I’ve been giving some thought to career choices, and I’ve come to a conclusion: Being a professor at UCSB would be the worst job in the world. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want to be a professor at all. I’m sure there are plenty of schools – probably on the East Coast – where the students are pale, fat and ugly. But trying to teach in a lecture hall full of the regulation hotties who go to school in Santa Barbara would simply be torturous.

Picture this: You’re a new professor, straight out of grad school, in your late-20s or early-30s. You’re probably single (who has time for a relationship in grad school?), but even if you happen to be attached, you won’t be for long on account of the plethora of 20-year-old sexpots who regularly hit up your office hours. If you’re a man, you have the perfect amount of facial hair scruff. Of course, you didn’t do this on purpose. It’s just a coincidence that you didn’t have time to shave and college girls happen to find scruffy professors incredibly sexually attractive… right? If you’re a woman, you wear a tight skirt and Chanel glasses to class and look just enough like Britney Spears circa 2001 to elicit wolf whistles when you take your place behind the podium in Chem 1179.

You gaze out into the sea of faces, earnest and excited to begin your career as an educator, and realize you aren’t teaching kids. In fact, you’re teaching hundreds of toned, blond and bronzed kids who are just old enough to vote, drink and legally have sex with anyone they want to. And more often than not, they wear bikinis and board shorts to class. You are – in a word – fucked. Or at least hoping to be.

But… you can’t. You’re a responsible adult, you’ve read the faculty code of conduct and you know you are strictly forbidden from engaging in any type of sexual relationship with a student in your class. And the fact it’s illicit, taboo and just plain wrong makes the idea of lying down on the big wooden desk in your office that much hotter. Talk about a serious case of blue ball hell.

The problem with the whole college set-up is all about age. College kids are ripe and fresh, old enough to have the body of an adult, but young enough to make stupid – albeit sexy – carnal mistakes. In the world outside the university bubble, there’s nothing unusual about a relationship between a 21-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man, unless he’s your gynecologist or your uncle. It goes the other way, too: It’s been proven men are at their sexual prime in their early-20s, whereas women reach their prime in their mid-30s. So really, it’s just good sense for more mature gals to look in the direction of a much younger dude for their next orgasm.

The point being, college professors are forced to go against natural inclinations in the name of their career. Either professors deserve to be paid more for successfully resisting the temptation, or we should go back to the days when boys went to Harvard, girls went to Radcliffe and teachers could field questions from students about correct MLA formatting without popping a hard-on.

It’s almost as bad for students. There is nothing sexier than an authority figure. The tweed jacket, the tie, the fact they give us homework, the idea our future is dependent on the mercy of their grading system… It’s enough to make a girl want to bust out a vibrator in the middle of Campbell Hall. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little fantasy.

On the other end of the spectrum, teaching assistants have the best job in the world. It’s an instant aphrodisiac. Tell someone you meet downtown on a Thursday night you’re a TA, and their pants will drop before you can offer them an add code… let’s just hope they don’t show up in your section next quarter.

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