Power + knowledge + sex = ?

In the last few days I have found myself unexpectedly notorious - accused, among other things, of advocating a return to a culture of sexual harassment, and a licence for groping dons. What I was wanting to do - in discussing the "wandering hand" of a distinguished professor of Latin who died years ago - was to give a bit of a historical context to what I called "the erotics of pedagogy".

It must now be one of the biggest cultural cliches to say that knowledge is about power. It's a cliche too, to say that sex and power are inextricable bedfellows. What happens when you triangulate all three in a university teaching scenario? (I'm not talking about under-18s here.) There is a heady mixture between a (usually) male don with power and knowledge, and a clever (sometimes) female student with a real lust to learn. All educational institutions have to police this explosive mixture somehow; to protect all sides of the equation, but especially the young women. There is, however, a more complicated historical dimension, too.

Flip back to one of the "origins of western culture": fifth-century Athens and the homoeroticism that defined it. There you find a cultural norm, among the elite at least, that the young man just emerging from adolescence should engage in a sexual relationship with an older man. The student learns from the attentions and knowledge of the older man; the older man takes pleasure in the body of the younger (the junior party was not supposed to enjoy it too much himself).

It's a scene that you can see displayed in many of the masterpieces of ancient Greek pottery: old man with knowledge courts young man, offering a more or less desirable range of gifts! But much more important is that it is exactly this kind of relationship that is written into the philosophy of Plato - to which so many of our ideas about teaching and learning go back. The connection of sex with education is written into Plato's work. In fact, one of his most engagingly approachable dialogues - the "Symposium" - takes as it central subject the nature of love (whether the love of bodies, or of learning, or of "the Good").

True, in the Symposium, Plato assures us that his hero Socrates did not sleep with his pupils - including, surprisingly, the lovely Alcibiades. But his readers are meant to be surprised by that.

We would not want to return to Plato's Athens. But it should remind us to think carefully (even as we disapprove - and I do) of the mixing of pedagogy and erotics, in the much more complicated dimensions of the modern university, where, thank heavens, women can be teachers and pupils. As so often, Plato sets the questions, we struggle with the answers.