A 25-year-old university graduate has revealed that she intends to marry her 71-year-old professor after just seven months of being in a relationship, Yahoo Style UK reports.
Cameron Platt met her 46-years-her-senior beau, Lee Clark Mitchell, when she took one of his classes at Princeton University, wherein she studied Henry James and William Faulkner.
“Lee was little more than a stranger to me then, but he captivated me with his brilliance, sensitivity, and passion.”
That was five years ago. In that time Platt has gone on to get her degree from Oxford University, while Mitchell has continued teaching at Princeton. However, she never stopped thinking about Mitchell, and the two maintained a mentor/protege relationship while she was away.
After getting her degree and returning to the States, she says she decided to put her cards on the table and go on a date with her much-older former teacher. They went on a first date to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the two acted, as Platt describes it, like a couple of giddy teenagers on their own first date, trying to figure out each others’ boundaries and figure out where the other stood.
Mitchell, for his part, was unsure if he was even on a date and not just a friendly outing.
“At last, to our amazement, we broke through. Something then sprouted from a seed that neither of us had known that we’d planted, and we realized that the force of feeling that we’d long had for each other and called by other names (admiration, wonder, devotion, gratitude) held within it the hope and the potential for love.”
As The New York Post reports, Platt announced her engagement to friends and family in a Facebook post that was set to “private,” meaning that only people whom she approves to read it can read it. How it was brought to the attention of the media remains unclear.
Nevertheless, Verdict reports that most of the comments on her post have been positive.
In case you’re wondering, colleges and universities have different approaches to professors having relationships. As The Cincinnati Enquirer reports, some universities have hard-and-fast rules against doing it, with consequences up to and including termination of the offending professor’s employment. Others strongly discourage it but have no official policy. Others have administrations that simply look the other way.
As for Mitchell, Princeton confirms that he’s currently on “academic sabbatical,” although it’s unlikely that his absence from teaching is connected to his relationship with Platt, inasmuch as he wasn’t her teacher when they began their romantic relationship.
It remains unclear, as of this writing, when the wedding bells will be ringing for Platt and Mitchell, and it’s highly unlikely that any details about the wedding will be made public.
