Interview with Hannah (Individual interview 2)

They come very immature now…very personally immature. They…I think I saw my tutor three times, the first day of each year, and never at any other time, it wasn’t the done thing in my day…and now… they email you, you know, “Do you know what room I should be in for my lecture?” You know…be a responsible person. […] The difference now between an 18, 19 year old and a 23, 24 year old - when they have made that transition to adulthood – is so much greater than when I was 19 and he [Nigel] was 25. I mean…I got married when I was 19 …they [students today] wouldn’t be ready for a… that kind of (1) grown-up relationship […] they’re kids.

Hannah deploys a number of tactics here that have the effect of problematizing contemporary F-S relationships. The first lies in her articulation of contemporary students as immature and irresponsible, which she emphasises by drawing a contrast

between students ‘now’ and students ‘in [her] day’, who, it is implied, were more mature. Second, Hannah manipulates category boundaries, minimizing the age of students. These tactics support, and are supported by, her application of the label ‘kids’ to students, and her inference that students are incapable of having a ‘grown-up relationship’ such as the one she had as a 19 year-old. Each of these tactics is now further explored.

As noted, Hannah’s account juxtaposes students ‘now’ and students ‘in [her] day’. In the first line of the extract she emphasises the immaturity of students now through the repetition of the expression that they are ‘very immature’. This immaturity is articulated through an evidential modality; Hannah gives the example of students e-mailing academics about the location of their lectures, which is contrasted with her own practice, as an exemplar of students in her day, of only contacting tutors on the first day of term. Interestingly, this latter practice is used to signify contemporary students’ lack of maturity. It is not interpreted as indexing a sense of entitlement and demand for improved customer service, which Williams (2013) and others locate as part of a consumerist discourse.

The immaturity of contemporary students is further underlined by Hannah’s age categorization of students. Throughout the interview Hannah identifies ‘18-19’ as the more or less uncontested age of student-hood. These assertions, however, fly in the face of evidence. Statistics published by Universities UK indicate that 46% of undergraduates, and 87% of post-graduates studying at universities in 2010-11 were aged 21-24. Meanwhile some 20% undergraduates and 46% postgraduates were aged 25 or over (Universities UK, 2012: 13). Consequently, Hannah’s selective approach to defining the student population is an example of gerrymandering, which excludes older students from her definition and thus emphasizes the immaturity of the student population.

Although Hannah’s account belies the age diversity of students, her reasoning possesses common-sense appeal. Certainly, with age at first marriage having increased by approximately 8 years in the last 30 years11it is hard to imagine a student today getting married in their first year of study, let alone that marriage being to their lecturer. Moreover, through appealing to a past golden age of student maturity, Hannah acknowledges the possibility that things could be otherwise; that immaturity is a social construct, and a student could be a ‘responsible person’. Such an attitude was exceptional across the data; age was more readily mobilized to fix, maximize, and naturalise the division between students and academics, as I demonstrate below. However, through her erection of a division between students now and students in her day, Hannah’s account establishes a ‘them and us’ approach (Potter, 1996). This enables students today to be written off as ‘kids’ in ways which she suggests would not, at one time, have been plausible. This division thus allows Hannah to preserve the logic of her position on F-S relationships; she can defend her own involvement, whilst remaining critical, on the whole, of similar relationships emerging today.

In many respects, Hannah’s account typifies the constructions of students-as-children that permeate the corpus. In particular, the business of gerrymandering the student category, which sees them confined to their late teens, consistently emerged in the interviews and CMD, as well as featuring in newspaper reports. Extracts 11, 12, and 13 all further evince this tactic. Moreover, a number of university personal relationships policies express similar doubts about students’ maturity, suggesting that an important reason for regulating relationships between academics and students stems from the latter group being ill-equipped to deal with such relationships. The policy on staff-student relationships in place at University Campus Suffolk is a case in point. It states: ‘Whilst most students at UCS are over 18 years old and regarded as adults in law, many students may yet be relatively immature in terms of their capacity to embark on adult

relationships’.This chimes with Hannah’s account, insinuating that university students, or at least ‘many’ of their number, are insufficiently competent to deal with the sort of ‘adult relationships’ that academics are likely to engage in.

This construction operates in tension with another common depiction of F-S relationships as brief and casual affairs. This latter tactic emerged in Extract 3, and is also evident in extracts 9 and 10, which I analyse later. In categorising academic’s relationships as ‘adult’, they are imbued with a sense of seriousness or gravitas that jars with notions of an affair or fling. This categorization device also works to delimit the activity of purportedly young and inexperienced students, who are not legitimately able to participate in ‘adult’ activities.

Yet intimate relationships surely take numerous forms. They might be experienced or expressed as fun, light-hearted, non-sexual, and casual. A number of these alternative descriptors emerge in the accounts analysed for the study. As I note later in relation to my interview with Sam (see p. 184), I spoke to academics who recounted angst-ridden and non-sexual relationships with students. I also interviewed undergraduate students who described their relationships as serious and stable. These varieties of intimacy, which appear to transcend age boundaries, are elided by the concept of ‘adult relationships’.

