Last updated at 00:01 17 August 2006

A leading scholar sparked a furious row yesterday after she claimed to have 'wistful nostalgia' for the days when female students were regularly groped and harassed by older male dons.

Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University and a fellow of Newnham College, said that pupils often had to put up with 'fumblings' in order to get inspirational teaching.

She said she had an 'ambivalent attitude' to being 'pawed' by male academics but said that some of the worst offenders were great scholars.

But fellow female academics and equal opportunity campaigners condemned her comments as 'shocking and unacceptable'. They point out that victims of sexual harassment are unlikely to share her views on the emotive subject.

Professor Beard, 51, made the controversial comments in a vigorous defence of Eduard Fraenkel who was Corpus professor of Latin at Oxford University from 1935 to 1953, and one of the most renowned classical scholars of the 20th century.

The academic - who teaches at an all-women college - complains that Fraenkel's reputation as a 'serial groper' has been omitted from all biographies of him.

In a review of the Dictionary of British Classicists, Professor Beard claims that a female tutor used to warn her students that 'although they would learn a lot, they would probably be 'pawed about a bit' by Fraenkel.

She describes how Baroness Warnock admitted in her memoirs that she had heady discussions about Latin and Greek with him, combined with 'kisses and increasingly constant fumblings with...(my) underclothes'.

Professor Beard, classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, said: "Any academic woman older than her mid-forties is likely to have an ambivalent reaction to this.

"On the one hand, it is impossible not to feel sisterly outrage at what would now be deemed a straightforward case of persistent sexual harassment and the abuse of (male) power.

"On the other hand, it is also hard to repress certain wistful nostalgia for that academic era before about 1980 when the erotic dimension of pedagogy (teaching) which had flourished, after all, since Plato was stamped out."

Professor Beard claims that Baroness Warnock shares that 'ambivalence' as she weighs "the damage done (to Fraenkel's wife no less than to some of his 'girls') against the inspirational teaching which came with, and was inextricable from the 'pawing'."

The academic also insists "it would be foolish to imagine that love for one's wife is necessarily incompatible with 'pawing' one's female students".

Professor Beard, who is married to art historian Robin Cormack and has two grown-up children, re-iterated her argument on her Internet website, dated August 1, the Times Higher Education Supplement reveals today (thurs).

But a spokesman for the Equal Opportunities Commission said he was sure that victims of this kind of behaviour do not feel a 'wistful nostalgia' for the past.

He said: "It's this kind of attitude that held women back in higher education for so long.

"Thankfully that's not the case any more and women are leading the way in HE. These kinds of attitudes should never be allowed back (into HE)."

Kat Stark, women's officer for the National Union of Students, said: "I find it incredibly hard to believe that anyone would view sexual harassment with ambivalence -- be it now or twenty years ago.

"All students have a right to learn in an environment free from any form of harassment, and to write about it with 'a certain wistful nostalgia' is both shocking and unacceptable."

June Pervis, professor of gender history at the university of Portsmouth, said: "Nostalgia? Where has that woman been living?

"The wandering hands fraternity used their status and power to exploit female students, and some were silly enough to feel 'flattered' by this attention... Very pathetic."

And Gill Evans, professor of history at Cambridge, added: "I was chased round a table once by an amorous don (I got away).

"I think it is and was an abuse of power and no-one should have to put up with being pawed to get inspirational teaching."

But Professor Beard hit back at the NUS attack, insisting she was 'not condoning sexual harassment'.

She said: "The NUS needs to think a bit harder about history and what university used to be like and what people of my age look back to.

"The best comparison I can make is about smoking. One looks at Humphrey Bogart movies that were surrounded by rings and rings of cigarette smoke and we have a wistful nostalgia for it. That doesn't mean that I think smoking should now be allowed in public places."

When asked if she had been the subject of sexual harassment herself, she replied: "No, I'm not a victim of this. But the culture of universities in the 1960s and 1970s didn't put it in terms of harassment. That's what changed."

She added: "I am terribly sorry if people got the impression that I'm in favour of male sexual harassment because I'm not."

But she repeated her assertion that she felt a 'certain nostalgia' for the 'mores' of the 1960s and 1970s. She claimed that 'something is lost and something is gained' by the move to heavier policing of the issue.

She said: "It is certain that some people benefited from the old fashioned mores - there were some relationships of closeness that were extremely productive.

"But some people lost out terribly and were damaged. I do feel nostalgia but that is different from saying that this is now how I want it to be."