Nil nisi bonum - Mary Beard in the TLS

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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.

In an interview she said: “It is impossible not to feel sisterly outrage at what would now be deemed persistent sexual harassment and the abuse of power. On the other hand, it is also hard to repress certain wistful nostalgia.

“You can’t just deny most of the history of the West, which has seen pedagogy as having erotic elements. It is naive to think that the powerful set of power relations in student- tutor relationships can be de-eroticised. You can police it, but you cannot deny history about this.”

She said that Lady Warnock had expressed a similar ambivalence about the conduct of Professor Fraenkel, who was Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford University from 1935 to 1953. He died in 1970.

Lady Warnock, a former Oxford student, wrote in her memoirs that Professor Fraenkel “groped his female pupils (though not his male ones, if my experience is typical)”. Professor Beard claimed that Lady Warnock weighed the damage done by Professor Fraenkel’s behaviour against his inspirational teaching.

She said: “One victim described his seminars as a circle of rabbits addressed by a stoat.”

Kat Stark, of the National Union of Students, said that she found it hard to believe anyone could view sexual harassment with ambivalence. “All students have a right to learn in an environment free from any form of harassment, and to write about it with ‘a certain wistful nostalgia’ is both shocking and unacceptable.”

Gill Evans, a Professor of History at Cambridge, said: “I was chased around a table once by an amorous don. I got away. I think it is and was an abuse of power and no one should have to put up with being pawed to get inspirational teaching.”

Professor Beard acknowledged that some students had been damaged. She said: “I do feel nostalgia but that is different from saying that is how I want it to be. The best comparison I can make is with smoking. One looks at Humphrey Bogart movies with rings of cigarette smoke and we have a wistful nostalgia for it. That doesn’t mean I think smoking should be allowed in public.”

Professor Beard made her comments in an article for the Times Literary Supplement.

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