The Firing of a Sex Fiend Philosophy Professor
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Creative Writing, The Bad Influence, Fiction, Comedy, Satire

True story: as an undergraduate I took an introductory philosophy course and a couple decades later I read that the professor who had lectured in that course had been fired years afterward from a different college, for sexually assaulting his students and colleagues.

Thinking back to that course and putting the pieces together, it began to make sense. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but the professor was a bit of a sex fiend — for a philosopher, at least. I’ll refrain from naming him here, partly to protect his victims’ identity and partly because uttering his name could unleash something like the dark magic of Voldemort.

I vividly recall one time, for example, when in the middle of a lecture a female student accidentally dropped her pen and it rolled along the floor to the professor’s desk. He actually stopped mid-sentence, picked up the pen and returned it to her desk.

Again, at the time his audacity didn’t dawn on me, possibly because I was bored silly by the professor’s explanations of metaphysics. But now, peering more deeply into the matter, I can see that the signs were all there; indeed, thanks to the revelations of the Me Too movement, the sexual aggression in that incident has become palpable.

The pen represented the professor’s penis, of course, and in picking it up he was inviting the student to pleasure him. That crafty use of symbolism would have been sufficient, but he went further and touched the student’s desk when he returned the pen. Can you imagine! To invade her personal space like that and to graze the desk which clearly represented the student’s vagina, because of the little shelf below the table — to be so reckless in his exploitation of Freudian imagery — it’s unfathomable.

But you must be thinking that those are only two strikes against him. Was there a third to make it a pattern? Indeed there was. Out of the blue one day in the middle of his lecture, he began talking about someone named Sextus Empiricus. Sextus Empiricus! It’s just mindboggling to recall now. Could that even have been a real person or was the professor just making up that name as an excuse to subliminally invade the students’ unconscious minds and incept them with the suggestion that sex with him was on the table?

Well, alright, Sextus Empiricus was a real Roman philosopher from the second century CE and the lecture’s topic that day was scheduled to be about ancient philosophy. But that only pushes his deviousness back a step, since why would anyone in a position of authority bother talking about ancient philosophy at all unless he were planning on using that anachronism as a pretext for uttering the bizarre name, “Sextus Empiricus,” thereby committing sexual assault?

So there you have the trifecta. But the professor had evidently gone on to explore greater depths of depravity, as I was astonished to read so many years later. Brace yourselves, because even the retelling of these more accomplished violations isn’t for the faint of heart.

What this professor had gone on to do, first of all, was to email some of his colleagues to invite them on dates or to suggest that they have sex.

Again, my apologies for being so blunt, but there was no delicate way to say it.

No more symbolism for him, then. No more pretexts or subliminal inceptions. He ended up just coming right out with it, with the blatant offer to go on a date and have sex. It’s just appalling and I’m ashamed even to have been in one of this professor’s classes; indeed, I’m only thankful I didn’t give him the opportunity to return my pen to me.

Naturally, the female colleagues had declined his offer, outraged as they must have been by his effrontery. So the assault reached ever more abyssal depths, since afterward the colleagues had to endure the awkwardness of belonging to the same department as this sex fiend. They had to see each other at meetings or in the lounge on coffee breaks, and all because the professor saw fit to inject sex into the world of philosophy.

Into philosophy, of all things! The very suggestion that a philosopher or any intellectual for that matter could betray his higher calling and succumb to such animal instincts, to unbutton his pants for the sake of having sex is itself grotesque. Philosophers should be angelic ascetics, toga-wearing monks that go around offering tidbits of cryptic wisdom, not sex fiends.

But the final straw for this professor was what he evidently did to a female student. Again, brace yourselves: this student, you see, said the professor sexually assaulted her when they were alone in his office.

That’s when the doves cried, surely.

Granted, there were no witnesses and this student was flunking the course, so she’d have had some reason to lie to avenge herself, but all of that falls by the wayside. What matters is that that’s what the young woman said happened. And the college administrators must have put that incident together with the carnal emails and with reports of more recent pen retrievals and abstract, subliminal suggestions.

So the professor was fired and good riddance, I say. With him out of the way, the philosophy students and professors could get on with being assaulted in the way they signed up for, by their delving into the absurdities brought to light by philosophical reflection.