Students sometimes fancy their lecturers. It’s all that wisdom and authority as they command a room-full of hormonally-charged undergraduates. Students while away long, dull lectures with smutty thoughts, rank the most attractive staff during pub conversation and flirt after seminars. But this should not mean that lecturers, supposedly wiser and hopefully more professional, should consider their students fair game.

Terence Kealey, the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, recently argued that flirtation between male lecturer and female students is the fault of the girls. The student will “flaunt her curves” at her teachers, he said, and they should just "enjoy her" as a perk of the job before going home to their wives. His stomach-churning words conjured images of my own tutors and lecturers interpreting purely academic interest as flirtation and my above-knee length skirt as permission to stare.

Dr Kealey cried satire and it would be hard to imagine that any kind of teacher with respect for their profession would suggest that female students were “a perk of the job” with a straight face. But he is clearly familiar with the subject.

The argument doesn't come across as satiric but sexist. It certainly is not just female students who fantasise. Some students, male or female, also use their youthful charms in seminars rather than relying on pure intellect.

Of course boundaries become blurred once you’re in higher education, but this doesn’t mean that academics should view every new school year as a new potential dating pool, or treat every student that shows the slightest interest as a perfectly acceptable object of lust.

For most of us lusting after lecturers is simply a bit of fun. One might, perhaps, develop a crush on their economics tutor as a good way to liven a dull Globalisation seminar (let’s imagine). It’d be nice to think that our professors were not pathetic enough to get overexcited by this behaviour or take it as the same kind of encouragement as they would outside the university walls.

In most cases a student crush on a lecturer is simply a continuation of the typical school-girl (or boy) crush. I went to an all-girls school during sixth form, where male teachers were the subject of female adoration. Girls pushed the boundaries of flirtation all the while trusting, perhaps naively, that the teachers would simply push them back.

Dr Kealey’s advice declared that academic staff should “look but not touch”. A friend recently told me about three postgraduate students at her university becoming involved with their professors, so perhaps the advice academics have so far been following is more like “look but don’t touch...yet”. After reading the vice-chancellor's article I think a lot of students would prefer that advice to be “stop looking and don’t even consider it”.

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