Love on Campus

Inside Higher Ed : By Scott McLemee

One generation’s faculty gossip is sometimes another’s cultural history. At the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, a professor stopped a teenage student leaving one of his classes. She was not properly enrolled in the course, but bureaucratic proprieties really did not have anything to do with it. She was stunning. He was smitten. They had lunch. And 10 days later, give or take, Philip Rieff was joined in marriage to a young woman who never actually did change her name to Susan Rieff, instead always being known as Susan Sontag.
They did not live happily ever after. ...

The narrator mentions reading George Eliot as a young bride and bursting into tears at the realization she had, like Dorothea in Middlemarch, married Casaubon.

As you may recall, Dorothea is at first transfixed by the learning and gravitas of Casaubon, a scholar who is many years her senior. It soon dawns on her (as it does perhaps more quickly for the reader) that he is a bloodless pedant, joyless except when venting spleen against other bloodless pendants. And there are hints, as clear as Victorian propriety will allow, that Dorothea’s honeymoon has been disappointing in other ways as well.

Sontag’s allusion must rank as one of the more subtly devastating acts of revenge ever performed by an ex-wife. ...

The summer issue of The American Scholar contains an essay by William Deresiewicz called “Love on Campus” that identifies a “new academic stereotype” visible in popular culture. ...

Deresiewicz offers a cogent analysis of how this stereotype may reflect the changing place of academe in American society and the contradictory attitudes it evinces. He also presents some thoughts on a dimension of education that popular culture for the most part ignores: the eros of learning, the way a student can fall in love with a teacher for reasons having nothing to do with sexuality. Combining them, as Sontag tried to do with Rieff, seems like a bad idea.