Don't believe the myth about male academics

WITH rising Hollywood starlet Julia Stiles soon to open a new production of David Mamet’s campus drama Oleanna in London, and Naomi Wolf’s allegations of sexual harassment against the distinguished American literary professor Harold Bloom still reverberating among the feminist chattering classes, it’s a moment to reflect on the changing image of the male academic in Western culture.

On one hand, the stereotype of the beardy academic, dressed in ill-fitting corduroy and locked away in his ivory tower, endures. As exemplified by Michael Caine’s drunken English lit lecturer in Educating Rita, he’s a pathetic figure. "Everyone hates a sad professor," sings Michael Stipe in REM’s elegiac hymn to thwarted scholarly dreams, "everyone hates a bore." And "boring" is a pretty good description of how the public in general has tended to view academics, especially in Britain, where intellectualism is viewed as marginally less threatening than an epidemic of bird flu.

There is, on the other hand, a very different image of the academic out there, perhaps best represented by Howard Kirk in Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man. As played by Antony Sher in the BBC’s classic adaptation, Bradbury’s tale of a right-on, ruthlessly immoral sociologist running rampant through female staff and students in a fictional red brick university, captured that moment in the late 1970s when feminism was just finding its voice, and powerful men - male academics in particular - were being identified as the enemy.

Ben Stiller reprised the stereotype in Neil La Bute’s scabrous My Friends and Neighbours, where he plays an academic so pompous, hypocritical and downright devious that he drives his own girlfriend to lesbianism.

Eric Stoltz was a depraved don in The Rules of Attraction, although that film has the students deserving everything they get on an American campus where drug-taking, date rape and nihilistic cynicism are presented as the commonplace backdrop to academic life.

As a media academic myself, I have a theory about the popularity of this stereotype. The academic teacher deals with adults, not children, in a hot house environment of rapidly maturing personalities and newly discovered desires, and where vulnerabilities on either side of the professor-student relationship are easily abused by the unscrupulous. That’s rich territory for drama, as well as presenting opportunities for ageing male actors such as Woody Allen to play opposite females a third of their age (as with Juliette Lewis in Husbands and Wives). Scholarly life isn’t quite like that, of course, though it can be tiresome trying to persuade the non-academic public that we’re not all ageing lotharios in search of eternal youth.

Thank goodness, then, for a recent spate of movies in which some of Hollywood’s leading men contrive to make we academics look neither boring nor sex-crazed, and more like misunderstood heroes.

21 Grams sees Sean Penn portray a professor of mathematics. We don’t see any flashbacks to the gory details, but the script makes it plain that this is a man with a murky past, who has indeed used his position to exploit his female students. In the terms demanded by Hollywood’s moral code he has paid the price, acquiring a dodgy ticker and a discontented partner, but we’re never allowed to stop rooting for him as he moves towards his date with destiny. Penn’s professor may be sad, but he’s dignified and sexy at the same time, even in corduroy.

Consider, too, Anthony Hopkins in The Human Stain. Having been hounded out of his distinguished academic career by a trumped-up racism charge, Hopkins gets lucky with a wanton Nicole Kidman. The 30-year age difference counts for nothing as a late life romance blossoms and Hopkins gets his own back on the PC crowd who kicked him out of his beloved faculty.

In last year’s Life of David Gale, Kevin Spacey’s morally upstanding philosophy professor is seduced by a manipulative student who subsequently makes a false accusation of rape, sending him into a downward spiral of divorce, alcoholism and death from which even crusading journalist Kate Winslet can’t save him.

These movies reflect a new view of the academic as victim rather than villain, which brings us back to Mamet’s Oleanna. The play, written in 1993, came at a time when feminists such as Kate Roiphe (her controversial The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism was published in the same year) were themselves questioning the pathologising of human sexuality promoted by the all-men-are-rapists wing of their movement.

Mamet’s professor was no angel, but the audience was invited to empathise with his predicament at the hands of a student determined to use her body as a weapon in a climate of sexual prohibition. Mamet was criticised at the time as a macho spear carrier for the male backlash, but a decade later the play resonates with a post-feminist sexual politics in which women, as well as men, are expected to take responsibility for their actions, on and off campus.