The Liberal Gentleman's Dilemma

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Terence Kealey - dirty old man

Kate and Demented beat me to the punch in the comments section of my previous post - but it's still worth mentioning the story that so horrified them.

In this article from the Times Higher Education Supplement, Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, opines that lecturers lusting after youthful female knowledge-seekers is 'a perk of the job', and indeed should give a fillip to said lecturer's uxorial sex life.

Amongst the oh so hilariously provocative pearls of wisdom are a couple of assumptions which reveal Kealey's utter conservatism. To him, lecturers are male, and students are female. All, of course, are heterosexual. Female students are recipients, passive vessels, moths gathering around the flame of masculine enlightenment. Worse than this, 'normal girls' (not women, you may notice), are dim, shallow creatures

Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays.

These abnormal freaks (in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, they were disparagingly called 'bluestockings') are essentially meat for the enjoyment of the lecturer in Kealey's slimy weltanschauang - heaven forfend that they might actually want to talk about their essays. To Kealey, young women are incapable of intellectual curiosity.

What to do?

"Enjoy her! She's a perk."

"She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife."

"As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch."

Kealey, who has been vice-chancellor at Buckingham, the country's only independent university, for eight years, said it was a myth that an affair between student and lecturer was an abuse of power, saying accountability has meant that "the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades".

But he added that some female students still fantasised about their lecturers.

Clearly Kealey thinks he's a bit of a card, and his literary references are meant to show that he's more than just a lad - Demented thinks that he's traduced old Casaubon, but Kealey's sort of got him right: in Middlemarch Dorothea marries Casaubon out of misplaced respect for a great man's intellectual labour. However, the marriage is cold and the 'great work' is tedious and will never be finished - Dorothea's the rounded human being. Howard Kirk is the swinging 60s lecturer who dabbles in revolution, drugs, rock and roll and students, a fake guru in an age of fake gurus. Felicity is the student who becomes entangled with her.

I've moaned about staff-student relationships before - I think Kealey's wrong. There is an inevitable power imbalance in these relationships. I doubt that anything so crude as 'marks for sex' goes on any more, but it's surely an uncomfortable situation - for the lecturer, the student and everybody's colleagues. Perhaps there are some students who might flirt for a bit more attention, and who could blame them in a place where classes are so big and staffing numbers so low that you're lucky to learn the names of a third of your students. That said, it's never happened to me. There was a rumour, several years ago, that a student found me attractive, and was so horrified that she promptly took herself off for psychiatric counselling, which speaks volumes for her good sense… I can't help feeling that Kealey's claim that female students fantasise about lecturers is the product of too much time on outré websites, or a personal fantasy of his own.

In any case, such freakish opinions are to be expected of Buckingham University's v-c: it's the only private university in the country: essentially a none-too-challenging extension of a minor public (i.e. fee-paying - sorry Americans, the English usage is bizarre) school, populated by drawling rich kids wearing Jack Wills from top to toe… hell on earth.

For a rather grubbier version of staff/student sex, read the opening chapter of Howard Jacobson's Coming from Behind. It's a bitter novel set in thinly-disguised Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and starts with a mature student on graduation day 'thanking' her lecturer in a particularly physical fashion: all sound effects delivered in full Wolverhampton dialect. Jacobson had worked at Wolverhampton for a year or two after a glittering student career at Oxford (or Cambridge), and clearly thought he was too good for the place, taking his revenge by caricaturing his colleagues most cruelly.

My sister, the author

It turns out that I'm not the only member of my family desperate to inflict his or her views on an unsuspecting public. My Dublin sister has been moonlighting as a journalist for a few years, and now she's had a personal column published in the Irish Sunday Independent, detailing her sense of liberation and discovery of a new set of values after living as a classic Irish materialist hedonist for most of the last decade. She quit her job in the middle of Ireland's massive economic collapse and looks forward to a simpler life (funded by either unemployment benefit, cheques from the media, or possibly by her bloke, who is one of the loveliest blokes with whome you could ever down a pint).

How do I feel about this? Simple things first - I'm far from being a fan of that particular paper, and this kind of column isn't what I naturally turn to. Most of all though, I'm proud: the girl can write.

It does, however, raise some interesting points. Reading about someone I think I know so well is bound to be unsettling. It's like seeing a painting through an opaque window: the general outline is what you expect, but the details are unrecognisable. Why? Firstly, because we never truly know each other, whatever the relationship. How siblings (or friends) understand each other is shaped by the dynamics of our shared past - Maura and I are 4 years and a sibling apart (I have four sisters and a brother). We got on well as younger kids, then lost shared interests in the ensuing years, before rediscovering commonalities in the more recent past, despite - or because - not seeing each other very often. My memories and understanding of her, and hers of mine, can never fit the way we understand ourselves. Part of becoming an adult is letting go of these fixed prospects, of encountering our loved ones as they wish to present themselves, or as they are. The loss of shared experience is replaced by the richness of our separate lives - there's always something new to learn when we meet again, unencumbered (hopefully) by distant rivalries and resentments. Refounding a blood relationship in friendship is surely a significant moment.

Added to this, of course, is the plain fact that we edit ourselves for public consumption: the Maura Byrne bylined in this piece is a fictional construct, just as the Plashing Vole you see in the lecture hall, the pub or on a blog is merely a facet of a shifting collection of attitudes, beliefs, positions and cells. This isn't criticism, merely observation: the concept of the individual as a stable, discrete unit is a product of western rationalist capitalism - my take on it is simple poststructuralism. 'Maura Byrne' the journalist is no more and no less true than Maura Byrne my sister - and the demands on the columnist is that the art is closer to the surface.

The result is that, ten years ago, the Vole who read of his sister's 'voracious' consumption of culture and art would have scoffed and sarcastically offered an alternative narrative. The Vole of now accepts that these claims reflect a life I haven't recently shared, an interpretation equally, if not more, valid than mine, which of course reflects the tensions and experiences of childhood.

So - to my sister the author: congratulations and admiration.