Hokay, everyone’s talking about the Laura Kipnis essay attacking zero-tolerance faculty/student sexual relations rules at universities, and UD – like Kipnis, a veteran of such affairs – I mean, UD has never had an affair with one of her students… But she long long long ago had affairs with a couple of her professors – UD figures she’ll follow along as Kipnis makes her case and is then megabombed because of having made it.
She adopts what she calls a “slightly mocking tone,” which seems to UD fine, since sex and sexual passion and love are both fraught and hilarious subjects. Kipnis recalls her hippie days when rebellion, experimentation, transgression, whatever, were things a lot of people did. Was there a price to be paid? Yeah, maybe, sometimes, but it
fell under the category of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t make my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.
So far so good. She and I are (echoing Oscar Wilde) on the same page. She points out that the new paradigm casts students in the role of weak vulnerable victims (“According to [her university’s] the code, students are putty in the hands of all-powerful professors.”), whereas the reality of this sort of interaction is in most cases far more complex.
This observation also seems to me (based on my own experience, and the experience of others I’ve known) quite true. Those implementing the new no-go zone codes are absurdly “optimistic,” argues Kipnis, that they can police complex desire.
[W]ill any set of regulations ever prevent affective misunderstandings and erotic crossed signals, compounded by power differentials, compounded further by subjective levels of vulnerability?
Kipnis also says the obvious:
Let no one think I’m soft on harassment.
But:
I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.
*********************
It’s a long piece and she repeats herself a lot, but she’s a fun writer. This, at the end of the piece, got a rise out of me:
[I]f colleges and universities around the country were in any way serious about policies to prevent sexual assaults, the path is obvious: Don’t ban teacher-student romance, ban fraternities.
(She doesn’t add that the situation is now so bad that more and more universities are in effect banning fraternities. That is, they’re banning this fraternity and that fraternity; they’re telling this fraternity it can’t come back to campus for three years, and that one that it can’t come back for five years… The litigation cost to the national chapters of the most notorious fraternities is getting intolerable, just as the wretched publicity for places like Dartmouth is getting intolerable… So fraternities are shutting down, but very, very slowly.)
Anyway, so here’s UD‘s thing. There’s an inescapable intensity, for some people on some campuses, to the professor/student relationship. This intensity tends to have in it elements of Pygmalion, Oedipus, Electra, blahblahblah. Less mythically, it may sometimes simply and unsurprisingly have to do with finding a person who admires and shares your intellectual, aesthetic, and moral, passions, and falling in love with that person. I say unsurprisingly because where, other than the Yale archeology department and a few other rarified locations, do you expect to find a fellow very specifically passionate archeologist? UD sincerely hopes that soulmates who meet in this way continue to follow their hearts.
March 3rd, 2015 at 12:46PM
Yuck.
And, for the record, the professors who I have known who preyed on undergraduates were not doing it because they were “passionate about archaeology” and there were certainly no “soulmates” being found, just a lot of creepy serial predation of 18-22 year old women.
And it is seriously awful thinking that someone is interested in you for your intellectual ability, but it turns out that they just wanted your body all along, which is something that happens all the time to women in male-dominated fields but far less frequently to CIS men in those fields. Completely unfair.
March 3rd, 2015 at 12:54PM
nicoleandmaggie: There’s an inevitably anecdotal aspect to this discussion. In your comment, you cite your experience; in mine, I cite mine. I don’t think what you’ve said is yucky. You think what I’ve said is yucky. That seems unfair.
March 3rd, 2015 at 1:34PM
The serial predators *are* really icky, and on many campuses, there are prof who are known to have a different undergrad girlfriend every semester. But there are other relationships that really are one time events between two particular people who find each other attractive, and it seems to me the problem is distinguishing between them. There is also a difference between having a relationship with an undergrad, and a grad student.
Of course it’s anecdotal — the prof I dated as an undergrad was emotionally stunted, but not a serial dater of undergrads: we shared interests, and were mutually needy, and. . . And the relationship ended because I was ready to move on. (And I met him 35 years later, and wondered, “what was I thinking?”). But back then we had no rules and no guidance — and I learned to be much more careful about boundaries. Love does not conquer all.