Whilst Hannah implies that the infantilization of students might be a new trend, inapplicable to those studying in her day, my analysis of campus fiction indicates that the portrayal of students as ‘kids’ is not confined to the late modern era. For example, in Malcolm Bradbury’s novel, Eating People is Wrong, first published in 1959, and including a relationship between a professor and his PhD student, Bradbury describes undergraduate students as, ‘youths straight from some grammar school sixth-form’ student (1959: 14). The device is also detectable in Bradbury’s later novel, The History

Man(1975), in which students George Carmody and Felicity Phee are written as gauche and impressionable characters. If one goes back further still, traces of infantilization are apparent in Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, first published in 1911: at one point Zuleika chides her suitor, the Duke of Dorset, for treating Oxford undergraduates as children (Beerbohm, 2008: 90). Perhaps Brideshead Revisited’s (Waugh: 1945) Sebastian Flyte, with teddy-bear in one hand and champagne glass in the other, personifies the liminal space occupied by the student, who is neither adult nor child.

Whilst these characterisations do not deploy the tactic of labelling students ‘children’, they nonetheless sit uneasily with Hannah’s identification of a lost academic idyll, in which students were more mature, responsible, and competent. Moreover, as stated in Chapter 4, the notion of students as errant, wayward children was, in part, the rationale behind the development of the college system at Oxbridge in the 1500s. Thus there appears to be a historical foundation for the metaphor of students-as-children which is belied by Hannah’s account, and this appears to significantly pre-date the origins of harassment knowledge, which were traceable back to second-wave feminism.

Constructions of students-as-children are not always as assertively established in the corpus as they are in Hannah’s narrative. I now turn to a further extract taken from the interview with Delia in order to explore some of the difficulties that might be encountered in working students up in this way. Delia’s account, I suggest, exposes further tensions elicited by the use of the metaphor, whilst also hinting at additional effects of its deployment.

Extract 9:Interview withDelia(Individual interview 1)

Well I mean I’m…I was a mature student, so… you know…but he was even maturer. [Laughter] But um….ya’ know, when I was at university there was always a lot of talk of…ya’ know…and certain men…lecturers… had reputations, and…but there was a lot of flirtation from a lot of the girls and…um…I’m not saying that justifies lecturers

having affairs with young girls… or women or whatever, ‘cause actually… at the time I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’m a grown-up, I’m making my choices’ you know, cause I wasn’t a child, I’m…I was a woman with two children, you know, but when I look back now I honestly think, ‘Oh my god!’…ya’ know? I was a kid…I was so young, an’ naïve (2) an’ I feel like… I was completely taken advantage of.

Delia’s positioning of students in general, and, more particularly, of Delia herself, as childlike appears less secure than was the case in Hannah’s account; her frequent pauses, ‘um’s and self-repair (Shegloff et al, 1977) suggest hesitancy. Moreover, her mixing of past and present tenses, alongside some apparent contradictions, rather destabilize her account. On this basis, this excerpt is interesting to analyse in some detail (see Foucault, 1972; Billig et. al., 1988; and Davies & Harré,2001).

Delia makes comments that are hearable as constructing female students - and, in the penultimate sentence, Delia herself - as ‘girls’, ‘young girls’ ‘a kid’ or ‘child[ren]’. Labelling female students as girls is a prevalent feature of the data; the quotation from Vod inFresh Meat, which prefaces this chapter, further exemplifies this DD. Alongside her gendering of academic and student subject positions, Delia’s deployment of this device aligns with aspects of harassment knowledge. However, Delia also articulates students - and herself - as ‘women’ or ‘grown-up’s. Further, she states, ‘I wasn’t a child’. In so doing she concedes the possibility of being interpreted as one, and the availability of infantilization as a framing device becomes apparent.

Although she admits that ‘girls’ may be ‘flirtatious’, Delia effectively writes students’ responsibility for relationships out of her account through her use of passive voicing, as in the phrase, ‘lecturers having affairs with young girls’. Such voicing operates as a form of agency management; in particular, the deployment of the agentless passive renders students as ‘patients’ and academics ‘agents’ (see Appendix 3, on the agent- patientdistinction).

Delia’s application of the students-as-children metaphor in relation to herself is troubled by her mature-student status, a contradiction she orients to, stating; ‘I was a woman with two children’. Nonetheless, the metaphor is still pursued and she asserts how ‘young and naïve’ she was. Delia reconciles some of the tensions called forth by disparities between the students-as-children metaphor and her own age by shifting the footing (Goffman, 1981) of her narrative. In so doing she creates a sort of divided self, which enables her to pit the interpretations of Delia now -which is to say, the principal Delia, speaking in an interview - about and against the interpretations of her past student self. Delia then thus becomes a character embedded in her story, whom she animates and linguistically disassociates herself from. This embedded character can be understood as childlike, even though Delia tells us she would not have thought so at the time.

