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[...] Thanks to the Hollywood actresses of Me Too, these women can now appeal to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund to sue if they are sexually harassed. But to whom should they turn when they need money to escape an abusive partner, or health care for a sick child, or when immigration comes to ask f…

The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to re…

Imagine a student who, infatuated with her professor, pursues him and, thrilled when he returns her attentions, has sex with him, dates him, only eventually to realize that she was just the latest in a string of students, and that their affair is less a sign of her specialness than it is of his van…

Adrienne Rich, in a lecture she gave in 1978 to the teachers of women students, spoke of what she called the “misleading concept” of “coeducation”: “that because women and men are sitting in the same classrooms, hearing the same lectures, reading the same books, performing the same laboratory exper…

Regina Barreca, speaking of and to women who ended up as professors, asks: “At what point … did the moment come for each of us when we realized that we wanted to be the teacher, and not sleep with the teacher?”28 The default for most women, Barreca suggests, is to interpret the desire sparked in he…