Diseño de la toolbox MImg

a) Consenting adults have affaire which ends badly - whoop de doo. Thank goodness these nannying policies weren't in place 15 years ago or my blissfully happy marriage to my then professor might never have happened.

(Sabine, posted 19/12/ 2008:CMD 1)

b) Grow up everyone - we’re talking about adults at university, not children at school… (Derek, posted 23/09/ 2009:CMD 2)

Each of these posts operationalizes consenting adults defences in order to refute previous comments posted in which students have been positioned as vulnerable, although they have not (yet) been explicitly labelled children. This perhaps further attests to the commensurability of harassment and infantilizing discourses. In 10a Sabine describes staff-student relationship codes as ‘nannying’. Thus she implies that such policies treat students – and perhaps academics also – as vulnerable infants in need of protection. Her ironic use of the phrase ‘whoop de doo’, and reference to her ‘blissfully happy marriage’to her former professor also undermine interpretations of F- S relationships in which they are marked out as unusual or different from other kinds of relationship. The implication here is that these are regular relationships; some end well, others less so. Thus they are deemed unworthy of institutional regulation, press attention, and lengthy on-line discussion space. In this sense Sabine’s comment sets her apart from Hannah (Extract 8), because no distinction is drawn between the writer and contemporary students; ifshewas mature enough to get involved with her lecturer, so, it is suggested, will other students be.

In Extract 10b, accusations of immaturity are turned back upon those deploying the students-as-children metaphor. Derek criticizes previous contributors to the discussion who have attacked Terence Kealey, directing them to ‘grow-up’, since students are not children and the university is not a ‘school’. This is despite the fact that the notion of the university as a school - a tactic I further consider later in this chapter – has not yet been raised in the discussion.

Extracts 10a and 10b are reminiscent of Professor Swenson’s outburst at the faculty dinner party, analysed in the last chapter. In Extract 4, Swenson rants that feminists and other repressive forces within the university need to stop whining and ‘grow-up’. As already observed, Swenson’s comments are met by his colleagues with shock, and

contribute to a sense of his inability to act in a considered manner. In contrast, the comments of Sabine and Derek are quite congruent with the overall tone of CMD; indeed they are relatively mild in comparison with a number of the online commentaries analysed for the study, some of which come under the spotlight in Extract 11. Notwithstanding this, Swenson, Derek, and Sabine challenge interpretations of F-S relationships as child-abuse. They do this by anticipating and resisting the students-as- children metaphor, and also by alluding to the potential for others, including contributors to CMD, to be similarly framed as immature.

Interestingly, accusations of being infantile are also applied to academics themselves; in a number of fictional accounts there are insinuations that academics are childlike. For example, in the comedy, Fresh Meat, Professor Jean Hales, the wife and colleague of English Professor, Tony Shales, discovers her husband is having an extra-marital relationship with ‘his’ student, Oregon. She meets Oregon in a café and tells her that she need not end the relationship; ‘I don’t see any reason why you can’t keep seeing Tony…we’re all adults…well, two of us are (2) not sure about Tony.’ (Fresh Meat, Series 1, Episode 7).

This joke hinges on the timing of the two second pause, which leaves the audience - and Oregon - just enough time to assume that it is Oregon who is being denied adult status, rather than Tony. This (potential) interpretation is then repaired by Jean. In a sense, this joke encapsulates how the consenting adults defence works; it opposes the infantilization of students, but also acknowledges its prevalence, and perhaps even legitimacy. Nonetheless, the defence constructs F-S relationships as a joint responsibility. Other variants of infantilizing discourse, notably, those in which the academic is framed as ‘old man’ or ‘parent’, re-insert asymmetries into F-S relationships. I now turn my attention to the first of these framings, considering the positioning of academics-as-old-men.

The old men ofacademe

Portrayals of academics as old appear in a number of the genres of text studied, including interviews, fictional accounts, and CMD. The latter genre emerges as one of the most prominent sites for constructing male academics as old. For this reason I return to the extended online discussion which played out in the THE, also the source for extract 10b.

In the original article published in the THE, Terence Kealey jokes about ‘affairs’ between ‘male scholars and[their]female acolytes’, and recommends a ‘look but don’t touch’approach to any academic on the receiving end of ‘his’students’ admiration. The piece sparked a frenzied on-line discussion, generating more than 250 posts, and running for over 18 months. An interesting and prevalent feature of the debate is the articulation of academics as ‘wrinkly’, ‘middle-aged men’, or even ‘dirty old men’. In Extract 11, I present a selection of CMD posts that employ variations of these devices.