Some thoughts on teaching and student crushes

I'm thinking this morning about students and crushes.  (Actually, I'm also thinking about UCLA basketball, my boxing footwork, pacifism, the health of one of my youth group teens, my wife's smile, and my chinchilla, but those are not subjects for the blog today.  Oh, and I still want a diet Coke very badly.  Is Lent half over yet?)

Recently, I heard from one of my former students, "Darren."  He took my class back when I was a new prof, in the mid-1990s.  He eventually finished his degree, got his master's, and is now himself an adjunct at several Los Angeles-area community colleges (PCC is not one of them).  Darren and I email every once in a while, and I got a note from him a couple of weeks ago that's been on my mind.  Here's some of what he wrote, which I've edited a wee bit:

Hugo, I love teaching, and I really believe I am supposed to be doing this.  But I'm becoming aware of a problem I have, and I think it may be one you had too: student crushes.  I've got a few women in a few of my classes who have crushes on me, and one or two of them have been flirting with me pretty heavily.  I try and have good boundaries with them, because I'm only an adjunct. I don't want to lose my job, and besides, I do very much want to be a professional in and out of the classroom.  But it's so hard, because outside of the classroom I'm so shy with women.  Inside the classroom, I feel so desirable and powerful. 

My question is this, Hugo: how did you or do you keep this from going to your head?  How do you keep yourself from paying special attention to the ones who make it so obvious that they like you/want you?  Any advice you can give me would be awesome.

I have Darren's permission to address this on the blog. (Also, let me add three things: Darren is 31,single, and his name isn't really Darren.)

I've already emailed Darren back, and I didn't save what I wrote.  But he's had me thinking about how it is that we who teach can best think about the crushes our students will get on us.

First off, before this starts to sound like a narcissistic rant about how "crushable" a teacher I am, let me be very clear that I've rarely met a genuinely talented prof of either sex who wasn't the object of desire from at least a few students.   A truly effective teacher will often be the object of desire, regardless of what he or she looks like.  Student crushes, I am convinced, are less about the physical attractiveness of the professor and more about that professor's passion, certainty, and competence.  Those three attributes are, for lack of a better word, intensely sexy for many people!

When I was an undergrad at Cal, I had a crush on a fellow student named Tiffany.  Tiffany saw me as just a friend, however, in one of those all-too-common scenarios that most of us know plenty about.  But Tiffany had a massive crush on one of her anthropology professors.  He was in his late forties, and while he was reasonably fit for his age, no one would mistake him for a sex symbol.  He wore earth tones (which didn't suit him); he was balding and perhaps 5'6".  But I was in his class too, and I have to admit, he was mesmerizing.   He had passion for his subject, he was a gifted lecturer, he had a sense of humor, and he struck the perfect balance between self-deprecation and arrogance.  (I've always thought that's a tough needle to thread, and I find myself striving for it often.)  Tiffany was in love with Professor P, and I eventually admitted I could see why.  I asked her one day what she wanted from him, and she told me:

It's not about sex, really.  It's that I want to be inside his head. I want to be near him, I want him to talk to me for hours, I want him to focus just on me and I want to sit next to him and soak up everything about him.

"Oh", I said.  I didn't get it.

But after thirteen years of teaching, I get it.  Students get crushes on me from time to time, just as they do on "Darren" and "Professor P."  Occasionally, some of those crushes have a specific romantic agenda.  When I was single, I sometimes (not often) got asked out at the end of the semester or received other signs of clear interest in pursuing a relationship of some sort.  But the vast majority of crushes were not and are not about actual sexual or romantic desire.  Most are like Tiffany's crush on Professor P.

If we're doing our job right, we have the power to change the way a student thinks about himself or herself.  At our best, those of us who love to teach are practiced seducers, Casanovas of the classroom.  But my agenda isn't about sexual conquest, it's about creating an interest and a passion where none previously existed. It's about getting students to want something they didn't know they wanted!  And when a student has a crush on me, I told Darren, it's more often than not like Tiffany's crush on Professor P.  Though some students may sexualize their crushes, what they really want is to continue to feel the way you make them feel: excited, energized, provoked, challenged. 

