Wanted: Adoring Female Students from Inside Higher Ed

And more handmaiden complexes...

Inside Higher Ed looks at a Twitter thread started by a blogger asking respondents to

please share with me all your stories of the male professors you had in college who thrived upon and demanded female admiration to function

and the resulting tweets, including messages about how this was not part of their student experience and pointing out that the Other Sex professors also enjoy adulation.

Again, it is this idea that women do not show up to work/study, or that getting sexual attention from professors is just part of the experience. To be fair, this is also a part of exploiting youth, of either gender, to quench a midlife crisis.

I also liked this quote from Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, where she stated that,

“Men are overwhelmingly the majority of full professors by rank,” she said, noting recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. “So that means male faculty by definition have greater power and authority on campus by virtue of both rank and numbers.”

She continued: “Does that mean every male faculty member abuses that authority (as the Twitter [thread] suggests)? Obviously not, but clearly there are structural issues at work in higher education that lend themselves to potential abuses of authority.”

I also don't want any comments about how students dress that invite such flirtation. I went to school in Canada and staying swathed in a parka to fend off the chill of the classrooms does not dissuade the most determined perv, since they want verbal, but sexually charged, adulation, at a minimum, and for you to disrobe, at close to the maximum access. It's not about clothing, it's about attitude and self-control.