The wildly misguided My Oxford Year
When I studied English literature at Oxford about two decades ago, the issue of tutor-student relations was a vexed one. On the one hand – so the reasoning went – students were adults, over the age of consent and entitled to make their own decision as to whether they wanted to indulge in sexual congress with the men and women responsible for inculcating a knowledge and, hopefully, love of their subject into them. On the other, there were clear – although sometimes blurred – conflicts of interest relating to these invariably older figures also on occasion being responsible for marking their favored students’ examinations.
