Faculty are scheduled to vote on new rules this spring, the culmination of a process that began well before the dean of UC's top law school left amid a sex scandal last fall.
The policy, which would make UC the latest in a line of universities to ban
classroom courtships, highlights a topic often hush-hush in higher education
-- the murky sexual politics of teacher-student liaisons.
Although UC doesn't have a no-dating decree -- faculty recommended drafting a policy in 1983 but it was not made formal -- there has always been an unwritten rule that getting involved with students is a bad idea, says Gayle Binion, chair of UC's Academic Senate and a political science professor at UC Santa Barbara.
Still, Binion, who says faculty have been working on a policy since late 2001, thinks it's a good idea to get it in writing.
"Even though the vast majority already live by an ethical norm, you still need to ... show that the institution has a position and then to deal with the rare case of someone who violates it," Binion says.
The proposed policy would make it a breach of the code of conduct for a faculty member to engage in a "romantic or sexual relationship" for whom he or she has, or should expect to have, academic responsibility.
That ban would be less sweeping than some.
At the College of William & Mary in Virginia, all dating between professors and undergraduates was banned after a former instructor wrote an embarrassing article about his affair with a student.
But the UC policy would go further than other schools that only ban dating between a professor and students directly under their supervision.
"We don't want the student dropping the class in order to date the professor," says Binion.
The policy has been endorsed by the university system's Academic Council, the administrative arm of the Academic Senate, and faculty are expected to vote at the end of May. If approved as expected, it would come before UC's governing board of regents, probably this summer.
Some UC campuses, including Berkeley, have guidelines on dating students. But the wording of the proposed systemwide policy is stronger.
Some outside the system think that's a bad idea.
"I think it's unethical. It's an intrusion into personal and private relationships," says Barry Dank, a sociology professor at California State University-Long Beach. "It's the bureaucratization of sexuality."
Dank married one of his students in 2000, although he notes the marriage raised no eyebrows, perhaps because his wife is his contemporary in age.
He points out there are laws forbidding illegal behavior such as sexual harassment -- the dating rules, he says, err by conflating consensual relationships with harassment.
Others contend that the balance of power between professor and student is so lopsided that students must be protected.
In the Berkeley case, the law student alleges she was sexually molested two years ago by the former dean of UC Berkeley's Boalt law school, John P. Dwyer, after she passed out following a night of drinking with Dwyer and other students. Dwyer has acknowledged acting inappropriately but said the incident was consensual. He left Boalt in January.
According to attorney Stevens, the student went to the Berkeley campus official charged with enforcing anti-harassment policies shortly after the incident, but the official didn't know the procedures for a complaint against a dean and couldn't guarantee that the student's name would be kept confidential or that she would be protected from retaliation.
Because of that, the student kept quiet until she had graduated and taken the bar exam, Stevens says.
Berkeley officials contend the student was given detailed information about how to proceed and was assured that the campus has strong policies against retaliation. They say the student would give neither her name nor that of her alleged attacker, so little could be done until she lodged a formal complaint last fall.
In a December op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Boalt law professor Linda Hamilton Krieger "vehemently" disagreed that the incident showed a functioning system.
Krieger, who declined to be interviewed for this story, wrote that the student told her about the incident before she graduated.
But Krieger said she couldn't figure out what she was legally required to do with the information if the student chose not to file a report, despite "many phone calls and much Cal Web site searching."
Nationally, universities have taken different approaches to rules on professor-student relationships, policies that can be useful if an institution is sued.
At Ohio Northern University, the faculty handbook dictates that "faculty and staff members should not have sexual relations with students to whom they are not married."
At the University of Michigan, romantic relationships are not forbidden but are considered to be "a basic violation of professional ethics and responsibility," if the faculty member is responsible for the student's academic performance or professional future. Faculty members are required to tell a supervisor if they are having a relationship with a student.
The trend of codifying policies is expected to continue, says Donna Euben of the American Association of University Professors. "It seems that more and more institutions are developing such policies in the hopes of avoiding having to deal with the issue when there's no policy in place," Euben says.
