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from www.nydailynews.com – While navigating pornography, one California professor got seriously lost.

Hugo Schwyzer, a humanities professor at Pasadena City College who recently taught a class titled “Navigating Pornography,” now openly admits he is something of a “fraud.”

Last week, the tenured professor announced he was going on medical leave after a sexting relationship with an amateur porn star who planned to speak at his class surfaced on various internet sites.

In one particularly salacious exchange, Schwyzer and Christina Parreira [pictured] traded fantasies about having a threesome with porn superstar James Deen—who also was a guest speaker at Schwyzer’s class—while students watched and masturbated.

“I think your students would really enjoy a live demonstration,” Parreira wrote Schwyzer in a text that was leaked to the porn website TheRealPornWikiLeaks.com.

“On the desk with you. I’ll film it so the whole thing will be REALLY professional.”

“Perfect!” Schwyzer replied. “I think they’d think it was pretty hot, honestly.”

In addition to the racy text exchanges, Schwyzer—who is married and the father of two children— also sent pictures of his penis to Parreira.

“I had a bi-polar breakdown. That’s an explanation, not an excuse,” Schwyzer told the Daily News. “And I knew I should have been in therapy and on my meds.”

Speaking to the News from his mother’s home in Carmel-by-the-sea, California, Schwyzer says he has suffered from mental illness for some time.

“I’ve been in and out of institutions for the past 19 years, but managed to get a Ph.D. and a tenure track job,” Schwyzer said.

Perhaps more disturbing than Schwyzer’s fascination with porn stars is the fact that he had managed to parlay it into an academic career as a “male feminist” when, in truth, he received his Ph.D. in Scottish Medieval History.

“When I go back to teaching I’m not going to be teaching porn or gender studies,” Schwyzer said. “A lot of feminists hated me because they could smell the fraudulence. I was making shit up and I did it over and over again. I was less a professor than a guy running a three-ring circus.”

Now that he has returned to therapy and has resumed taking “a ton” of medication to treat his illness, Schwyzer says he realizes that teaching the course on porn “was done under false pretenses.”

“Porn was of genuine intellectual interest, but I also had an intense desire to get closer to people in the porn industry,” Schwyzer said.

Whether granting interviews about what he has been through is a sign of healing or just another symptom of his illness is something Schwyzer says he has tried reckon with. Whatever the answer, he does hope to return to the classroom before long.

“I’ve put myself on medical leave, but I haven’t broken a single academic rule,” Schwyzer said. “My penis is all over the internet but I haven’t broken the university’s code of conduct.”

Pasadena City College spokesman Juan Gutierrez said last week that he was unaware of Schwyzer’s plans to sit out the fall semester.

“We have not received any direct indication that professor Schwyzer will not be at PCC in the fall,” Gutierrez told the Pasadena Star News. “Should professor Schwyzer indicate that he is in need of any support from the college regarding this situation or health issues, we will extend that support in any way possible.”