Vice-chancellor: female students are 'a perk'

[NotanOtter]

ha ha ha

only i for one aint laughing

where's Dittany when you need her?

He is a revolting looking specimen. I honestly can't imagine any female students flaunting themselves to him. What a prick.

I do hope whatever teeny percentage of female STAFF Bucks have stage some sort of serious revolt also. I don't suppose they have an SU or serious UCU membership though...?

agreed

christ i imagine i would seriously struggle not to slap his sagging jaw

"I was a bit at his accusation that ?I know of two girls... who got firsts ...from a south-coast university in exchange for favours to a professor" naming the year & subject - there can't be that many who fit that description."

This is bollocks. Even in the 80s there was such a thing as double marking, external examiners etc. AND there was far less coursework back then. I find it hard to see how anyone could sleep her way to a First... (And certainly not with him [vom]!)

I read the whole THES article and it was certainly meant to be light-hearted. The bit on sartorial inelegance certainly rang a few bells with me. Oh, and pedantry . But this contribution was just utter balls. Will be interesting to see whether there's any follow-up from it tomorrow.

It's just the assumption running through the piece that the males are in one place - usually authoritative - and the 'girls' and 'the wife' are in another. Ergh. He could have written the same 'hilarious' article without the gender assumptions - relationships with the same roles but other sexes in them are hardly unknown - but didn't, and it looks from the article as if he would hardly be aware that any other gender pattern were possible.

The 1982 anecdote is horrible. What's he doing? Is he bringing up a well-known fact, that he could back up with actual evidence, was he in fact the professor involved, does he know this story for certain but has no evidence to offer, or is he just repeating unpleasant gossip?

Also irked by the fact that clearly academics' wives (of which I am one) are not sufficiently alluring to make sex interesting without said academic having to fantasise over 19 yo girls.

he is a sad sad man- imagine a gang of undergraduates having nothing better to fantasise about- talk about wishful thinking

There are fewer than 1000 students there, apparently. He probably knows all the girls by name. Blee.

i hope they make no bones about showing utter contempt towards him now

Gulp. I too know 2 girls who got first from similar institution. Only one was giving the favours AFAIK.

He sounds rather unconstructed (polite).

cory being fair to him he does say (in a revolting way) that 'normal girls' would never fantasise about lecturers.

oh God i'm not going to defend him. if i were being taught by him at the mo i'd want him to do it by email only. Yuck.

But even that is kind of offensive -- the implication that if you do fancy a prof (and not all of them are as unattractive as him) you are abnormal (whereas his ogling after students is presumably standard full-blooded male)

Completely thredworm. You work it out far better than me.

What makes me feel like tearing out my chest hair is that he will go to his grave convinced his critics are 'politically correct' and just didn't understand the subtlety of his humour.

Words fail me, really.

It's the banality of it. We all take the perk of having a little bit of an ogle at work, if we can, surely????? At work or anywhere else. Male, female, whatever. We are human beings!

To turn it into "me professor, she acolyte" is pathetic and irrelevant!

Oh look, words didn't fail me.

Grr at him, anyway. I used to coach students for getting into Buckingham. It's not exactly, well, not exactly where yer top-notch rich students go.

University of Buckingham is shite. 2-year degrees and entrance criteria is paying the bills.

I don't know about his wife cringing. "...you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife." if my dh had said something like that publicly I'd be changing the locks.

My uncle was a lecturer at reading uni. He would pick a girl from each first year for special attention. Sometimes it was just for dinner and mutual adoration.

This was 15 years ago though, he was old school as it seems this bloke was.

The girls got extra tuition and he got his oats, it seems a fair exchange to me in a way. If we assume that these 18 year old girls were adults and making an informed decision. I would have been a bit miffed if I had been on one of his courses though as he must have practically ignored everyone else.

DW read this article out to me yesterday and I thought it was a spoof at first.

I do not make any comment about the people or Universities in this article but I think and hope it generally expresses views held 30 years ago. Having been a lecturer at both graduate and undergraduate level I do not recognise any of it either in myself or my male colleagues in the mid 1990s. Young male lecturers today are I am sure very much more aware of equality issues.

I do however think that in general women in Universities at lecturer, researcher, Professor level are stil badly discrimiated against. My own contemporaries who are women have not progressed their careers as quickly as men and there are far fewer women at all levels in academic life. These are women who would have been facing selection committees in the mid/late 1980s where the committes would have been made up of largely male academics who themselves started their careers in the 1970s.

All that said I have two close male academic friends who married their female PhD students and have been happily married for years. Human attraction can happen everywhere.

Oh god I know an academic very well who got done for sex discrimination, having told a few new female PhD students that he was a difficult character, he expected them to work harder to impress him because he didn't think women were any use at his field. Too flighty, unfocused and generally not good in academia. Nice message for their first day at work.

The point being, he got done. There was loads he didn't get done for, though (none of it sexual, but generally misogynistic, racist and crass).

It is really not that unusual. (If DH ever does this he is toast, but he is not made that way as far as I can see.)

PhD students are a different kettle of fish, aren't they? I know LOADS of academics who are paired up that way, not supervisor-PhDstudent but moreseniorstaff-PhDstudent. Undergrads being groomed by profs is quite ickily different.

I too read this article and it had me grinding my teeth.

Glad to see the general consensus here is that it's offensive and unacceptable. I'm seeing some pretty unreconstructed comments elsewhere.

Some real humdingers here, on the Guardian website, of all places.