I guess he was a romantic at heart, and as time went on he sent me his poems. Some were satirical epics in the manner of Pope, on the state of British society; others more enigmatic little versicles.
On many Saturdays I would go out with him in his Mini to wander around architectural monuments in Northamptonshire (better buildings than Cambridgeshire, he used to explain). This was intense training in how to look at architecture and how to understand how a building worked — and for me (architect’s daughter though I was) it was completely new. A real eye-opener.
The instruction would have its lighter side: lunch and then tea before returning to Cambridge, where we’d perhaps have dinner before going home.
It would be naive of me to imagine that the relationship was not in some sense eroticised, but at no point was any physical advance made. He never put a hand on my thigh nor, as the old phrase goes, “took advantage of me”.
Nor do I feel that I was taking advantage of him. That is to say, looking back, I don’t believe that I was using him as some kind of means of sublimation. I was having other more conventional relationships at the time. Yet we were in our own way close. He is long dead, but I still feel grateful to him (as I know do several other of his students, all of them women, who also enjoyed his trips to “the stone”).
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He taught me an enormous amount. And his teaching and inspiration on those days out is almost certainly one of the reasons that I am still in the university system — and trying myself to encourage the next generation to take buildings (classical and other) seriously.
Yet now such behaviour would be completely inadmissible. I doubt if someone like my friend would actually be sacked, but he would certainly risk some kind of disciplinary procedure. In fact, if I found out that one of my male colleagues was having days out in the country with a female undergraduate looking at architecture (a likely story!), I would almost certainly warn them to stop. If they protested their innocence, wide-eyed, I would make what now seems the obvious riposte: what they were doing might easily be misconstrued as an improper sexual advance.
New rubrics on inappropriate behaviour have certainly protected some people, usually women, who in the past might well have been damaged by university teachers abusing their power. Of course that is to the good. But inevitably many relationships that could be productive and supportive have been lost in the process.
For all the benefits of greater control of sexual behaviour (and as a feminist I would be the first to want to make universities fairer places for women to study and work), it’s sad that some of the good things we took for granted would now be ruled out of court.
These considerations really do make a difference to the way I now teach. Classical literature is full of raunchy stuff and in Cambridge we still sometimes teach students one-to-one (it’s one of the most dynamic and exciting ways of teaching that there is). But even I, as a woman, would now hesitate before teaching some of the more explicit parts of Latin love poetry or satire to a single male undergraduate in my room. I’d probably leave the door open or make sure that there was more than one. In a funny way, of course, that only serves to heighten the potential eroticism of the encounter. What on earth might happen if she closed the door?
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Were dons sleeping with undergraduates when I was at Cambridge? It was and is hard to know exactly. Sure, there must have been cases (it was the era of The History Man, after all). But those are now difficult to separate from a more general cultural mythology.
My own guess is that rather a few real examples were embroidered for all they were worth and some of the tales were no doubt flagrantly untrue. “I walked into his room for a supervision and there he was completely naked.” Believe it or not. Frankly, looking at the far from sexiest specimens of English manhood that often end up in the academic profession (true, there are notable exceptions), I suspect that some scepticism is in order.
Many dons make implausible lotharios. What was different was the fact that we lived in a culture where erotic relationships of that sort (even if mythical ones) were still on the agenda. I can remember evenings where we giggled at the prospect (fantasy in most of our cases) of getting it together with one of our teachers. One of my friends even gave it a nicely political edge: women were so disadvantaged in the university system, she argued, that this went some way to helping us claw ahead. Of course, we all know now why she was wrong — and that the chances were it would leave the woman even further behind.
More important, though, I don’t think more than a handful of us ever tried the recipe out. The rules really are different now; and I doubt if my own students talk quite like that. Yet they still are fascinated by the private and sexual lives of their teachers. Any academic who doubts that should take a look at the LiveJournals of some of their students.
In some sense, of course, they are fascinated because teaching in small groups at university level with clever young adults encourages closeness. Indeed it has encouraged it at least since 5th-century Athens, where teaching was often an explicitly erotic activity between (in that case) young and older men.
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The traditional closeness between teacher and pupils in Oxford and Cambridge can be traced to the literary and social culture of the 19th century. What was wrong with going for a walk with your tutor to Grantchester? Or taking a naked dip in Byron’s Pool? It has always been hard to know where to draw the line.