Letters to the Editor
Reality-Based Lefty
Published Letters: 115 Editor's Choice: 24
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Fascinating
[Read the article: Ivory tower romances, "lesbian" koalas and more]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I find letters like the previous (St. Fu'ad) fascinating, primarily because they show such a lack of comprehension of campus life and professor/student relationships.
1. There is a huge taboo against consensual professor/student relationships. That they happen at all is something of a miracle, as they are so negatively viewed by so many, and can very much damage or ruin a professor's career, regardless of what the regulations are at a particular campus.
2. Anyone that thinks that 19-year-old females are uniformly innocent is out to lunch, and is insulting 19-year-old women. This has only recently become the rage, starting as far as I can tell with the bizarre shock over the 24-year-old Lewinsky/Clinton affair. A 24-year-old woman can make her own decisions. In most situations, an 18-year-old person of either gender can as well. Any 18-year-old can sign up for the military, a choice that puts them in far more of an intellectually/emotionally damaging situation than having a roll with a professor. Imagine the psychological aftermath of having to make a choice about shooting a child that may be carrying a bomb, for example. Anyone that thinks that such an event compares to having an infatuation with a professor is the one that's out to lunch.
3. Any person having the opinion of the previous writer obviously don't know many professors. If there's any word that I could use to describe professors (I supervise about 1200 of them) it would be socially unskilled and awkward. It is far more often the case that the students are more socially sophisticated than the average professor, who is often in the profession as a retreat from society-- not as an extroverted sexual predator.
I view the obsession with things like consensual student/professor relationships as being more of a cultural hatred toward having an intellectual class, and exacerbated by right-wing beliefs that professors are fundamentally liberal. In France, they have their intellectuals on radio and TV. In America, we don't even bother to go to the universities to find real experts for public events-- instead we go to biased, funded think tanks that have hacks for hire. And when was the last time that you ever heard a positive stereotype of a professor? The only one that immediately comes to my mind is "absent-minded" or 'noodle-head' who doesn't know anything about the 'Real World.'
But this in itself is not surprising. Americans are really not into knowledge, especially the current crop. How else to explain an electorate that would knowingly elect a leader for two terms that was such a nincompoop? Or ignore the fact that the previous President was a true intellectual? Or have a significant minority that doesn't believe in evolution? Or have 65% of the adult population believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11?
But more than anything, I find the focus on this issue, as opposed to focusing on legitimate issues of sexual harassment, depressing because more than anything, it gives Americans a chance to obsess on their hatred of young people, and their desperate need to devalue and disempower youth. When you deny people legal choices, and consensual relationships are legal choices, you are saying that they are incapable of making good decisions. As far as I can tell, young people, for the most part, tend to make pretty good decisions. It's the current crop of old people that have created the mess of a world we live in. Young people haven't had the time to make a mess of the world yet.
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Ah, the beauty of ad hominem attacks
[Read the article: Ivory tower romances, "lesbian" koalas and more]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm always sorry to see someone that hates the academy as much as St. Fu'ad-- not that it doesn't have its flaws. And I see that he's deduced that I actually run a car wash-- because anyone that's actually high up in the chain of command of a large land-grant university would never read Salon, let alone write letters as part of relief from what is a pretty stressful job, made more stressful by people like him that need to be on Prozac.
I'm glad that St. Fu'ad is going to show it to his/her class. Make sure you include the first and second letters written by yourself as well. As always, I trust the kids. I always have. And unlike some of the faculty I've had to deal with, they've never let me down.
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Thank goodness for Heather
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What can anyone say or do that will really create outrage in a country where people are almost having sex on stage? Or really, why should anyone care? For the life of me, I'd much rather have a Pussycat Doll show than Alice Cooper biting the head off a chicken, or whatever the urban legend of that time was.
One thing for sure, H.H. is a treasure. I investigated the term "whoring sea donkey" on the web, and I could find no other attribution other than to her. Who else could come up with her own Dadaist term to describe such a phenomenon?