It just keeps on keeping on …

From the time I was an undergrad to the time I was left at the ripe old age of 42 by a molecular biology professor significant other for a 20 year old undergraduate who just adored the presentation I helped him write, this shit has rolled on around me. As some one who has spent plenty of time in academia, I think the time is now to purge these perverts from higher education. This headliner at the UK Guardian just makes me want to drive to my daughter’s dorm room and adorn her in a burkha. I’m not kidding.

Are female students ‘a perk of the job’?

A vice-chancellor is encouraging lecturers to enjoy gazing at, even fantasising about, attractive female students

In an article for the Times Higher Education magazine on lust, part of a feature on the seven deadly sins of universities, Kealey wrote: “Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

“Enjoy her! She’s a perk.”

Flashing a few literary allusions, he continued: “She doesn’t yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.”

Displaying a more surprising familiarity with the etiquette at lapdancing clubs, Kealey added: “As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch.”

I would just like to say that me, my mother, my grandmother, and my two daughters sat in those chairs at university for an education, not to spice the sex life of some nasty old, over-educated and undersexed Humbert. Even as I write, I can name at least one colleague engaging in a grad student in the PhD. program from which I came.

Kealey, who has been vice-chancellor at Buckingham, the country’s only independent university, for eight years, said it was a myth that an affair between student and lecturer was an abuse of power, saying accountability has meant that “the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades”.

But he added that some female students still fantasised about their lecturers.

Kealey’s comments were attacked by Olivia Bailey, women’s officer at the National Union of Students.

She told the Telegraph: “I am appalled that a university vice-chancellor should display such an astounding lack of respect for women.

“Regardless of whether this was an attempt at humour, it is completely unacceptable for someone in Terence Kealey’s position to compare a lecture theatre to a lapdancing club, and I expect that many women studying at Buckingham University will be feeling extremely angry and insulted at these comments.”

My daughters are not the perks of jerks. This guy should be fired post haste along with any one that agrees with him.

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