Accidental Blogger

William Deresiewicz of Yale university has written a very interesting article in The American Scholar. The essay, Love on Campus bemoans the rapid disappearance of the intense and intellectually erotic Socratic relationship between the teacher and the taught.  He blames the loss on the obsessively sexual nature of mass culture in America – a relatively new development, according to him.  No serious relationship portrayed in popular books, movies and on TV, rises far above the crassly physical. At the same time, suspicions of child abuse and sexual harassment pervade domestic, legal and professional environments. (I would add to the list, the hypocritical behavior of a parade of public officials who preach sanctimoniously from the family values / sanctity of marriage platform but exempt themselves from the rules of purity.) Consequently, relationships between professors and students too are measured by the same tawdry yardstick and campus life is portrayed as a sexually charged environment where old and decrepit intellectuals lust after the firm and nubile bodies of their students. (I noticed that in all the fictional cases cited, the teacher is a male and the object of his desire a female student. With the corridors of academia bustling with women profs these days, where are the salacious campus tales of the aging woman mentor and the well sculpted male jock under her care? )

Deresiewicz cites several recent movies where this theme plays out in a class room setting. In all the instances, the story involves an aging, self absorbed professor of humanities (most often of English lit) who, realizing his failure as an academic (and also as a human being?) indulges in rash sexual peccadilloes, often extramarital, with a much younger student – with disastrous results. I have seen some of these movies and yes, the male characters caught up in the unequal and desperate relationships are indeed all quite pathetic. (Deresiewicz left out the British Educating Rita, I noticed. That was a kinder, gentler version of the same scenario and not American. Or perhaps, it was Socratic in its spirit.) The author points out that when a movie does come close to depicting the intensity of a Socratic relationship, it cautiously steps over into safe territory where no erotic relationship, real or imagined, is implied.  The mentor in such cases is either old, dying or physically handicapped (In Her Shoes, Tuesdays with Morrie). Or else, it takes place in a single sex environment (with no hint of homosexuality, I presume) of an all boys or all girls school (Dead Poet’s Society, Mona Lisa Smile). Deresiewicz laments:

Socrates says in the Symposium that the hardest thing about being ignorant is that you’re content with yourself, but for many kids when they get to college, this is not yet true. They recognize themselves as incomplete, and they recognize, if only intuitively, that completion comes through eros. So they seek out professors with whom to have relationships, and we seek them out in turn. Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.

The Socratic relationship is so profoundly disturbing to our culture that it must be defused before it can be approached. ….. Yet many thousands of kids go off to college every year hoping, at least dimly, to experience it. It has become a kind of suppressed cultural memory, a haunting imaginative possibility. In our sex-stupefied, anti-intellectual culture, the eros of souls has become the love that dares not speak its name.

Deresiewicz’s article reminded me of an ancient family tale of minor infamy.

It’s been a long time since I was on a university campus.  But even in my time, the phenomenon of the Socratic method spilling into real life physical romance, occurred disproportionately in the humanities departments.  More time, more fertile ground – teaching of all that poetry,  romantic classics and examination of issues of the mind.  As a science student, I saw rather little of it.

There was however an interesting and well known incident in my own family of a student- teacher relationship which created a few waves in its day.  Most readers of this blog may not have heard of the well renowned Indian philosopher S.N. Dasgupta, a pre-eminent scholar of Hinduism and Indian classical studies. He once had a fiery and public falling out with one of his star students, Mircea Eliade. Eliade was discovered conducting a romance with Dasgupta’s teenage daughter, Maitreyi Devi.  After their love was interrupted by the stern teacher / father,  the young lovers went their own separate ways.  Subsequently, decades apart, each recounted a personal version of the love story in a couple of "he said, she said" books, later published as twin volumes by the University of Chicago Press in 1994.  Eliade’s book is called "Bengal Nights" and Maitreyi Devi’s passionate rejoinder to that is "It Does Not Die."

The older Dasgupta, who frowned upon the young love between his daughter and student, later became alienated from his family and proceeded to marry a much younger graduate student of his own.  The graduate student, Surama Dasgupta was my father’s aunt and an accomplished philosopher in her own right. The unusual marriage caused a scandal of sorts, with the excitable Bengali intellectual community in India divided between supporters and detractors. I am speaking of an era, years before my birth, when few Indian women attended college, let alone pursued Ph.D studies. I read Maitreyi Devi’s autobiographical account of her life with her father and love with Mircea Eliade when it was first published in Bengali. The book caused considerable hilarity and regurgitation of old gossip among my relatives, especially the older women. In the later chapters, Maitreyi Devi berates my great aunt (pseudonymously, for some reason) in withering terms, accusing her of stealing not only her father’s affections but also his intellectual legacy.  But surprisingly enough, in our family, Surama Aunty was held up as a shining beacon before the younger generation of girls and women – not just for her academic prowess but also for the May – December scholarly marriage she contracted with her mentor.  The praise went somewhat along these lines, "Surama did not marry for money or lust.  She chose her man based on the intellectual connection she established with him."   Brain sex, as Deresiewicz  recommends in his article.