If we take advantage of student crushes, I told Darren, we make a huge mistake.  We assume that the real interest was in us rather than in how we were able to make our students feel and how we were able to make them think.   The best way, I told Darren, to think about student crushes is to take them as a sign that you're probably doing your job pretty damn well.  And while age and perceived physical attractiveness may play a small part in encouraging these crushes, the real precipitator is enthusiasm, talent, and an obvious commitment to your students.

There's an old axiom in pop psychology: we don't just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like!   Students don't get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I've got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves.  They're externalizing all of their hopes for themselves.  And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places! That's what student crushes mean to me.

After I wrote some of this to Darren, he wrote back:

"Hugo, thanks.  But honestly, I'm a little bit crestfallen.  I did want it to be about me! I did want my students to want me, even though I know that that seems so selfish and manipulative.  At the same time, I'm glad to know that you think there's a healthy function for these things.  Still, I'm a bit chagrined."

I told him I knew how he felt.

Comments

[Erin C.]

As someone who's had teacher crushes (and who hasn't), this really rings true to me. Insightful post.

[Bitch]

Thank you! I know exactly what you mean and I've had fits and starts when writing about this. I have a crush on you now -- though I don't think it's that I want to be like you, it's just that you expressed something I haven't had time or fortitude to put into words! :)

I also think it's a lot like the transference phenom in psychoanalysis, especially when you're teaching about life changing issues such as, in my case, teaching sociology.

[The Happy Feminist]

I don't think I necessarily had any romantic crushes on my professors (okay, maybe once) but I was intensely curious about a couple of them, the really good ones. I absorbed with avid fascination any personal information they dropped or that others dropped about them -- the name of a pet, how the professor met his wife, faculty politics, anything. I am not sure why this stuff was of such great interest to me, but it was.

[sophonisba]

"I try and have good boundaries with them, because I'm only an adjunct. I don't want to lose my job"

I'm sure you told him this, but the more power and responsibility you have the less acceptable it is to show favoritism to hot girls or "pay special attention to"/screw the undergrads - not more. If he must do something, it's far better that he do it as an adjunct, rather than waiting until he has tenure, so that a student who complains will get a hearing and so that he will face some consequences.

let me be very clear that I've rarely met a genuinely talented prof of either sex who wasn't the object of desire from at least a few students.

And, uh, you don't have to be talented, either. It happens to absolutely everybody eventually.

If we take advantage of student crushes, I told Darren, we make a huge mistake. We assume that the real interest was in us rather than in how we were able to make our students feel and how we were able to make them think.

What possible difference would it make if their real interest was in you? He needs to stop conflating "like you" with "want you," true, but I had a purely sexual crush on a professor or two in my day, and so what? Good teachers don't date students, and they also don't use student crushes to prop up their egos. The sincerity and nature of the crush has nothing to do with this, and Darren really needs to figure that out.

[Hugo]

Let me clarify, sophonisba, that I'm not suggesting that if the crush were purely sexual, that would justify responding to it.

I do think some profs are more likely to be the recipients of regular crushes than others, and talent and passion are likely to play a part in that.

And indeed, as a tenured professor, I chaired the college committee that developed a strongly-worded policy about consensual relationships between faculty and students.

[sophonisba]

Oh good. There's also the question, if a professor is really so "shy with women" outside the classroom, of how exactly he can distinguish between flirting and, well, the good old-fashioned practice of sucking up. There are certainly times when no ambiguity can arise (if your students email you pornography, unbutton their shirts in class, sit next to you in your office and press their leg against your, or profess their love in essays - all things that Really Happened to people I know). But if this "flirting" takes the form of asking questions, going to his office hours, smiling, laughing, even bringing him baked goods or asking about his personal life - well, he should be careful that wishful thinking is not getting in the way of accurate observation. Undergrads don't have the greatest sense of boundaries, either, and if a professor allows them to treat him as a friend and an equal, they will - but it doesn't mean they have crushes.

He should also know that getting a reputation among the undergrads as someone whose vanity can be flattered in exchange for a higher participation grade is not something he will enjoy.

[Hugo]

Indeed, which is why we probably ought to develop a whole taxonomy of crushes!

