Universities Struggle to Legislate Student-Faculty Liaisons

Late last year the College of William and Mary in Virginia banned all sexual liaisons between professors and undergraduates as well as between faculty and graduate students under their supervision.

This spring, Stanford University toughened its policy to require professors to give up “any supervisory or evaluative function” over their campus romantic partners and to report such relationships to their department chairs or deans.

Ohio Wesleyan University barred faculty from romances with students they supervise, advise or evaluate.

Sexual relationships between faculty members and students -- a long-standing feature of campus life -- increasingly are being legislated out of academia.

But for every school that has imposed a ban, there are many more that still have vague or loophole-riddled policies -- or no explicit restrictions at all -- on consensual relationships between faculty and students.

The question of how strict such policies should be has been highlighted in the last two weeks by the resignation just before Thanksgiving of the dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. John P. Dwyer resigned as dean and as a member of the law school faculty after the university opened an investigation into a sexual encounter he had two years ago with a female law student.

Dwyer’s resignation has students, faculty and administrators questioning the adequacy of the school’s policies. Nationwide, that same question has arisen at hundreds of campuses.

University administrators and professors have been “really schizophrenic on the issue,” said Sheldon E. Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education.

“They’re very concerned about protecting students. At the same time, they don’t want to see faculty members’ careers ruined by mere allegations of impropriety.”

Many academics argue that consenting adults who meet on campus should be free to date. Often, they note, there is little age difference between junior professors and students, particularly graduate students. And over the years, faculty-student romances have led to lots of happy marriages.

But professor-student relationships also have yielded some of higher education’s ugliest sexual harassment complaints.

The conflict seems inherent in educational settings. Students and faculty members can spend many hours together in often intense intellectual relationships. At the same time, faculty members wield extensive power over students, academically and psychologically.

“There’s this very strange power balance,” said Boalt Hall law student Jo Ann Virata . “It’s not an equal situation at all.”

Because of that, Jonathan Petrus, 29, a third-year law student, argued that “there really ought to be a bright-line rule.”

“In order to eliminate the appearance of impropriety, why not create a policy that prohibits or at least frowns upon [sexual] relationships between faculty and students? It doesn’t seem that tough.”

Some schools have adopted that sort of ban. Generally, they have been smaller colleges such as Oberlin and William and Mary, located in towns “where they feel the fabric and community of a campus would be destroyed if any faculty member got involved with a student,” said D. Frank Vinik, a risk manager and lawyer with United Educators, a cooperative providing insurance to about 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities.

William and Mary adopted its ban in November 2001 after two incidents. First, a former creative writing instructor wrote an article for GQ magazine in which he portrayed the school as a “moral mosh pit” and said he had had an affair with a married student that led to the suicide of her husband. University officials disputed the story.

A few months later, an anthropology professor resigned after accusations that he had impregnated a student who worked for him and hounded her with threatening phone calls after learning of the pregnancy.

The incident at Boalt was far less dramatic. Both sides agree that it concerned a one-time encounter between Dwyer and a woman who was not in his class. The encounter, they said, did not involve sexual intercourse. Dwyer has said it was consensual. The woman, through her attorney, said that he fondled her after she passed out following a night of drinking and that his conduct was an assault that should legally be considered sexual harassment.

Faculty and administrators who oppose across-the-board bans on sexual contact between faculty and students say they want to ensure against policies that are so broad that they open the way to faculty members being abused by false allegations.

“It could become a very dangerous tool in which people could be accused of things that weren’t true,” said Philippa Levine, a USC expert in the history of sexuality and president of the university’s academic senate.

Levine says she considers relationships between professors and students a “very, very bad idea” but questions whether a ban or tight restrictions would work.

“The U.S. has not proven itself particularly successful in legislating around sexuality,” Levine said. “Its laws on prostitution are a very good example.”

To stop relationships between faculty and students, “You’re going to have to reprogram people’s psyches,” said Barry M. Dank, a sociologist at Cal State Long Beach. Dank, who is 60 and married to one of his former students, formed a group in the mid-1990s called Consenting Academics for Sexual Equity to speak out against some of the first bans on professor-student dating.

“Women tend to be attracted to more powerful men, men with resources. And men tend to be attracted to physically attractive, nubile women. All the training in the world is not going to change that,” he said.

Many students question policies that would bar or inhibit fraternization between them and professors. Some say they enjoy getting to know their professors in informal settings outside of class. Others noted that many graduate students attend schools like Boalt because of the networking possibilities -- good relationships with faculty members can often lead to connections for jobs.

And particularly among older graduate students there is resentment over potential university intrusion on their privacy.

The result of those conflicting interests has been a national mishmash of policies.

Some schools have sought a middle ground. Stanford’s policy, adopted in May, allows faculty members to date students but requires them to notify their bosses of the relationship and recuse themselves from academic involvement with students they are dating.

University officials wanted an approach that “was enforceable, that made sense and was not so prohibitive as to drive the issue underground,” said Laraine T. Zappert, director of the school’s Sexual Harassment Policy Office.

“It’s professionally dumb to be grading someone you’re having a romantic relationship with,” Zappert said. “It just defies any sense of fairness to the person or anyone else.”

Berkeley’s policy, adopted in 1994, says professors may be subject to discipline if they fail to disqualify themselves “from exercising professional responsibility over a student in cases where a conflict of interest exists.”

Jan de Vries, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for academic affairs and faculty welfare, interpreted that to mean faculty members may not date students in their classes or whose theses they are overseeing, but they can have relationships with former students or others not in their current classes. De Vries would not comment on specifics of the Dwyer case but said he believes the rules prohibit a sexual liaison between a dean and a student in his school.

USC has a three-paragraph passage in its faculty handbook saying that consensual relationships “are discouraged.” In legalese, the policy goes on to explain that faculty members who go forward can’t show favoritism toward those with whom they are having sex, nor can they penalize those who turn them down.

Others schools, including Caltech, UCLA and at least a third of the 23 California State University campuses, have not adopted restrictions on consensual relationships. Officials at those campuses often take the position that existing faculty conduct or sexual harassment policies are adequate protection.

The wide variation in policies -- and the lack of clarity at many institutions -- can, itself, be a source of trouble, some say.

“What we’re experiencing here is absolutely how murky the boundaries are and how hard it is to navigate them,” said Gabriela Kremer, 31, a third-year student at Boalt. “The rules really need to be clear.”