The other night I was at dinner with a friend who was an undergraduate here years ago. A colleague of mine, someone I’ve always liked and wouldn’t mind having in my social circle (or so I thought) came up and hit on her.

They hadn’t seen each other in 10 years. She was horrified and said OMG, he used to hit on me when I was in college, and now he still thinks he can come and do the same thing. And she told me he had a huge rep for this. And the faculty does NOT know.

I still keep getting surprised to find one more case of it. I wonder sometimes whether in the end I may find it is almost all of them.

Of course, if he went to the places where 18-24 year olds hung out, he would look like the skeevy older dude. Instead, he’d turn to his classes as a dating pool. He had the gall to ask me on the first day of class if I saw “any good prospects” for him among the students. When I told him that I didn’t approve of that, he told me I should “get over it.”

He had actually married one of his students something like a semster after she had been in his class. She was all of 19. The marriage didn’t even last a year. He was back, trolling the classroom the next semester, before the divorce papers had been filed.

Then — it gets better — he told me that I should date him (and I was over the 25 year old age limit) because that would shut down the rumors that I was having sex with my advisor. Who started the rumors about the advisor? The advisor himself. I wasn’t the first he had started rumors about, either, nor the last. He liked to find some young, naive, single student, get her to take classes only from him with late meetings in his office when the building was empty, and then tell the other professors what a slut she was. Since he was the department bully, if he decided you were his target, you were poison to anyone else as either a friend or a student.

I later worked for a professor who took it upon himself to file a harassment suit against his department chair on behalf of the graduate students in that department. No one asked him, he just didn’t like that the chair was dating another grad student. Well, the whole time that he was filing this complaint, he himself was dating a grad student. The chair, at least, wasn’t married at the time. This particular professor ended up having three wives. Their ages all stayed the same, but he kept getting older.

Somewhere along the line I began to wonder if it was just me, if I was a magnet for scumbags, or just brought it out in the people around me. Then, I realized, it was the whole system around me — the power, the sexism, the vestiges of an age that permitted sexual harassment, the younger men who were pissed that they were unable to live in that age, and, on some level, the juvenile antics of overgrown boys trying to prove to the other boys that they are the most virile of the pack.