[Dustin]

Great response, Hugo. When I started teaching, I was utterly unprepared for the crushes that I would encounter. It *is* flattering, at first, but easier to deal with when you realize that it's not *you* up there in front of the classroom -- it's "super-you", the one with all the facts at their fingertips and the confidence of knowing their material inside and out. Our students don't see us struggling to understand what our mechanics are saying about our cars, how term-life insurance works, or which way to turn the knob to make the refrigerator colder. They don't see us stumbling around the house first thing in the morning, or struggling to balance our finances so we can pay the bills (frankly, they don't realize that adjuncts are typically dirt-poor). That is, for the most part they only see us in the one forum we've dedicated our lives to being good in.

There's another aspect to this, though, that I think bears mentioning: I feel like a lot of my students -- especially female students -- thrive on the attention and approval that I offer. That is, for many of them, the college classroom is the first time and place they've been treated as someone worthwhile, who had a contribution to make and who was inherently interesting. This, of course, is not too far off from courtship (your word "seduction" is exactly right) and is easy to connect with romance. For female students, I think there's the added "bonus" of being judged and respected on the basis of their mental abilities rather than on their physical attributes -- very seductive to some young women.

In a sense, this is a good thing -- students should learn that they have a value separate from their physical appearance. But it takes some learning to be the kind of professor that can make this into a good part of the student's education. Obviously, acting out the seduction isn't helping anyone. But we have to also prevent ourselves from seeking that flattery, and let's face it -- it's hard to deprive yourself of something that feels good, even when it's the right thing to do.

[Dustin]

But wait, I have a question, too: Like "Darren", I'm an adjunct -- I teach the introductory classes so the full-timers can teach the advanced classes. I think a lot of adjuncts do the same -- we teach one class and one class only, which means that we never see our students again (at least not as "our students"). So as a thought-experiment, what happens after the class when our authority vanishes (or does it?). What happens when we encounter our students months later, as "civilians"?

[Hugo]

Dustin, well said. That's what makes our role so vital, perhaps especially as male professors: that we can validate, listen to, and engage female students without responding to them sexually. It's a potentially tremendously liberating experience.

In response to your second comment, nothing automatically wrong with dating a former student. Obviously, the greatest problem is a continued power imbalance -- and how that former student might react when the fantasy she had about who you were (based on your teaching) is, uh, stripped away by reality.

[Stentor]

I would be wary about relationships between former students and teachers as well. If a possibility of such a relationship exists, it seems like it would be easy for both parties to "lay the groundwork" during the class, blurring the lines in inappropriate ways (consciously or unconsciously) even though they wait to begin "official" romance.

[Lauren]

One of my recurrent daydreams in my classes was to imagine what it would be like to sleep with the teacher. No further comment, just an impulse to pass the time.

[Dustin]

Stentor, you're kinda right, and kinda not. The trick is, not to see your students as potential sexual partners at all -- which can be kinda hard! (I'm thinking of the recurring "hottie panic" that I run into on the web, on TV, and in my department offices, the ongoing concern on the part of adults with young women displaying themselves on the grounds that if I see a bare belly I might be sexually attracted to the owner of said belly, and what if she turns out to be 14?!) And I think I'm getting pretty good at turning that off when I walk into my classroom. But what I wonder about is the power relations, if and how they persist after the context in which they were formed ends. A lot of professors have married their students, which baffles me a little because even in relationships with non-students who weren't as academically advanced as I was there's been something of a struggle to avoid the teacher-student "thing".

[mythago]

Great post, Hugo. I'd say that part of the dynamic is also that people who enjoy teaching enjoy the dynamic of being the learned, intelligent, powerful person leading the underlings to knowledge; that kind of enjoyment can get mixed up with romantic feelings, and for some people, that power dynamic is something they find sexually attractive as well.

[collegegrl]

All of my strongest crushes have always been towards teachers/professors. I've never acted or even flirted in reality, though I have often played it out in my head. I think there is some validity to the statement that I want to be closer to their intellect and that I'm attracted to the confident side I observe in class. But as I'm getting older and more sexually aware it seems to be a fantasy that I just can't kick, and getting more tempted to act upon. It seems that many educators are responding, so I'm asking for advice on how I should deal and possible a "reality check" to make it stop.

[Hugo]

Collegrl, I'm sorry that some educators are responding; ultimately, even if you are a legal adult, the obligation to maintain boundaries lies with the one in the greater position of authority.

