The Times: Professor’s nostalgia for the days of ‘pawing’ by male dons
A PROFESSOR has said that she yearns for the days when male dons spiced up tutorials with their “groping” of students.
Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, stunned fellow academics with her fond recollections of female students putting up with the fumblings from older professors to get inspirational teaching. She wrote: “It is hard to repress certain wilful academic nostalgia for that academic era before about 1980 when the erotic dimension of pedagogy which had flourished since Plato was firmly stamped out.”
She made the remarks as she criticised colleagues for failing to record that the respected Latin scholar Eduard Fraenkel was a notorious groper. She said that this side of Professor Fraenkel’s character had been omitted from biographies, even though “any academic woman older than her mid-forties” would be ambivalent to it.
Professor Beard, 51, said that a female tutor used to warn students that although they would learn a lot from Professor Fraenkel, they would probably be “pawed about a bit”.
Professor Beard’s remarks have been criticised by academics and student leaders but she remained unrepentant. She said she was sorry if she had given an impression that she was in favour of male sexual harassment but said that other academics had acknowledged the link between “pawing” and teaching.
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