Interview with Delia (Individual interview 1)

D: I didn’t come into university and feel all enamoured.

J: No? So what…

D: No, but I think there is a lot of that. Definitely. You come in, and somebody has knowledge, and there is power in that, there’s a definite power in that. You know…this person [the academic] really knows what they’re talking about, an’ there is some…you know there is um… you could say that they almost… it’s intoxicating for him, because there is a sense of power, and you could easily abuse that power, you know? An’ I mean…whether you think that (2) if it’s a male lecturer for instance, an’ he abuses that power by having a relationship with a…a student ya’ know, I think there is sort of…I think…we do have a code of conduct and um (2) and although… maybe it’s not the law in this country, it’s kind of (3) you know… lecturers know they aren’t supposed to have affairs with students, and… they just shouldn’t.

Delia’s account begins with an assertion that she didn’t enter academia ‘feeling all enamoured’. Her own position is then contrasted with that of unspecified others through her comment that there is ‘a lot of that’. This reference to the attitudes of others works as a membership categorization device. So, other members of academia - one might infer, other students - are somewhat vaguely categorized as being easily enamoured, perhaps even gullible (see Lakoff, 1973; Potter, 1996 on fuzzy or vague concepts). By positioning herself outside this category, Delia appears comparatively shrewd, and her account is lent a sense of detachment and authority.

Being ‘enamoured’ is articulated by Delia as a product of the ‘knowledge’ and, concomitantly, ‘power’ possessed by the academic. This echoes the policy documents analysed earlier, which followed harassment knowledge by inserting a power gap, based on differentials of status and expertise, between the academic and student. However, power is framed here as affecting both students and academics, the latter of whom may find it‘intoxicating’.

The use of the word intoxicating is interesting; in constructing the academic as drunk or stupefied, his/her9 ability to act rationally appears to be thrown into some doubt. This might appear at odds with the idea of the academic as possessing power, knowledge, and expertise, since it seems to work against the image of the calculated and predatory lecturer constructed by harassment knowledge, diminishing the academic’s responsibility for their actions. However, the deployment of this metaphor in Delia’s account does not remove the academic’s responsibility to abstain from relationships with students. Delia makes it clear that having a relationship with a student is something even the intoxicated lecturer ‘knows’ they ‘aren’t supposed to’and ‘just shouldn’t’do. With this in mind, her assertion that power can be intoxicating might rather be read as positioning the academic as an egotist or megalomaniac; someone for whom power acts as a stimulant, and who, acting on this, ‘abuses’ his position by behaving predatorily towards students. This perhaps hints at the unintended and productive effects of harassment knowledge (Brewis, 2001; Taylor, 2011).

The use of ‘him’ to refer to the intoxicated academic raises a further issue. Delia’s account falls back here on the gendered assumptions of harassment knowledge by deploying the male pronoun and constructing a hypothetical male lecturer. This is a point worth elaborating. Where hypothetical scenarios involving F-S relationships are discussed in the corpus, and where they are referred to as a general rather than a particular phenomenon, the academic is almost always worked up as male, and the student as female. Thus these accounts are not only gendered but also heterosexist (Brewis, 2001). This is the case even in the interview responses of female academics and male students who had been directly involved in relationships, and by those with experience of same-sex relationships.

On two occasions interview respondents were challenged about their use of gendered and heterosexist formulations of relationships. These challenges came from participants in the group interviews. For example, Gill, who contributed to the group interview with undergraduates, reminds other respondents who continually refer to lecturers as ‘he’ and students as ‘she’ of the multiplicity of permutations of F-S relationships which exist. She asserts; ‘They could be gay, straight, mature students, men, women’. Despite this challenge, the participants in this group continue to use the male pronoun to refer to academics and the female to refer to students. Indeed one participant, Sean, seems to find it impossible to refer to an academic as a woman, interjecting ‘Come on…it’s always a bloke, isn’t it?’ In the interview with female academics, use of the male pronoun to refer to lecturers was also marked, but was corrected by Sally, who observes ‘We all keep saying ‘he’, but of course it could be the other way around’. Following this comment the group refrain from gendering relationships unless a particular case is being discussed.