I'm no therapist, but the most effective way I know to keep fantasies from becoming reality is to "think it through." If you want Professor X, fantasize all the way through about what you want. Where do you see it going? What's the fantasy really about? How will you feel afterwards? Usually, fantasizing all the way to the consequences helps restore some perspective...

Mythago, right on. I do enjoy being an intellectual seducer and a mentor; I don't sexualize those feelings. Some folks, however, need some guidance to separate the two.

[Rob]

Hugo,

A student forms a crush on a teacher because of the student's need. The crush is the result of the teacher somehow resonating with something missing in the student. In psychology, this is projection onto an object, and to the student in this case, the teacher is no more than an object.

Now, very often the need is for a competent person who can hold down a job, in which case competence is the cause. If the student feels rejected by parents and/or classmates, acceptance can be the cause. Especially during the period after puberty, the student might project a romantic need on the teacher, who *being older) appears to be more mature and desirable than the surrounding cohort. Power is always attractive to the powerless.

"At our best, those of us who love to teach are practiced seducers, Casanovas of the classroom."

A seducer is someone with anti-social personality traits who manipulates the victims for his or her own need. While an instructor should strive to make knowledge attractive and to get the students to pay attention, a good teacher should never seek to selfishly meet his or her own needs through the students. Ok, I know the whole "we only do things for personal gain" psychology schtick, and so altruism is always for selfish motives. But in the case of an instructor, those motives should be things like "being the best teacher possible" and "self-satisfaction in the generative stage of life of passing on wisdom," etc.

Anti-social people do go into teaching. The girls in the general science class in high school caught on that wearing short skirts was a way to do better in class. In the case of that blonde teacher in the news lately, I'm betting she's got her own pathological issues that were being projected onto the student. She used the students, and those students were vulnerable to her because of their own needs and wounds. What she did seems less damaging than the male teacher on female student version, but it's not. Those students will have to live knowing those needs and wounds were used against them.

[sophonisba]

A student forms a crush on a teacher because of the student's need.

Or, in the case of college students, because the teacher's hot.

Or, you know, because they have nothing to do for three hours every week but stare at that teacher's face and body and try to entertain their idle minds with lewd fantasies (no offense to those teachers who believe that crushes are due to their intellectual prowess, but it's a lot easier to cultivate crushy fantasies when you stop listening to the lecture and let your mind wander.)

I find it disturbing that there seems to be a need to pathologize a simple crush in order to explain why teachers shouldn't respond to them. Teachers don't screw their students. Period. Not because students with crushes are wounded baby birds, or because they're seeking father figures, or because there's something "missing" (ugh) inside them. We don't screw our students because screwing students messes up the teacher-student relation, destroys the trust that all students, not just the ones with crushes, are entitled to feel in their instructors, and destroys the teacher's integrity (both real and perceived) with regard to grading standards. That's really all the justification anybody should need.

Collegegrl: To some extent it depends whether your fantasies are purely romantic/sexual or if you really want a relationship. If the latter, it might help to know that people in academia gossip. This is an enormous understatement: people in academia gossip a lot. People say snide things about professors who married their graduate students thirty years ago, when that was a normal practice - what they'd say about a professor who carried on an affair with an undergrad, I can only imagine, but I assure you it would be horrible for you. And everyone would know. They always do. If the professor didn't get fired, everyone would know that he should have been. You'd be accused of trading sex for grades, and if the professor you were involved with had ever taught you, you'd have no way to deny it (and if he were unethical enough to be involved with an undergrad, he'd probably pad your grades too, anyway.)

It's more trouble than it's worth. Wait a year or two, and bag a grad student. That has its problems, too, but not as many.

[Hugo]

Rob, I think you have too narrow an understanding of seduction. Seduction can be about selfish gratification; it can also be an artful and exciting way of leading the seduced to new ways of seeing. That's what non-sexual, intellectual seduction is all about. It has nothing to do with paying more attention to "hot" students of either sex.

Sophonisba, I'm not pathologizing student crushes. They are normal and healthy. I'm saying that a great many of them aren't really about romance and sex (even if the students experience them that way); they are about seeing the world through new eyes.

