Stephen
Kershnar
Faculty-Student Romance: A Tempestuous
Debate
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
January
5, 2015
Among
the sharpest disagreements faculty have with one another is on whether it is
wrong for professors to date or have sex with their students. The professors
are invariably male, the students usually, but not always, female. The discussion
sometimes gets heated because some professors, often feminists, think that such
relationships are bad, wrong, or creepy. Many of their colleagues disagree,
viewing the feminists’ opposition to such relationships as no better than the
historical opposition to interracial and same-sex couples.
The
frequency of these relationships makes this a live issue. Over the years at
SUNY-Fredonia, for example, a number of faculty married students. This includes
professors in chemistry, English, geology, history, music, and philosophy. Still
more have dated them.
A different
issue is whether schools should punish professors who have romantic
relationships with their students. The issue is different because schools
should not penalize everything that is wrong (consider, for example,
anti-intellectualism and gluttony) and not everything it should penalize is wrong
(consider, for example, failure to publish).
There
are four arguments that feminists and others give in support of such
relationships being bad or wrong. The first argument, and by far the most
common, is that the faculty and student are in an unequal power relationship
and such a relationship is bad or wrong. The idea here is that the professor is
in a stronger position because he occupies a superior role, controls the
grades, or knows more about life. His stronger position makes him have more
power than the student and unequal power makes the relationship problematic or can
lead to the vulnerable undergraduate being exploited.
The
problem with this argument is that it involves a misunderstanding of power in
personal relationships. Power in a personal relationship is a measure of the
ability to bend another to one’s will. It depends on things such as an
individual’s psychological strength, willingness to leave the relationship, and
her other dating and marriage options. The options depend in part on features
like attractiveness, age, and intellect. Undergraduate and graduate women often
have a greater ability to leave the relationship and better options in the dating
and marriage market than do male professors. As a result, it is unclear whether
professors usually, let alone always, have more power in the relationships. This
can be seen in part in brokenhearted professors crying into their beer.
Even
if there were an imbalance of power, it doesn’t make a relationship bad or
wrong. Many couples have an imbalance of power because one member of the couple
is more in demand than the other. Consider, for example, a woman who is younger
and more attractive and who makes more money than her suitor. As a result, she can
more easily leave the relationship and might even use the leverage to insist on
certain ground rules (for example, future children have to be raised in her
religion). It is hard to see what is wrong about this imbalance, especially
when it doesn’t block love, marriage, children, and so on.
The
second argument for faculty-student relationships being wrong is that they
often involve premarital sex and such sex harms or degrades female students. I
doubt that such sex is harmful. 95% of Americans have had premarital sex. It
seems implausible that in this context,19 out of 20 Americans don’t know what’s
in their interest.
There
is a debate over whether having more premarital partners leads people to have,
on average, worse marriages, but a number of experts think that this has not
been shown, noting that such a result has not been established in a peer-reviewed
academic study. Also, University of Michigan economists Betsey Stevensen and
Justin Wolfers point out that in the early 2000s most marriages are preceded by
cohabitation, so premarital sex appears to part of a common path to marriage.
The
notion that such sex involves moral or religious harm is implausible for those who
don’t accept the pinched view of religious Jews and Christians. Even if one has
this view, there is no evidence I am aware of that professors having sex with
students is worse for students than their having sex with male peers.
The
third argument is that twenty-something students are not adults, but rather
children, and are being preyed on by the seductive male professors. Anyone who
has been in a bar since 2000 would likely find this laughable. In any case, the
argument is just a variant on the premarital-sex-is-harmful objection since
protecting children against something only makes sense if it poses a
significant risk of harm.
This
argument infantilizes adult women in that it suggests that they are so
incompetent that they can’t be trusted to run their own sex lives. Such an
attempt harkens back to days when universities protected women against
themselves by subjecting them to curfews and prohibiting them from having overnight
visitors.
A
fourth argument is that dating market between professors and students might
lead to unwelcome advances and other forms of sexual harassment. This argument
falls short because it doesn’t show that relationships without these features
are wrong. Even if such faculty-student dating occasionally did lead to such
abuses, this hardly shows that a widespread practice wrong. Faculty-student
romantic relationships can, and with surprisingly frequency do, lead to
successful marriage and children. Citing the cost of a practice while ignoring its
benefits is no way to evaluate it. In fact, the frequency of such successful
outcomes makes it a real issue as to whether such dating should be encouraged.
In
summary, there is little reason to think that faculty-student romantic or
sexual relationships are worse than other romantic or sexual relationships.
A
separate issue is whether state universities may prohibit them. It is unclear
whether they may do so because such prohibitions arguably violate people’s
right to privacy and intimate association, rights the Supreme Court emphasized
in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558
(2003). In any case this is a separate issue.
