"Why are these professors all men...?"

Well, there was Garp's wife, but IIRC she didn't have tenure, so maybe that doesn't count.

"The reason professors sleep with their students in fiction is because any realistic portrayal of your jobs would bore readers out of their skulls within ten minutes."

Right, but there are other ways to make things unrealistically interesting. For example, Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones character doesn't sleep with his students -- not even the ones who write "Love" "You" on their eyelids. Instead, he crawls out his office window to escape the attention and takes off for adventure.

Of course, in real life, male professors *do* marry their younger students. As it happens, right across the street from me are two houses owned by male professors who married younger ex-students (though they're both great guys and in neither case did they cheat on and divorce a first wife).

Yah. We could tell your basic thinking/investigation skills were slipping when you needed help deciphering the cartoonist's tag...

Personally, I blame the cushy soft entitlement mentality -- no genders or races necessarily advantaged: "Um, can you do my 'work' for me?"

Catches up, you know? (Maybe you need a spanking for blowing past the 10-day deadline? Now that might have racial/gender traits in common, but I'm not going there today. :) "Mommy!")

The alternative portrayal the article notes is the Dead Poets Society version. Given the choice, I'll stick with the lecherous version, because most of the movies named in the paragraphs above are very, very good and the regular remakes of Dead Poets Society (which are really remakes of Goodbye, Mr. Chips) are almost always terrible.

The article's about movies, and Dan's blogged about it before with respect to television, but the stereotype is in novels, too-- not only "academic novels," which take adultery and sleeping with students as their usual plot engines, but in, e.g., Disgrace, or The Corrections-- the latter a novel that gets much of its traction from he clever manipulation of massively-overfamiliar cultural tropes and zeitgeist references. The pathetic lecherous white male prof is in the Corrections Cultural Trope Hall Of Fame.

9:56 A.M.: Dan scratches ass.

Your own? One belonging to one of your students? You need to be more clear if you are attacking the stereotype or supporting it.

I think we have to exempt anything based on a John Irving Novel; heaven forbid they ever make "The 158-Pound Marriage" into a film.

(My also-an-academic spouse points out that, in the TV show "Jack and Bobby," it's a female (history) prof who sleeps with her (male) graduate student. Of course, there's always "Third Rock from the Sun"...).

I think we have to exempt anything based on a John Irving Novel; heaven forbid they ever make "The 158-Pound Marriage" into a film.

(My also-an-academic spouse points out that, in the TV show "Jack and Bobby," it's a female (history) prof who sleeps with her (male) graduate student. Of course, there's always "Third Rock from the Sun"...).

A profession is pretty boring movie-wise, when the camera guys seeking action shots to go with the interviews take video of either you typing on a computer or flipping through a book.
Both have happened to me after doing interviews with local media types so that they could have some more active shots to go with the interview.

We may have interesting things to say, but not so much to do/watch.

At least after all that Jungian analysis you are also safe in knowing that there will never be a "reality show" about psychiatrists either. (In the movies they are either crazy or sleep with their patients or their patients relatives.)

I realize that I now await the movie which features a cute woman shrink falling in bed with the crusty aging professor who she is both: (i) psychoanalyzing and (ii) taking a class from. Or has that already been done?

A creature of my time, the first film I thought of when Dan mentioned academia in the movies was "Knute Rockne, All-American."

I mean, even students who can't remember the name of their own English professors know who the football coach is. Here in Madison they erected a statue to the last one. There are not too many poli-sci professors memorialized in that way.

Wait, the rest of you don't sleep with your students? Not even before you were married?

It's not even unethical if you restrict yourself to strong "A" students (that way you and they know there is nothing to gain/lose).

Thanks for the insipration in your daily schedule.

9:30 A.M.: Dan considers writing referee report that was due ten days ago; decides it's better tackled after lunch.

Read this after perusing your post on pop culture (and watching the videos too). Got me inspired to finish the draft of a grant report that I've been putting off.

I seem to recall that Saul Bellow, and Phillip Roth have novels like that also. Herzog, The Ghost Writer,.... I'm sure that there are others

Michael Caine & Julie Walters, "Educating Rita." 1983. But, then, Dan, you probably don't remember than far back...

"It's not only English professors."

Nope. It's mostly English professors, but the rest of the Humanities have some representation.

It looks like social scientists + scientists are safe though. I guess it's easy to dramatize Research in a movie, so scientists can just focus on that. Dramatizing literary analysis is rather more difficult.

Other movies with 'wacky' academics ...

'Under the Tuscan Sun' and 'A Beautiful Mind'.

btw ... I think a road trip movie with Professors
Churchill, Finkelstein and Chomsky would outsell
"Sicko" ... or perhaps be named "Sicko II - just
when you thought it was safe to send your children
to College!"

I think the stereotype exists because it is true. At undergrad, masters and PhD level, and afterwards on faculty, I knew of male profs who slept with female students. And my wife as an undergrad had affair with her 47 year old English prof.

As for why are English profs and humanities in general over-represented? Two reasons
1. sciences et al had far fewer female students for creepy male profs to prey on
2. authors, screenwriters etc. more likely to have been English/humanities/film students and observed this behavior.

Well, well how could we all forget the noted Harvard Symbologist Dr. Robert Langdon, who cracks ancient mysteries and remains totally cool in the presence of delicate Sophie Neveu!

Are Dr. Langdon's books even peer-reviewed? Does he obsessively check his emails to see if there is any word from the editor? Does he crumble when he sees referee reports that are longer than his essay? Hmmm....I don't think so. I am sure he is tenured and at Harvard. That's why he can get away by publishing with Random House and not with Princeton and Chicago.

Now, I am back to drafting another obscure article that nobody will read or cite (assuming it ever gets published) and I don’t even dream of sending it to APSR (do you know they reject 88 percent of the articles).

i recall 4 UC poli sci profs fitting the philandering stereotype in the pre-drezner era.

You left out Donald Sutherland as the lecherous professor in Animal House!

You don't turn on your computer until 9am? It's been a while since the workstudy in my gradschool's budget office, although I still remember the sound of pens hitting desktops at 5pm.

Don't forget Dr. Jonathan "I'd Like to Climb All Over Him" Hemlock in the Eiger Sanction. Baddest Movie Professor of All Time until Indiana Jones brought the box office. An a gentleman, too, sending the naughtly little grade-grubbing minx away with only a pat on the fanny to get her out the door.

--furious

I'm kinda late to this thread but I was just reading a book review from a couple of years back by Joseph Epstein that hits it just about right. He was reviewing a book called, "Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents" by Elaine Showalter. Epstein writes:

'Professor Showalter does not go in much for discussing the sex that is at the center of so many academic novels. Which reminds me that the first time I met Edward Shils, he asked me what I was reading. When I said The War Between the Tates by Alison Lurie, he replied, "Academic screwing, I presume." He presumed rightly. How could it be otherwise with academic novels? Apart from the rather pathetic power struggles over department chairmanships, or professorial appointments, love affairs, usually adulterous or officially outlawed ones, provide the only thing resembling drama on offer on the contemporary university campus.'

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