Was this sexual harassment going unpunished? Or another crazed P.C.er seeing evil in every innocent gesture? Colleges aren’t waiting for nasty Hill/Thomas-type hearings to sort out the predatory from the friendly. Although the idea that it’s dumb to bed someone you teach is implicit in sexual-harassment codes, more and more schools are flat-out prohibiting faculty from dating students in their classes. Harvard, Tufts and the Universities of Iowa and Pennsylvania, among others, have banned such dating. Amherst College requires faculty who venture into sexual relationships with students to remove themselves from any supervisory role over them. Last week the University of Virginia faculty senate prepared to vote on what would have been the most far-reaching ban: a prohibition on sexual relationships and “amorous overtures” between students and any faculty member.
But in a heated two-hour session, UVA’s blanket prohibition never came to a vote; proponents, sensing defeat, instead offered a narrower ban on instructors dating students they teach or supervise. That passed 31 to 4. But the debate over where to draw the line on campus romances is still resounding in dorms from Cambridge to Palo Alto. It’s fueled by the growing belief that many campus relationships deemed “consensual” are not-that (usually female) students get pressured into bed with (usually male) faculty or graduate teaching assistants. Professors’ power to determine their students’ future, through grades and recommendations, “makes ‘consensual’a suspect notion,” argued UVA’s history professor and director of women’s studies Ann Lane. UVA received more than 100 student complaints last year about romantic feelers from faculty; most believed that spurning the advances would jeopardize their grades.
Even if both student and teacher freely choose romance, others can be adversely affected. A grad student living with an assistant professor may get invited to department parties, making other students jealous. Such romances also call into question the objectivity of the grading system. At Harvard, most of the dozen or so complaints received each year about student-instructor affairs come from suspicious undergraduates in the same class as the teacher’s love interest. “It would take a Solomon to be entirely fair when you’ve become romantic with a person you’re trying to evaluate,” says UVA engineer Thomas Hutchinson.
UVA’s attempt to clip Cupid’s wings failed because it prohibited romances even between faculty and students who have no academic relationship. Many students were outraged over an infringement on their cherished right to date whomever they please. “During four years at UVA, a student will take classes with just 2 percent of the faculty,” says student-council president Matthew Cooper. “[Banning all relationships] denies our autonomy as adults.” Stanford University is about to accept that argument: its proposed sexual-harassment policy will not prohibit consensual affairs, but warns of “special risks involved in any sexual or romantic relationship between individuals in inherently unequal positions.” (Not all such romances end in disaster: UVA president John T. Casteen 3rd is married to a grad student he met when he was a professor at Berkeley in the early 1970s; he won’t say whether or not he oversaw her work.) Absolutists, though, reject exceptions for people in different departments. A music student who has an affair with a physics prof may later switch majors and find herself sitting in front of his lectern.
Are blanket prohibitions constitutional? The right to free association is not absolute; a “compelling state interest” can limit it, and some scholars argue that keeping a college free of the problems caused by student-faculty romances is one such interest. Policing a prohibition is another matter. Says Hutchinson, “To regulate the moral behavior of 18,000 people puts an unbearable load on the administration.” UVA will enforce its ban only if a grievance is brought; Tufts doesn’t police bedrooms and no one’s been reported for breaking the ban. Few of the prohibitions carry an explicit penalty.
In a 1988 survey of 800 faculty at a West Coast university, 25 percent of those questioned admitted bedding students, most more than once. Few students actually ask to be protected from lascivious faculty, but surely those who do ought to have some recourse. For schools, the arguments boil down to practicalities. Sexual harassment can require a subjective determination, but a ban on dating draws an unambiguous line. “People have to learn to be decent to each other,” says associate provost Samuel Jay Keyser of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “No policies, no matter how good or complete, can achieve that.”
