When we speak of the power differential between teacher and student, it isn’t simply that the teacher has more influence on how the student’s life will go than the student has on the fate of her teacher. Indeed, to represent it that way is to invite the counter that, really, women students have all the power, since they can get their male professors fired. (That’s the premise of David Mamet’s Oleanna.) Instead, the teacher–student relationship is characterized, in its nature, by a profound epistemic asymmetry. Teachers understand and know how to do certain things; students want to understand and know how to do those same things. Implicit in their relationship is the promise that the asymmetry will be reduced: that the teacher will confer on the student some of his power; will help her become, at least in one respect, more like him. When the teacher takes the student’s longing for epistemic power and transposes it into a sexual key, allowing himself to be—or worse, making himself—the object of her desire, he has failed her as a teacher.