Imagine that you are an undergraduate, a young woman. In one class, you are in awe of the professor. He is so knowledgeable, erudite, wise, suave. And there’s more. He seems to take a special interest in your development. You meet — and become lovers.
Is there anything wrong with this?
Rose had a relationship with her professor, Samuel. After they parted and went their separate ways, she still cared for him, believed in him. She was tolerant of his next relationship, with Ellen, also an undergraduate, essentially a younger version of Rose herself. She got along with Ellen.
But then Samuel parted from Ellen. When Rose found out about Samuel’s next lover, Sienna, it was different. Rose felt — what? Betrayed? Why was she so upset? And why did her relationship with Samuel, years down the track, now feel wrong?
Rose’s story is one of several in a new book by Madison Griffiths titled Sweet Nothings. Griffiths had her own experience, as a student with her tutor, but she doesn’t dwell on it. Her book focuses on the experiences of four women who, as undergraduates, had relationships with their university teachers or mentors.
Griffiths’ writing is so elegant, so evocative, that I find it almost unfair to write about it in prosaic terms. She does not so much tell each of the four women’s stories as give the reader a feeling for what it was like for them. This is an emotional journey into the hearts of young women smitten with academics, in a context where close relationships can turn out to be damaging.
Griffiths, in pursuing her project, eventually made contact with well over a hundred women in similar situations. She chose just four to explore in depth in her book, but it is clear that she draws on what many more told her. They are all from Australian universities, especially in Melbourne. It’s easy to conclude that this is a widespread pattern across academia.
Two other specifications are important. Griffiths focuses on consensual relationships, in which the young women agreed to, sometimes pursued, close personal connections with professors. She sets aside the problems of sexual harassment and assault, which are crucially important, to address a much thornier issue, something legal yet problematic. Most of the relationships she came to know about were sexual, aside from one better termed romantic, but which raises similar concerns.
Madison Griffiths
So what is wrong with close personal relationships between consenting adults, one an older and accomplished man and the other a young female student? Griffiths provides an answer that emerges from the stories of Rose, Cara, Elsie and Blaine. The problem is the impact of these relationships on the women. They came to university to learn and looked to their teachers for guidance on their intellectual journeys. As Griffiths bluntly puts it, “no student goes to university to fuck their professor.” The women’s intellectual journeys were hijacked as they were turned into bodies for the gratification of senior scholars. And not just bodies. The men who groomed them were also inside their minds, not in a helpful way.
Griffiths provides context by describing the women’s encounters — and her own — with teachers in high school, and by telling about occasions in which teachers behaved as she thinks they should, helping and taking care not to exploit. These examples provide telling contrasts with the stories of relationships that seemed alluring yet became debilitating.
Griffiths learned the names of the male academics involved and followed them online, but did not pursue interviews. She discovered that despite damaging the lives of the young women ostensibly in their care, the men seemed to have suffered little or no detriment in their careers. A few of the women, after deciding they had been abused, submitted formal complaints to their universities. But so far as they could learn, nothing happened: their complaints disappeared into bureaucratic black holes.
Same story, a different angle
My involvement with these issues has been quite different. It provides a more banal perspective than Griffiths’ elegant investigation into emotions and meanings.
In the early 1980s, I first heard about sexual harassment — including intellectual grooming and exploitation — and then joined the sexual harassment committee at the Australian National University when it was set up in 1984. On moving to the University of Wollongong in 1986, I joined its newly formed sexual harassment committee. For years, we focused on sexual harassment, writing articles and giving talks. Then, in 1990, there was a thunderclap. Two students accused a tutor of rape, and the Vice Chancellor released a statement warning about staff-student relationships. (The tutor was convicted and went to prison.)
Our committee decided to look at staff-student sex. We proposed a register of staff-student relationships, causing a great stir on campus, with much opposition expressed on an early electronic forum. As part of our efforts, we produced a four-page leaflet on staff-student sex and I wrote an article published in The Australian.
Back then, we saw the problems as falling into two categories: conflict of interest (COI) and abuse of trust. COIs arise when a person making academic decisions has a close personal relationship with someone affected. Griffiths’ stories contain many examples, such as when a teacher marks the work of a student or gives them a recommendation. But some staff-student sexual relationships do not involve a COI. One of my colleagues taught a class in which her husband was a student; she was careful to ensure that he was not in her tutorial and marked none of his work. In other cases, staff and students from different parts of the university have relationships where COIs do not arise.
So far, so good. But there was something else, less easy to pin down: abuse of trust. As we described it, “An abuse of trust occurs when the trust associated with a professional relationship is destroyed through actions, or requests for actions, of a non-professional nature.”
Several others on our committee were aware of egregious examples, such as the lecturer who had been in a new relationship with one of his undergraduate students every year or two for decades. We knew of young students who dropped out of their studies after a relationship like this broke up.
Abuse of trust is at the core of Griffiths’ concerns. On our committee, we had an inkling of how this affected students. Griffiths has provided a guide deep into the emotions of students who fall in love with their teachers and learn to regret it or become ambivalent, who are deeply and complexly damaged.
At the University of Wollongong, administrators implemented a policy on close personal relationships, focusing on COIs. Abuse of trust is hard to police. And a policy does not do much to affect behaviour unless there is publicity and agitation, of which there has been little.
Our committee was technically a sub-committee of the Equal Employment Opportunity Unit, a small group with usually one undergraduate, one postgraduate and two academics in addition to two professional staff from the EEO Unit. The others on the committee had many more stories to tell than me, and I learned a lot. A few years later, a new head of EEO abolished the sub-committee, ending our efforts. After this, trying to organise a group proved difficult. Cut off from well-connected colleagues, I knew little about whether behaviours had changed. Alas, from Sweet Nothings, it is apparent that COIs and abuse of trust have continued to plague universities.
Even back then, over 30 years ago, I was sceptical of policies and procedures providing a useful response. The key, I thought, was greater awareness. In subsequent research, I found evidence that formal procedures, what I call official channels, often serve to dampen outrage from injustice. And that is just what the women reported to Griffiths. Their complaints disappeared into a procedural swamp, and the offending academics went unscathed, their careers unimpeded.
Instead of turning to official channels, with their false promise of justice, a more effective response is to mobilise support, raise awareness and form coalitions. Griffiths has done much along these lines by talking with so many women ensnared by professors who let their urges overwhelm their professional obligations. And she has done an inestimable service by giving voice to the women’s feelings, and her own, in Sweet Nothings.
Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au
Thanks to Marina Granato, Julia LeMonde and Erin Twyford for useful comments.