A TOP uni student who recently graduated with a masters degree from Oxford University has revealed she has got engaged to her ex professor – who is 46 years her senior.
Cameron Platt, 25, previously an undergraduate at the Ivy League university Princeton in New Jersey, USA, recently gushed on Facebook about Lee Clark Mitchell, who will be 72 in June.
Cameron wrote that she met Lee, who has served as chair of Princeton’s English Department, when she took one of his classes during her sophomore year five years ago.
“I was taking his lecture course on Henry James and William Faulkner,” she said on April 18.
“Lee was little more than a stranger to me then, but he captivated me with his brilliance, sensitivity, and passion.
“His lectures changed forever the way that I think.”
By the time Cameron was graduating at the top of her class with a degree in English and a certificate in theatre, Lee had become a “devoted mentor” to her, she said.
But after graduating, she left for the University of Oxford to pursue a master’s degree in English and United States history.
During her two years in England, loving thoughts of her grey-haired prof frequently came to mind, she said.
“I was surprised to find how much I still thought of Lee — and soon I understood that I felt something for him that I’d not fully acknowledged before,” Cameron wrote in the Facebook post.
“At the end of my two years in Oxford, after much reflection, and with encouragement from my wonderful friends, I resolved to shoot my shot.”
The young scholar reached out to Lee last September and asked him out for a date at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, where they frolicked through the galleries like “shy teens, eager but tentative,” she wrote.
She said Lee spent most of the first date trying to figure out if it was actually a date, while they were both “unsure of how to test new boundaries with each other.
“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 realised 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,” Cameron went on.
I was surprised to find how much I still thought of Lee — and soon I understood that I felt something for him that I’d not fully acknowledged before.
Cameron, who is 46 years younger than her fiancé, wrote in the post that she kept their relationship “private” for the past half year, but once they became engaged after about seven months of dates, she was ready to make the relationship public in a post that’s since garnered nearly 300 likes.
She acknowledged that the announcement “will come as a surprise to many” and that the couple had concerns about their relationship, given their “different stages of life.” But she said that more importantly, she’s deeply in love with Cameron.
“Eventually it became impossible to deny how fully we feel meant for each other, and neither of us has looked back since,” Cameron penned in her closing lines.
“Now here we are, more enthralled than ever, wanting no life other than one we make together.
Last week, we made it official.
She shared a photo of her and Lee beaming over wine at an unnamed restaurant and another photo of a sparkly, diamond-crusted engagement ring.
Lee is currently on academic sabbatical from Princeton, which was requested long before his relationship with Cameron, the school said.
University spokesman Ben Chang added that the school doesn’t believe it’s appropriate “to comment on personal relationships that take place outside of the University.”
As for the students at the historic school, the majority weren’t fazed by the professor-former student hook-up.
“They’re adults, they can do what they want,” one student told the New York Post.
Still, some had their reservations about the relationship, even though Cameron said it started after graduation.
“That kind of age disparity is probably something I’d categorise as wrong,” a student said.
Neither Cameron nor Lee responded to requests for comment.
Previously a couple with 29-year age gap forced to move after strangers brand husband a PAEDO.
And a student, 19, insists that ‘love has no age limit’ after falling for lover, 52… but her family have disowned her over the 33-year age gap.
And Courtney is a granny-of-three at 25 – after marrying a man 34 years older than her (and their sex life is amazing).
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