Student / teacher romances: Off limits

But for those favoring the bans, the biggest issue is the power dynamic. We don't want to meddle in intimate affairs, the argument tends to go, and we even recognize that there are gray areas - grad students and teaching assistants, for instance. But just as more workplaces are banning relationships between superiors and their employees, we need to guard against unequal liaisons that could lead to favoritism or retribution in the classroom, in recommendations, in career paths.

Some schools, such as Duke, even allow the relationship to continue as long as the professor notifies a superior and gives up any supervisory role.

"We felt it was more productive to frame it that way than to condemn the relationships and to in effect run them underground," explains Peter Burian, a classics professor and the chair of Duke's Academic Council when the policy was passed a couple years ago. It was a rule, he adds, that created more of a stir than any other issue he dealt with on the council.

But the power-dynamics defense angers some professors.

For one thing, notes Jane Gallop, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, professors don't really have all the power. They're employees of a university, and often risk their career by getting involved with a student.

Professor Gallop had her own run-in with two female students who accused her of sexual harassment over a decade ago. She was cleared of the charges, but the investigation took a year and a half, and the university criticized her for having "consensual amorous relations" with one of the students, whom she had once kissed in a bar.

Gallop, like Dank, also notes that professors face all sorts of conflicts of interest when evaluating students. One might be a close friend, or the child of a colleague, or an outspoken racist. "It's one of the complicated ethical things teachers have to deal with all the time," she says. "These bans suggest sexual relations are unlike every other kind of relation."

But her main issue with the bans, Gallop says, is the way in which they confuse sexual harassment with consensual relationships.

"You can't start banning relations for people with more or less power, because it takes even more power from that person," she says. "One of the ways people understand sexual harassment is the belief that when women say no, they really mean yes. These policies say that when they say yes, they really mean no." Just because a few such relationships end badly, she adds, isn't a reason to ban them all.

Still, some say that protection is important. Virginia Lee Stamler, an Iowa City psychologist who co-wrote the book "Faculty-Student Sexual Involvement," says all the justifying theories don't take into account the reality of most student-professor relationships.

When she worked as a counselor at schools like the University of Iowa and Boston University, Dr. Stamler remembers, "these students would come in, and would have these problems, they'd be depressed. Then I'd find out they'd been involved with a professor, they'd felt they were special, and then it would be dissolved and they'd be extremely distraught."

The issue of objective grading is important, she says, but even deeper is the power that faculty members have simply by virtue of their title. "It's the status of the individual, the admiration the student has, the knowledge and expertise the student assumes the person has. That puts the student in a vulnerable position."

Nearly always, she adds, the student involved is female. And quite frequently the student's perception of what's consensual changes over time - a development that makes Stamler question just how consensual such a relationship can be.

Just as those in her profession outlawed relationships with patients, Stamler believes professors will eventually need to relinquish the right to date students. "I don't see it as an individual right so much as a professional responsibility," she says. "Professors don't understand the amount of power they have."

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