Professors Yarbrough and Conly: Teaching Love

Love was in the air this week, and displayed prominently in every store window. While we enjoyed a few days of “consuming” love in the form of sugar cookies—and the Dining Halls’ infamous chocolate soup—some students will spend the whole semester treating love as a topic for classroom discussion.

We’re shining our spotlight on the two professors who make this intellectual discourse possible…

Professor Jean Yarbrough

Professor Jean Yarbrough is the Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences in the Government Department. Her challenging ‘Eros and Politics’ course (GOV 249) examines “how some of the greatest thinkers in Western civilization conceived of erotic longing.” And while she acknowledges some professors may shy away from a syllabus that includes everything from Plato to ‘Sex and the City’, Yarbrough says there’s “no question in my mind that it’s an academic subject.”

“Most people wouldn’t touch this course with a 10 ft. pole,” says Yarbrough. It’s filled with proverbial “landmines” such as the Athenian practice of man-boy love and the Judeo-Christian position on the family. It asks hard questions such as “what does courtship mean in an age of equality?” and exposes students to “the great range of answers to the question ‘what is love,’” Yarbrough tells me.

Yarbrough starts the class off with clips from past issues of The Bowdoin Orient to capture the zeitgeist of campus romance. Among the diversity of texts the course examines is a comparison between historic and contemporary marriage vows. Professor Yarbrough mixes writings such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who “invented modern romantic love”) with “light stuff” (Carrie Bradshaw).

‘Eros and Politics,’ which in the past has been female heavy, has a 50/50 gender make-up this semester. Whether the students are freshmen—often credited with being the most promiscuous demographic on campus—or upperclassmen—who have acquired a certain degree of maturity, they all stand to gain from a deep look at Eros. 

No matter their class year, “when students make a commitment to work on [the material]” Yarbrough says, they get a lot out of it “because it really touches them.”

Professor Sarah Conly

Sarah Conly, Associate Professor of Philosophy, teaches a first year seminar titled simply “Love.” According to Conly, “there are many worthwhile things to study out there, but love will probably make as much difference to our lives as any of them.” For this reason, contemporary philosophy—which values rational methodology—is coming around to the study of something so emotional as love “since most people consider love essential to a good life, and anything that may be essential to a good life deserves study.”

Conly highlights the (necessary) inconclusiveness of studying love in a classroom. Questions, and impossibilities, always linger. “We’d like to control our feelings enough so that we only feel love when it is indeed beneficial,” says Conly, but love is a “complicated phenomenon.” Studying and talking about it helps to discover love’s multiple facets and distinctions.

One such distinction is the line between love and lust. “Love seems to involve more than just a feeling that someone is physically attractive—it seems to include attraction to character, including  esteem for that person’s character, enjoyment of and interest in their mental attributes, etc. “ Conly tells me. 

“However, “ she adds, “given that you can have lust without love, one question is whether you could have (romantic) love without lust.”

For first years just starting to navigate the tricky world of DFMO, friends with benefits, study abroad romance, and everything in between–a seminar such as Conly’s surely has its benefits: “Seriously, we humans all spend an enormous amount of time and energy on our love lives, and surely arriving at some understanding of that —understanding of why we care so much about love, and when that care is justified —can only benefit us. “

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