March 3rd, 2015 at 1:42PM
Susan: Agreed.
March 3rd, 2015 at 3:48PM
My concern would always be that the transference-like elements in such a relationship would make it almost automatically less real or less clearly real — a treacherous requirement in this realm in any case — than in most other relationships. Perfectly innocent mental states on both sides at the beginning, can easily metamorphose later to a student’s feeling of having been exploited and to self doubt on the part of the teacher about his/her original motives and feelings. Still in unusual circumstances, particularly when things were taken slowly, I’ve seen a few of these work. By work I mean that, in hindsight, it becomes an important and happy part of the history of both persons.
March 3rd, 2015 at 3:59PM
Greg: I agree that in many cases these relationships seem kind of immature/unreal – on both sides. As Susan said, “What was I thinking?”
March 3rd, 2015 at 5:15PM
Where are you going to find a person who shares your intellectual, aesthetic and moral passions?! Hey, how about your peers?
It is awkward and kind of embarrassing for the student, a youthful indiscretion, and yes, a sign of immaturity. But why do we accept this kind of immaturity among the male faculty? And can we at least agree that it is always a male faculty with female undergrads, if it’s a heterosexual relationship? Is that a coincidence? It is often predatory behavior by male faculty and it degrades the climate for everyone else — students and faculty, male and female.
I’m with nicoleandmaggie on this one. Yuck, yuck, yuck. And if it is true wuv, they can keep it in their pants for a year until their undergrad soulmate (lol) graduates. Ffs, UD.
March 3rd, 2015 at 5:47PM
Anon: Once again the anecdotal problem. Most of the heterosexual relationships I know about are professors and grad students, and some of those are women professors and male students. I agree with Susan that we need to distinguish between predatory and non-predatory relationships in universities.
March 3rd, 2015 at 5:48PM
“Frat Rape Critic Champions Prof-Student Sex”. That may be one possible headline for these thoughts, UD.
Some decades ago a local Podunk Tech student was murdered. He’d been a dean’s gay lover, and was murdered by the dean’s previous gay lover, also a student. The trial was a local sensation. Does anyone believe this overstepping or muddling of the mentor-student relationship had nothing to do with the murder?
March 3rd, 2015 at 7:32PM
I think the reason you don’t hear as much about the relationships between profs and undergrads is that they tend to be more secretive, and they don’t last. But I assure you, they happen. A lot. And, as N&M points out, the male protagonists are often serial romancers of intense smart women. For which the response is, indeed, yuck.
The irony is that while I know there are healthy and long-lasting relationships between faculty and grad students they are even more fraught with power issues. At least now you don’t have to invent your own rules.
March 4th, 2015 at 7:12AM
So I think where the most intense problems in the Kipnis piece come in around a case like this one: http://thoughtcatalog.com/anonymous/2014/04/i-had-an-affair-with-my-hero-a-philosopher-whos-famous-for-being-moral/ and https://protectinglisbeth.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/the-moral-philosopher-and-his-illicit-international-affairs/
where two things are going on at once. The woman writing about the philosopher in question initially revealed simply that he was very precisely “yuck”: an older man who targets Asian and Latina students at academic events (conferences, etc.), flatters them with attention, tells them a series of calculated and tediously ordinary lies (you’re the first person I’ve been with for years; oh, I’m basically divorced; well, you’re the only one who really matters to me; etc.) It is hard to call it anything but predatory.
Folks might say, “Well, why make that a professional and public issue: it happens in life in general, it’s an old story, this thing of older male liars using and discarding younger women”. I suppose I’d say that even if that were so, why not make it public? It may not be against the law, but it is in some profound emotional sense a form of indecency. Why not say it, and if the man in question ends up losing reputation, losing friends, being regarded as a malevolent figure, well, he’s earned it. All’s fair and all that. If you read the second of those links, the whining of the philosopher in question (who is indeed known for his moral posturing in his writing) is reason enough for him to have been exposed–“why do you care about making me look bad?” he asks pathetically. “Is it some thing about international womanhood?”
