The Bewildered Mentee -- The Collateral Damage of Professor-Student Romances

If you are tired of reading about this topic, feel free to give this one a miss.

One of my greatest regrets is the impact that the very public loss of my career had on the young people I mentored. When you resign because of sexual relationships with young female students, it casts an understandable pall over every relationship you had with every young woman – and it can lead to many young women reassessing everything they thought they knew about what it meant to be mentored.

For the record, I'm not exaggerating when I say I've mentored hundreds of high school and college students. I mentored students I met at the Buckley School (where I began my teaching career), and at Pasadena City College -- as well as kids I met through youth groups I led at All Saints Church and the Kabbalah Centre.

(In small ways, I find ways to continue to be a mentor. It is one of the great joys of my life.)

When my fall happened, many of the young women I mentored found themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of questions from family, friends, and PCC administrators. When I made my online confession that I'd been sleeping with students all along, I was intentionally vague about the number -- and of course, completely opaque about the identities of those particular women.

My understandable desire to avoid naming names meant that a great many people played guessing games to figure out which students had been my lovers -- with one conservative website presenting various candidates, chosen from among my most regular commenters and those who had been photographed with me.

The college wanted proof of my misconduct that went beyond my own confession.  They were afraid that I might change my mind, and declare I had “made it all up,” and they would be unable to go any further with the termination proceedings.  (Obviously, I had a documented mental illness – confessing to misconduct I hadn’t committed would be textbook Borderline Personality Disorder – considering my tenure, that would make firing me utterly impossible.)  Pasadena City College needed more than the words of a manifestly unstable man.

In their eagerness and haste, the college hired outside investigators to go through my campus email and student rosters. Those who were identified as being particularly close to me were harassed, urged to "tell the truth" and assured that they were victims of a sociopath.

The women who had been my lovers were never questioned. It fell to a few of my most-public mentees to bear the brunt of the ugliness. They had to process their own sense of betrayal while also dealing with lawyers and the media. It was dreadful, and though the final responsibility for all this upset rests with me, the college was appallingly and unnecessarily cruel in its tactics.

I know that some young women I mentored who had always felt safe with me began to wonder, at least for a while, if I had harbored other feelings for them. I imagine that doubt was awful. It convinces me that the most potentially troublesome thing about a professor having a consensual affair with a young student isn't necessarily the impact on the student herself, who might be happy with what happened. It's the impact on all the other young women who were mentored, who might suddenly have reason to doubt the nature of that professor's gentle interest in their lives. The mentees who came to doubt the purity of their relationship with me were hurt –invariably more -- than the students who took me into their beds.

I didn't mentor in order to find sex partners. I didn't mentor out of an inappropriate fixation on young people, particularly young women. I mentored because I believed and still believe it was my calling. I mentored because I believed that I was a safe and loving adult to folks who needed safe and loving adults. I mentored because it gave me a deep sense of purpose.

I mentored because I loved my mentees, and I wanted to see them thrive.  It is a great joy to be in touch with a few of them even now, and watch them continue to grow and transform.  I am still invited to witness, and occasionally, even advise.  After everything that’s happened, it’s an honor I do not take lightly.

It upsets me greatly to think that mine might become a cautionary tale about the dangers of mentoring! I fell from grace because I broke a rule that I had personally written into the college's governing code. I did not fall because a young woman reported me for inappropriate conduct.

I never worried about false accusations because I knew false accusations are incredibly rare. I never worried about being misperceived because I made my intentions -- and my non-sexual, non-romantic devotion -- so clear to those I mentored.

In a healthy society, young people should have adults in their lives of all sexes, adults whom they can trust and to whom they can turn. I want Heloise and David to have mentors to whom they’re not related, and I want them to have mentors who do – and don’t – share their biological sex. I don’t want my daughter to grow up thinking every man is a potential predator; I don’t want my son to grow up believing that just because he’s a boy, he’s hardwired to be incapable of nonsexual intimacy with women. I want them to have common sense, as we all should have common sense – but there’s a colossal distinction between common sense and irrational prejudice.

We need to let go of the myth that men and women cannot have close, platonic friendships. As long as we insist that lust is both inevitable and makes cross-gender friendship impossible, we’ll continue to be deeply mistrustful of any man who claims he’s “only” mentoring a female student or subordinate. That mistrust, left unchallenged, will remain one of the most impenetrable components of the glass ceiling that still blocks women from achieving full equality with men in every aspect of public life.