Anthony Hopkins playing a professor who has an affair with a caretaker, Nicole Kidman, in The Human Stain (2003). But should similar relationships with students be forbidden? Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Rex Features
Paul Abramson's Romance in the Ivory Tower: The Rights and Liberty of Conscience looks like just another oh-so-worthy American academic work, replete with references to his country's constitutional law, founding fathers and the Bill of Rights. As the Los Angeles Times noted this month, the 172-page work certainly contains no steamy scenes of stolen kisses in library cubicles or the like.
But wait. What's all this talk about randy professors tumbling in the sack with blameless undergraduates, iconic seduction scenes from movie history and the collected sexual wisdom of the Kama Sutra? 'Tis the sound of what the LA Times describes as a blistering online debate about the American law professor's take on academic propriety in the classroom - and the bedroom.
Romance in the Ivory Tower makes the case that what happens between consenting adults is their own affair, even if the individuals happen to be instructor and student. (The author makes an exception for cases where the teacher also happens to be assigning grades to their soulmate.)
Abramson is critical of both his own UCLA institution and American colleges in general, and by implication any institution of higher learning anywhere in the world that restricts romantic flings involving faculty and students - or "tramples the very nature of freedom itself", as the law professor cogently puts it.
Not surprisingly, some in the blogosphere are just as critical of Abramson.
One such contributor, not unreasonably, makes the point that just because something might be legally kosher, it doesn't necessarily make it smart. "There is a reason why these sorts of relationships have been almost universally prohibited," he writes. "They almost always cause problems." Another contributor to the same forum asks why, in looking through the American constitution, he "cannot find anything about the Kama Sutra and professors. Even the unmarried law school profs haven't tried to tell us it's in there."
Another blogger, Dr Anonymous, cheekily included an image of the actor Dustin Hoffman's most famous academic moment, as if to ask, "Are you trying to seduce me, Mr Abramson?"
But Mr Abramson, whose former romantic partners include at least one erstwhile student, has not been without humour either. Responding to the accusation, made in a related debate on Salon.com, that he might be "a campus Casanova in his own right", the passionate professor told the LA Times: "I'm 57 and have three kids and two grandkids. If I'm the campus Casanova, then the campus has a lot of problems."