The principal Delia is articulated as having reflected on the relationship, meaning that she can now see it for what it ‘honestly’ was, and can conclude that she was ‘completely taken advantage of’. Her assertion of authenticity and use of an Extreme Case Fomulation(ECF) here urge us to concur with this reassessment. So, whilst her account is, overall, somewhat inconsistent in its deployment of the student-as-child metaphor, her ultimate denial of agency in this last statement facilitates a reading of the text which discredits the thoughts of the embedded Delia, who thought she was ‘making [her] choices’, and secures those of the principal Delia, whose opinions are expressed as more honest, and which come with the benefit of hindsight. Delia’s relationship is thus re-cast as coercive.

This strategy perhaps illuminates the findings of Glaser & Thorpe (1986). As indicated in Chapter 2, they find that students often retrospectively reappraise their involvement in F-S relationships as non-consensual. Glaser & Thorpe suggest that this makes it difficult to assess students’ ‘actual experiences’ (1986: 49), and they turn to psychoanalytic concepts such as dissociation in order to explain why such

reassessments might have occurred. Dissociation may be a valid explanation, but as with many psychological explanations, it is hard to prove without access to participants’ at-the-time internal cognitive states (Billig, 1997). By focusing instead on the rhetorical organization of Delia’s account, I re-specify dissociation as a linguistic accomplishment (Billig, 1997; Wiggins & Potter, 2008). This has the merit of bracketing questions about what really went on, and foregrounding accounting practices.

By positioning herself as having been childlike at the time of her relationship, Delia’s account of coercion is also hearable as indexing not harassment but child-abuse. She is not arguing that Peter took advantage of his hierarchical status, but rather that he took advantage of Delia-as-child. Later in the interview she corroborates such a reading, commenting, ‘someone should really have…asked what was going on…an’ checked I was OK with it...that it wasn’t like…harming me.’ This statement presents Delia as de- responsibilized and F-S relationships as a source of potential harm or danger. It also alights upon notions of the university as protectorate. These are ideas I return to and develop later in the thesis.

Having touched upon this shift in how F-S relationships might be constructed, it is worth drawing some further comparisons between infantilizing discourses and harassment knowledge. The mobilization of the students-as-children metaphor alluded to above has parallels with harassment knowledge’s construction of victim status. It seems to insist on the existence of an age, and therefore power, gap between the immature student and the mature and adult academic. As I have already stated, there is also a gendering of subject positions.

As such, infantilization also shares harassment knowledge’s conceptualization of power as sovereign, quantitative, and zero-sum. Indeed, in some ways, attempts to establish the existence of a power gap based on age, and not (only) gender role or organizational status further fixes and naturalizes this gap. This is because the gap is predicated on

ostensibly biological rather than socio-cultural or organizational differences. This point is, of course, contestable; the socially constructed nature of childhood and age has been persuasively argued for by Ariès (1962), and Hutchby & Moran-Ellis (1998), amongst others. Notwithstanding my own sympathies with such perspectives, age is typically deployed within the data as a means of locating and accentuating students’ lack of maturity and accountability. Consequently, the construction of students-as-children and, as I discuss below, academics as either ‘adult’ or ‘old’, essentializes differences between them, making consent not just problematic but impossible. This further transforms F-S relationships from bad or worse sex into unnatural and dangerous sex. Before exploring this modification further, I now turn to texts in which the students-as- children metaphor is rejected.

Consenting adults?

One of the ways in which the availability of the metaphor of students-as-children is underlined emerges in texts where its legitimacy is questioned. The metaphor continually emerges in the corpus as a concern that must be attended to and countered in order to undermine accounts censuring F-S relationships. This is often accomplished through what I term the ‘consenting adults’ defence, which is a recurring feature of accounts which critique the problematization of F-S relationships.

In contrast to the frequent and explicit rendering of students-as-children, references to academics-as-adults are often implied by the data. One exception to this occurs where challenges are made to the students-as-children metaphor. Such challenges are often worked up through arguments invoking what Edwards (1995: 322) has termed ‘two-to- tango’ script formulations. These construct relationship troubles as reciprocal, rather than blaming them on the activities of one person.

Such formulations are evident in policy documents and in fictional representations of F-S relationships. For example, the University of Reading prefaces its personal relationships policy with the caveat, ‘The University does not seek unduly to interfere in relationships between consenting adults’. This statement presents the university as having respect for the private lives of its ‘adult’ inhabitants. Thus it works, as Edwards (1995) suggests such formulations do, by pre-empting counter-arguments that the university might ‘unduly’ understand them as non-consensual relationships between an adult and child.

Perhaps the strongest formulations of the consenting adults defence are found in online discussion forums. Given CMD’s capacity to elicit flaming behaviour amongst users this is perhaps unsurprising. Nevertheless, it is worth examining how such arguments are appropriated in CMD, and with what effects. Below, I provide excerpts taken from two different discussion forums. Extract 10a is a below-the-line response to an article published in the THE, which reported on a F-S relationship between a mature student and her lecturer at the University of Warwick. This relationship ended, and the student, who was pregnant at the time, terminated her pregnancy. Extract 10b comes from a prolonged on-line discussion responding to a purportedly satirical piece on lust in the academy, written by Terence Kealey, the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, also published in theTHE.