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Monday, November 22, 2004
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E STRANO! E STRANO!
...as Violetta sings. And the vast disparity between one report about goings on at the University of Pittsburgh and another report is indeed surprising. To cut to the whatever, do faculty members in the communications department there "routinely and repeatedly...engage in consensual sexual relationships with graduate students"? An outside review of the program said yes indeed. But a later, more extensive, internal review "found no ongoing inappropriate conduct by communications professors... . The implication that female graduate students felt unsafe 'was based on a hypothetical concern posed to one external reviewer.'" "No current student has indicated that any faculty member has approached the students in a manner that was inappropriate or made him or her feel uncomfortable," said the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. So the department - otherwise apparently an impressive place - got into all kinds of trouble because of this outside review whose conclusions turn out to be false. Or do they? "I guess one wonders," says an official of the AAUP, "why there's such a tremendous difference between the two reports." UD will now - knowing nothing at all of the circumstances behind this kerfuffle (UD hates the word 'kerfuffle.' Why is she using it?) - try to unpack it anyway. First, faithful readers know (see UD post dated 11/30/03) that consensual sex between professors and graduate students does not strike UD as anything to get het up about. Yes, some people believe that by definition there cannot be "consensual" sex between two people in these positions -- even if the professor has no involvement in the graduate student's work -- but that seems to UD ridiculous. So if UD'd been on the committee, she wouldn't have included this information in her report in the first place. Second, UD figures there probably was in the past one such relationship in the department. So some graduate student who'd heard about it said something like this to some investigator: "Well, sometimes I worry a professor's going to hit on me. I worry what might happen if one of them hits on me and I reject him. After all, the professors around here have been known to have sex with the grad students." This statement got the interviewer all jumpy, etc. Anyway, UD certainly hopes not too much damage was done, and that the story is now over. Speaking of stories, though, the title for the story that the Associated Press wrote about the situation strikes UD as, well, in questionable taste: INTERNAL PITT PROBE FINDS NO INAPPROPRIATE PROFESSOR-STUDENT LIAISONS |