Professor–student relationships, once the slightly louche subplot of campus novels and knowing winks at faculty dinners, are suddenly back in the spotlight. But it’s still not always clear what we’re looking at. Take Daniel Biss, the mathematician-turned-politician who, on the eve of a congressional primary this week, found himself answering for a relationship that took place more than two decades ago. The accusation came via Substack from Megan Wachspress, who described a brief series of encounters—an “inappropriate romantic relationship,” as she describes it—when she was a 20-year-old undergrad at the University of Chicago and he was a 26-year-old graduate student who had taught her class. The details are, on their face, almost aggressively banal. He waited until the course had ended to ask her out. They went on a handful of dates. By her own account, he quickly called time on the relationship. This is not Harvey Weinstein in an open robe in a hotel suite. And yet, 22 years later, it is presented as a cautionary tale of imbalance, one that Wachspress, now a lecturer at Stanford Law School, says she only fully understood after teaching herself. “It took becoming a professor,” she writes, “to realize the implications—what it means to be attracted to someone who categorically has less power than you.” It is a striking line. It is also, in its absolutism, oddly reductive. Here’s why.
Follow Joanna Coles at PRIMAL SCREAM on Substack for more on sex, power, ambition, politics and all our modern-day deadly sins.
