That seems like a good middle ground—provided there’s more than one section of everything. If that’s really the only faculty member qualified to teach that particular course (which is hopefully rare), then I think they just have to be extra aware of their responsibility to be professional and impartial in the classroom.

Particularly when you’re young, it’s all too easy to end up sleeping with someone because you desire emotional and mental intimacy with them and that’s the only way you can think of achieving it. There aren’t enough models around of how you can love someone’s mind but not necessarily their body.

Friendship?

I think our culture is just too distrustful of the idea of friendships between people of opposite sexes (and especially older/higher status men with younger/lower status women; not that there isn’t some good reason to suspect some such men of a sexual agenda, but it shouldn’t be the kind of blanket assumption that it is).

It’s not so much about non-equals, because many relationships outside the university are between non-equals and aren’t problematic. The trouble is in universities (and in the workplace) if one of the partners is in a position of authority over the other one. I don’t think anyone is actually too worried if physics lecturers and history students are fooling around together.

The problem with relationships with someone in authority is that it inevitably gives the appearance of favouritism to other students (even if there isn’t unconscious favouritism) and it is also very likely to be distracting during teaching. My take would be not to prohibit relationships, but to say that you cannot be formally taught by/teach someone you are sleeping with. (There’s nothing to stop informal education with your pillow talk being on the topic of quantum mechanics or the current state of cultural studies). The student would need to choose a differect class/section, find a different supervisor etc.

I think this would be useful because it would make staff and students think about why they really wanted the relationship. Particularly when you’re young, it’s all too easy to end up sleeping with someone because you desire emotional and mental intimacy with them and that’s the only way you can think of achieving it. There aren’t enough models around of how you can love someone’s mind but not necessarily their body.

Dsquared #10—“I have what I regard as a hilarious satirical article about the inability of the investment banking industry to hire women and minorities …”—
I wish you would publish it. My brother, bless his heart, recently resigned his decades-long senior position with a major investment banking firm in the South because his new boss was a woman from New York. I don’t believe he’s ever worked with a woman before except as a secretary. Can’t see him working either with a person deemed other-than-white.

This is true as far as it goes, but there also seems to be a thread here insinuating that consensual relationships cannot arise between nonequals, or aren’t deserving of respect when they do. (Maybe I’m misinterpreting or something. If nobody wants to defend that thesis, then fine.)

While it’s certainly true that it’s difficult for third parties to judge the consensuality of a relationship between nonequals, I think that such an absolute statement is too absolute. IMO the right to enter into a consensual sexual relationship is a fundamental human right that should not be interfered with absent some really compelling reason for doing so. The fact that the relationship falls into a general category with some other relationships that are coercive, or that therefore outsiders may mistake it for a coercive one, doesn’t even come close to being enough.

a lot of experience goes to show that student-teacher sex is just too liable to coercion, manipulation, and self-deception, so that, notwithstanding Susan Sontag/Philip Rieff, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger and a few other examples, we don’t allow it on campus

Well, what if they go off campus then? Snark aside, I think this is a serious issue: exactly where does the university get off dictating the personal lives of either its employees or its students?

This policy could easily lead to a situation where the principals of the relationship conspire to conceal it from the administration. (Which superficially resembles, but is IMO very morally different from, one party coercing the other to both engage in the relationship and conceal it.) What good is done to anyone if the administration finds them out? Let alone acts to enforce the policy, as it would surely feel obligated to do—never mind the potential for self-righteous fury on the part of people who toed the line by obediently repressing their own desires, only to find that someone else was actually eating the forbidden fruit. (And speaking of forbidden fruit, simply branding the relationship or potential relationship as illicit will turn some people on.)

Looking at the issue through the lens of nonconsensual abuses and forging absolute rules on that basis seems like it has the potential to result in serious injustice to people in consensual relationships. The line between consent and nonconsent may be difficult to discern at times, but crossing it is the only thing that justifies third-party intervention in the relationship at all, so throwing up your hands and refusing to look is abdication of a moral responsibility.

Shorter me: people certainly have a right to avoid unwanted “relationships”, but also have a right to participate in wanted ones. Policy that doesn’t respect both of these rights is bad policy.

P.S. In the list “coercion, manipulation, and self-deception”, one of those things is not like the others. If you attempt to protect people from self-deception, IMO you will both anger them and fail.

“If you’re a male professor, female students will come on to you. That is, when they seek out your attention in any way, that’s probably what they’re doing. However, they aren’t into you, they’re just going for ‘The Professor’. So don’t take it too seriously, but enjoy it whenever it comes along.”

And I think Belle’s disgust comes largely from that—from having been unable to talk to her Roman History professor about Roman History without having it turn into a discussion of whether she wanted him to look at her breasts. It’s hard to get an education if you can’t interact with your professors on an academic level.

“If you’re a male professor, female students will come on to you. However, they aren’t into you, they’re just going for ‘The Professor’. So don’t take it too seriously, but enjoy it whenever it comes along.”

My interpretation is that Belle’s disgust comes from that last sentence, particularly “don’t take it too seriously”. Kealey’s assumption is that the students who flirt with him are just doing it for fun, maybe for grades, and because they think smart men are sexy. What he’s ignored is the potential danger of playing along and sending mixed signals. Maybe a girl is attracted to you because she lacks a solid emotional support structure, you’ve been an attentive professor, and she extrapolated beyond that because she wanted so badly to believe that someone cared about her. Maybe she has some other lingering issue, and this is how she’s expressing it.

The point is, don’t just “enjoy it”; eliminate false pretenses as soon as possible. If it was just harmless flirting, all you lose is a some creepy ogling opportunities. But if it’s more, and you let it go on, the damage you can do by letting a vulnerable girl build you up is far more dangerous. Be explicit, and not implicit, about the boundaries in your relationship.

No, I think we’re seeing the real conservatism (and liberalism) coming out.

The question is POWER, not sex. Conservatives wants power to stay where it is, i.e. with the powerful—that’s what they are conserving, here. Liberals or progressives want power to be equalized, to be moved away from the powerful. The conservatives aren’t in favor of “liberal” sexuality, but of a consistent power dynamic in sex. The liberals aren’t in favor of “conservative” sexuality, but of consensual relationships between equals.

I definitely wondered. The need for a sarcasm font has never been clearer …

Serious, I did and do wonder why a woman who has been in academe for many years could say: Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a “perk” unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.

No-one on any side of this debate has denied that some senior male academics think of women students as a “perk”. The only question is whether such a man would be willing to say it in public, under the veneer of “satire”. IMHO, no woman of Beard’s academic experience can doubt that some men are, yes, just that full of their own privilege. I have heard no indication whatsoever, from any side, that Kealey is one of the male academics who is aware and thoughtful about male privilege and about the dance women have to do to be taken seriously in the academy.

I know a number of young, academic women whose reaction to Kealey saying “She’s a perk” has been to feel that they’ve been slapped. They did not for a moment doubt that a powerful male academic would say—and mean—such a thing. It is more plausible that Beard is being satiric in turn than that she is so naive.