Similarly, fictional accounts of relationships almost always involve a male academic and female student. The Channel 4 comedyCampus is exceptional in its depiction of a brief fling between a male postgraduate student, Flatpack, and female maths lecturer, Imogen Moffatt. Even here, however, it is Moffatt who is pursued by Flatpack. Meanwhile Campus’s resident lothario, the vain Professor Matt Beer, fits the active male role constructed by harassment knowledge far better. In Episode 1 of the series he comments on the perks of his job thus, “It’s like the best vending machine imaginable. Every September another bumper crop of gorgeous, impressionable girls drops into the drawer at the bottom…there for the taking.’ The vending machine analogy, allied with the description of female students as ‘gorgeous’ but ‘impressionable’, constructs students as a sort of confectionary, which in turn denies them agency. Conversely, Beer is presented as a serial predator, whose agency is emphasized through his ability to pick

and choose from the available eye candy. The student emerges from this metaphor less as consumer, and more as consumed,and is thus assigned victim status.

Returning to Extract 2, Delia can be heard to falter regarding where the academic’s presumed knowledge about whatnotto do is derived from. She pauses frequently at this point in her account, subduing the strength with which she commits to her expressions through the use of the verbal hedges, ‘sort of’and ‘kind of’. Conceding that refraining from having ‘affairs’ with students is ‘not the law in this country’ 10Delia now invokes the ‘code of conduct’as the source of this knowledge.

Leaving aside her pejorative use of the term ‘affairs’, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 8, Delia’s reference to a code is ambiguous. Later in the interview, in an extract of transcript not reproduced for the thesis, Delia states that she has never seen a personal relationships code, and doesn’t know whether universities are required to have them or not. With this in mind it is unclear exactly what Delia is referring to here; is this a formal, written code, or something altogether more informal and tacit? Either way, according to Delia there isa code, and the lecturershouldbe bound by it. Delia’s words here seem to echo the contractual edifice of F-S relationships constructed by the LMH policy, since she signs the inhabitants of academe up to rules of conduct that mark relationships as bad sex and attempt to prohibit them. Thus the mode ofsubjectivation articulated here appears highly attentive to other imposed codes.

Consequently, this extract can be interpreted as appropriating and developing a number of the central tenets of harassment knowledge. However, it also sows the seeds of one of its ‘stumbling blocks’ (Foucault, 1978b: 101), namely its productive nature. In linking power with desire, Delia hints at the potential for harassment knowledge to encourage F-S relationships by reinforcing images of academic power. This idea is explored in more detail towards the end of the chapter in my analysis of the TV sitcom,Friends.

Fighting harassment knowledge: Deploying the war metaphor

In contrast to Delia’s apparent reproduction of harassment knowledge, there is a tendency amongst the fictional accounts of F-S relationships studied to lampoon or attack this prohibitive approach. Oleanna, Blue Angel, Disgrace, and The Corrections can all be read as sardonic accounts of how harassment knowledge suffuses campus life. In each of these narratives feminist academics and students, often allied to various advocacy groups, are depicted as stirring up trouble for male academics. For example, professor Lauren Healey and the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance inBlue Angel, and student Carol and her women’s group inOleanna, can both be read in this light.

These texts thus appear to invert harassment knowledge by setting female academics, and perhaps more significantly, students, as potential harassers of male academics. In this section I trace how this move is accomplished, focussing on the trope of the aggressive female academic and vindictive female student. I also include an extract from the only interview account in which the issue of feminism arose as an explicit topic for discussion. In each of these extracts I locate the presence of fighting talk to articulate harassment knowledge. I also consider various forms of counter-conduct that may be set against it.

Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel contains perhaps the most vehement opposition to harassment discourse found amongst the corpus texts. The novel traces the fortunes of Ted Swenson, a 47-year-old Professor of Creative Writing, and malcontent. The story is set in the mid-1980s at Euston College, which is in the midst of introducing an anti- fraternizing code prohibiting relationships with students. Although the college is fictional, many real-life US HEIs would have been developing such codes during this period (see Dank & Fulda, 1997).

Prose’s text emphasizes, and frequently returns to, Swenson’s derision of his feminist colleague, Lauren Healey, as well as other supporters of relationship bans. This is largely premised on the grounds that they are both ‘puritanically’ repressed (21) and ‘thugishly’ (270) repressive. One such example occurs in the early stages of the novel during a dinner party conversation in which staff discuss the newly introduced code. Having already described Healey as ‘pugnacious’ (p 98) and ‘bullying’ (p 100), Swenson now lays into supporters of the code.