In the news in Pompeii

I am still reeling from the reaction to my “Keeping Sex out of Scholarship” blog. More than a year ago, I reviewed a book in the TLS (a “Dictionary of British Classicists”), in which I pointed out how the reliable stories of what is euphemistically known as the “wandering hand”  of Eduard Fraenkel, a professor Latin at Oxford had been ignored. I wrote that I had an ambivalent reaction to what Fraenkel was supposed  to have done: on the one hand sisterly outrage at the abuse of male power; on the other, a wistful nostalgia (shared, I can assure you, by many of my age) for an earlier era of pedagogy, an age perhaps of greater innocence. What was the reaction?  I received just a handful of letters from outraged pupils of Fraenkel, denouncing me for sullying the memory of their teacher.
A couple of weeks ago, I return to the issue briefly in a blog. This gets suddenly picked up by the media, from the Mail to the BBC. This time I am denounced for exactly the opposite crime. Now I am supposed to be the out of touch Cambridge don who “hankers after” an age when professor slept with students. Not what I said, and not true.

Let me say again (I’ve found myself saying this often over the last couple of days) I do not condone sexual harassment or “hanker after” a return to the old world. “Wistful nostalgia” is very different reaction – which doesn’t involve trying to put the clock back. We can, after all, have wistful nostalgia for the nicotine culture of half a century ago, and the swirls of smoke around Bogart’s head in Casablanca, without deciding to go out and buy a packet of Marlborough – and without being unaware that, if he went on like that, Rick would die a very unpleasant death from lung cancer.
By far the best encapsulation of the ambivalence I was trying to express is to be found in Mary Warnock’s memoirs. Warnock was one of Fraenkel’s "girls" and she very nicely gets across both the sense that she had benefited from the high-octane pedagogy that he offered some, and the sense that some people were terribly damaged by it.
For me the whole reaction to what I wrote feels even odder because I am not even in the country. I am at Pompeii, getting some work in for the next book I should be getting on with. Yesterday, as I was exploring the site with my husband and at Italian colleague, the mobile phone kept going and re-going (the reception is a bit wobbly at Pompeii) – wanting quotes or more articles. What I decided not to say is that I was actually in the middle of an exploration of Pompeian so-called “brothels”, wondering what the criteria should be for identifying them. That would have been throwing too much of a delicacy to the wolves.
So what have I learned from all this? Well, first be very careful what you say in the silly season of August. But, on the other hand, the reaction – silly and inaccurate as much of it is – shows that this a difficult subject that people do want to discuss.
I would also advise friends and colleagues not to give an interview to the Today programme on a mobile phone from the back of a bar in Pompeii station.

Comments

[Zareen P. Bharucha]

I can't say I was "introduced to the pleasures of the bed" by one of my supervisors - or any other academic in my life. Still, can I just say (without condoning the obviously deplorable) that I totally sympathise with what Micheal Bywater (August 18, 2006 - below). We live in an age where we seem to be on the verge of puritanical frenzy and yet whipped on by the most vulgar of collective sexualities: the purely acquisitive, opportunistic kind. Perhaps an earlier age was more honest - and most certainly, whatever went on, for the most part, based on what I hear and see around me, I think it was a cleaner place to be human in.

[Carol A]

Sadly, the biggest losers in the relentless quest for sensationalism will be the journalists themselves. They are fast going the way of their television counterparts, nothing but a "talking head" with the same entertainment value as a circus clown. Except that we at least respect the circus clown.
When the occupation "journalist" has the same status as "used-car saleperson" or "snake-oil seller" who will be to blame? Only the journalists who chased after a few quick dollars at the expense of their self-respect and integrity.
And you are right - the best defence is not to give interviews at all!

[Michael Bywater]

We should remember that the media are driven by controversialism and that hundreds of thousands of pages are written each day by people who are desperate to say something but have nothing to say. Reactive disapproval is the easiest solution, not least because one doesn't have to think. Couple that with the current profound unease about pedagogy in general (in the West, at least) and the fact that, having demonised smokers into oblivion, the professional (and amateur) tutters need something to tut about, and the unthinking response is all too predictable.

A frightening number of journalists don't think. Perhaps they can't think. Perhaps they're paid not to think. Most likely, what they do best is second-guessing what their readers may "think". The Daily Mail, for example, is brilliant at this, the assumption being that Britain is full of anxious, cross, suburban voyeurs, and that the Mail may as well get 60p a day off the rotters by boosting their prejudices. Quality of public discourse? Feh. In BlairBrit, quality of public discourse counts for nothing.

The link between eros and pedagogy is well-established and made explicit by, among others, Plato -- perhaps a clearer thinker than most journalists. What's alarming is that we have even come to suspect the coupling of, not eros, but philia with teaching. Shall we return to the days when teaching was in the hands of avowed celibates (and we know where THAT led)? Maybe so, in these curious times when we are scared of everything, just like a bunch of big babies.

But a couple of personal observations. My old headmaster once said to me that 90% of schoomasters were paedophiles at heart -- who else would want to spend his working life among adolescent males except one who genuinely loved them? The other 10%, of course, were pederasts, and they were the ones to keep an eye on. A distinction we have lost.

And, at the university level, I am proud to say that I was inducted into the pleasures of the bed by one of my supervisors, some 10 years older than I. It was an unalloyed joy -- I hope, for both of us -- and it stimulated not only my erotic sensibilities but also my interest in the subject she taught: two great gifts which have given me delight to this day. I will be grateful to her for ever, and my gratitude is only increased by the certainty that the withershins of anxious, unthinking PC will never know anything like it.