[Former student]

Sophonisba,
I completely agree with this post. I remeber when I was in Hugo's class, I liked him because I thought he was "hot" not because of his teaching ability(However, Hugo is the greatest lecturer I've had). It's a nice way to spend time when you are bored.

[Dustin]

Sophonisba,

Or, in the case of college students, because the teacher's hot.

Or, you know, because they have nothing to do for three hours every week but stare at that teacher's face and body and try to entertain their idle minds with lewd fantasies...

Maybe. I don't think Hugo (or I, for that matter) are trying to "pathologize" student crushes, but to understand them. Sure, Hugo's a hot, hot man, no doubt about that, with all the running and working out and boxing and all, but I'm a 30-pound overweight bearded man who doesn't iron his shirts and who forgets to get his haircut for three or four months at a time. The question has to be, why do guys like me -- who 19-year old women certainly weren't falling all over when I was 19, and who 19-year old women certainly don't fall all over when I'm out and about -- seem attractive to a disproportionate number of 19-year old women in my classroom? Not *every* young woman has a crush on their professors, but a lot of them do, and I'm willing to bet that a) male students get crushes on their female profs, and b) everyone has gay students that get crushes on them. If pointing out that unequal power relations can be highly eroticized is "pathologizing", then it's not pathologizing the student but our society as a whole. I personally feel that this is only a part of what's going on, though -- I think in a broader sense that students are, almost by definition, experimenting with selves, including sexual selves, and that the older, more experienced, and hyper-competent professor-type "clicks" with one or more of those selves. As far as I know, none of my older students (and as a community college prof, I have lots of returning/non-traditional students) have had crushes on me. I happen to feel that it is our responsibility as educators to encourage such self-experimentation, up to a point, whch is why I said that student crushes can be a good thing, but none of that changes our responsibility not to exploit our students.

[sophonisba]

Oh, sorry, Dustin and Hugo. I was talking about Rob's comments, not everyone's (specifically these: A student forms a crush on a teacher because of the student's need. The crush is the result of the teacher somehow resonating with something missing in the student.) I don't think that this is a useful way to categorize and conceptualize most inappropriate attraction. Being young, dumb, and infatuated doesn't imply that your crush object is somehow resonating with a missing part of you. Dustin's remarks about "experimentation" make a lot more sense.

[Hugo]

Former student, I don't know whether to be complimented or not, but I'll go with what I think is the prevailing sentiment, and say thanks.

Dustin, excellent point; Sophonisba, thanks for clarifying. The remark about using a crush to experiment makes a great deal of sense.

[mythago]

it seems to be a fantasy that I just can't kick, and getting more tempted to act upon

Collegegrl, you need to make the decision to enjoy your fantasies as fantasies, without having to try and turn them into reality. An awful lot of fantasies only work because they are in your head.

[Bitch]

"Rob, I think you have too narrow an understanding of seduction. Seduction can be about selfish gratification; it can also be an artful and exciting way of leading the seduced to new ways of seeing. That's what non-sexual, intellectual seduction is all about. It has nothing to do with paying more attention to "hot" students of either sex."

Sophonisba, I'm not pathologizing student crushes. They are normal and healthy. I'm saying that a great many of them aren't really about romance and sex (even if the students experience them that way); they are about seeing the world through new eyes."

Hugo reminds me of my third semester as a TA. I worked for this guy who was very stern. He told the students, "I do not teach sociology. I profess sociology. If you want a teacher, please leave now." (He was from Germany where things were a little different because the introductory course is considered the hardest one.)

The first day, a young man raised his hands to ask a challenging question, dissing the discipline of sociology saying, "I think you're just talking tough about a subject that isn't that hard. It's not even a science. I'm a physics major. That's science."

Well! I watched the instructor set up to seduce that young man -- intellectually speaking! And that he did. In fact, by the end of the year, it was his senior year, he'd ditched the idea of becoming a physicist and was planning on going to grad school for sociology.

He and I stayed in touch and, as it happened, he'd had a crush on me since I was the substitute for he was straight and the professor was a man. It was patently obvious what was going on -- and he of course had a legitmate crush on my because I also had the same passion for the discipline. It wasn't all about his crush on a male professor, chanelled through me.

We talked about it and I tried to help him see what he was doing. He really didn't want to date a woman 8 years his senior, packing a kid and a mangy dog. :)