But in this case, what turned up when the author first published her j’accuse is not only other women to whom the same thing had been done, but a broad array of trespasses–not just the predatory seduction of a more or less consenting adult but also workplace sexual harassment of the hostile environment and quid-pro-quo kind. And I suspect that would be the case fairly often. The problem is that the scorned person often thinks: well, it’s just me, I was the fool, I should have known better, that was an awkward and embarassing thing, and doesn’t realize that their own experience is just the tip of the iceberg. And at that point it really is a professional, workplace issue that’s systematically poisoning a teaching institution.
I think I’d rather try to stop that kind of poison even if the cost is losing a small handful of awkward one-off encounters between basically decent and well-meaning people.
March 4th, 2015 at 9:48AM
I agree with Tim: I don’t mind sacrificing what I suspect is a ha’pennyworth of rewarding romantic and erotic relationships to prevent an intolerable deal of workplace harassment inflicted by creeps.
March 4th, 2015 at 11:26AM
Susan…”At least now you don’t have to invent your own rules.”
Isn’t inventing your own rules—not for everything, but across a pretty wide spectrum of choices—kind of what *freedom* is all about?
March 4th, 2015 at 1:05PM
Whatever happened to adulthood? I’m with Anon, Tim, and Tony on this question.
Physicians can lose their licenses for propositioning or dating patients. Lawyers can be disbarred if they have a sexual relationship with a client. It’s forbidden for psychologists or clergy to be sexually involved with people they’re counseling. Why shouldn’t university and college faculty own some professionalism and their own expertise and agree to keep their hands off students?
How would it be bad for our public reputation to adopt rules that prohibit sexual relations between faculty and students?
Kipnis is so bothered by the alleged victimology of students, especially of female students, and so soaked in nostalgia for the 1970s “anything goes” sexual culture, that she doesn’t address faculty responsibility. She is completely fine with constructing faculty as bumbling fools or even victims of student erotic fantasies, but any time we’re talking about sexual affairs between students and faculty, no matter the age of the student, the faculty member bears more of the responsibility. Full stop.
March 4th, 2015 at 2:42PM
Historiann, and everybody else: This seems to me an extremely thoughtful article on the topic.
March 4th, 2015 at 11:22PM
How Kipnis wrote that without mentioning David Mamet’s play Oleana, which rang the changes on this issue more than twenty years ago, is beyond me.
March 5th, 2015 at 1:03PM
In response to Historiann, doctors are allowed to date other doctors’ patients, lawyers, other attorneys’ clients. She is not saying that professors should not date their own students (a proposition the vast majority of faculty would support and have done so for decades–at least that’s been my experience in academia) but proposing a blanket ban on contacts between faculty and students that is not analogous to the examples she puts forth and suggests some rather different motivations from the one she states.
April 2nd, 2015 at 10:33AM
Physicians can lose their licenses for propositioning or dating patients. Lawyers can be disbarred if they have a sexual relationship with a client. It’s forbidden for psychologists or clergy to be sexually involved with people they’re counseling. Why shouldn’t university and college faculty own some professionalism and their own expertise and agree to keep their hands off students?
I agree with you entirely. But as noted above, doctors can still date other people’s patients, not their own. I think there’s a good case to be made for prohibiting sexual relationships involving people who work for or teach one another. I’m concerned though that there is a broader agenda here to shame and suppress relationships (among consenting adults) with big differences of age, income, intellectual achievement or social status. And that I strongly disagree with. Some people (male and female) are attracted to youth and inexperience, some are attracted to age and status. There isn’t anything wrong with that, in my book.
How sweeping do you want to make these rules, in an ideal world? Can a professor date someone at a different institution? Say, the 18 year old at the community college across time whom they meet at a coffeeshop? Say they’re in entirely different disciplines and have no reasonable professional connexion.