Are male undergraduates at Harvard afraid of love? Caroline W. Bynum, associate professor of Church History at the Divinity School, thinks they are and suggested why in a recent article in the Radcliffe Quarterly. Torn between a broad cultural pattern that prescribes male dominance and a subculture that idealizes equality, men in universities today shy away from love relationships, says Bynum. At the same time, new demands for honesty and openness conflict with the traditional image of the strong, silent type. These problems are exacerbated by increasing insecurity about the future and a prolonged adolescence.

But if this motive to avoid love is a serious and real problem, Bynum says, it is one that can only be solved by men; and it is important to recognize that the male psyche is not the norm of health in our society.

In an interview last month with Crimson editor Jenny Netzer, Bynum discussed her Quarterly article and the general subject of interpersonal relationships at Harvard.

Q: How did you happen to write the article? Was it just through contact with undergraduates?

A: Yes, it really was. I had several different reasons for writing it, which is not quite the answer to the question, "How did I listen to undergraduates that way?" One of my reasons for writing it was a certain dissatisfaction with the basic tone the Quarterly takes, not that I don't think the Quarterly doesn't do some very good things, because it clearly does.

But at the end of the summer, I realized that this sort of pounding home that the Quarterly does about the "special needs of women" and the special position of Radcliffe is in some ways debilitating. It's really counterproductive in very very basic ways for older women to read only about the problems of younger women in college and the younger women in college to read only about their "special problems." Women do have special problems that come from being a minority, but women do not have special problems that come from being weak, debilitated creatures and those things are easily confused. I really felt that the tone of the Quarterly and some of the tone of propaganda coming out of Radcliffe about the merger contributes to that. So one of the things I wanted to do originally when I thought about it was almost a tongue in cheek kind of parody of the sort of thing that people write about women, about men, to make that point. Now that's not how it came out, but that was one of the purposes.

Another one of the purposes which didn't come out as being a primary one either but which is in there is when I talk about the necessity for men to talk to each other about these problems. That again was a point that was directed at women in a curious sort of way because I'm bothered by the tendency in my female students, in my female colleagues and, to be honest, in myself, to spend too much time listening to male problems and trying to sort them out. That's bad for men, that's also profoundly bad for women.

So one of the points was to say to women, stop trying to solve the whole world's problems, you've got enough of your own. Men are going to have to solve certain problems that have to do with them, and women should back off, leave them alone. Women are not weak, debilitated creatures with special needs; men have problems too. Women are not cosmic mothers with an obligation to solve the world's problems.

And then the third thing, where it came from very directly, was what you were asking me about, conversation with male and female undergraduates, about these particular problems, where the same things were just said over and over and over again, sometimes in situations that were accompanied by tears, in a great deal of pain. And when you hear such common themes, you really begin to wonder. Something that I had thought in part as doing as a sort of tongue in cheek parody became, as I thought more about it, a grappling with things that I think hurt people very much, became a very different sort of thing.

Q: Have you talked to any psychologists or psychiatrists about the article? What have they thought about it?

A: Obviously the people that one talks to are the people that share some of one's own concerns. I have no idea what your average professional psychologist would think. But the people that I've talked to, which includes at least one woman psychiatrist and several males, all thought it talked to something they had all tremendously much observed, although maybe not put their finger on quite in that form, because each person's observations are all obviously a little bit different.

The general things that I've read and the general conversations that I've had with people who are counselors or psychologists or whatever had struck me as being too general. There's a great deal of talk about the problem of intimacy. There are always certain jazzy current problems that are around--intimacy and death and dying seem to be the big ones this year. Everybody's aware of problems of intimacy, how to have relationships. Everybody's aware of the difficulty men have dealing with feelings in comparison with women. Everybody talks about this, and one of the things that bothered me about it was that it wasn't specific enough. The thing that I was puzzled about was why people in a certain age group, in a certain sort of social situation, have a certain, more particular version of that kind of problem. Even a lot of the psychologists that I've talked to just wanted to put what I was talking about generally into the bag of alienated youth, or generally into the bag of America's problem being intimacy.

I just think that what I was listening to students talking to me about was something more specific than that, just as I think "the motive to avoid success" is not an appropriate analysis of working-class women in modern-day America. They don't have those kinds of conflicting pressures on them. It's basically a problem of more privileged women who're getting conflicting signals.

My feeling was that the particular feeling that men seem to be talking about had to do with people in a privileged situation with a great many expectations for themselves and expectations that other people had for them, and people in a certain age bracket. Maybe there are problems of intimacy for men of 45, but they don't react the same way.

Q: Do you notice any differences in this area between grad students and undergraduates, since you're teaching primarily grad students?