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The Charlotte Observer

Rules tighten on campus romance
Schools grapple with relationships between teachers and students

New York Times

The University of California is beginning the academic year under a new policy that bans professors from engaging in "romantic or sexual" relationships with students.

Like a lot of people on campus, Catherine Gallagher, a professor of English at the Berkeley campus, is confused.

What precisely does the new policy mean, she wonders, echoing the question being asked by many of her hyperverbal colleagues in the English department. "Does it mean a personal relationship?" she asks. "Does it mean you can't go out for coffee?"

The university has long had a strict sexual harassment policy. With its new policy, it has joined a small but growing number of colleges that have taken the extra step of trying to regulate those relationships that, at least at the outset, both parties seem to want.

Setting policy for how sex and romance should play out on campus turns out to be as complicated and problematic as relationships themselves. The policy took effect at the University of California's nine campuses in July. People have been debating it ever since.

At the University of Michigan, where such a policy is under consideration, the administration has even come up with detailed hypothetical examples of what situations might arise and how they should be handled.

"Department Chair X is having a sexual relationship with Graduate Student D who is a member of Assistant Professor Y's laboratory in the same department," one example reads. "In managing the resultant conflict, Chair X would have to recuse himself from evaluative/promotional reviews of Assistant Professor Y's work while Graduate Student D is a member of the laboratory."

Another example concerns Student E and Professor D, who become involved the summer after Student E completes -- and gets an A in -- Professor D's class. As Student E prepares to graduate, she asks Professor D for a letter of recommendation. According to the policy, Professor D must disclose the relationship to his supervisor before sending out any recommendations.

Schools that have adopted such policies include Duke, the University of Iowa, Stanford, Yale, the University of Virginia and Ohio Wesleyan. The strictest policy, put in place at William and Mary College two years ago, forbids consensual relationships between all faculty members and undergraduate students.

More typical are policies like the one Duke adopted in 2002, which strongly discourages faculty members from becoming involved with their students, but says that if such a relationship develops, the faculty member must report it to a dean and then be removed from all authority over the student.

Peter Burian, a classics professor at Duke who was chairman of the Academic Council when it took up the issue, said he received dozens of e-mails from faculty members about the policy, more than on anything else the council considered under his watch.

"People have very strong feelings about this," he said. "There were people who felt the university was morally culpable for not saying no to any such relationship. There were other people who basically said, `You're trampling on our rights. We know faculty members who are X years later happily married to former students. We know this is going to happen.' "

The new policies, at Duke, the University of California and elsewhere, arise from a range of concerns, including the ethics and conflicts of interests involved in such relationships.

Gayle Binion, a professor of political science who helped negotiate the adoption of the new policy at the University of California, said her primary concern was assuring that faculty members did not cross "normal professional relationship boundaries," the same sort of boundaries that have long been clearly established between patients and their psychiatrists and doctors, she said.

Like other supporters of the policy, she questions whether relationships between faculty members and students they grade, supervise, recommend for graduate school or jobs, or otherwise evaluate can ever be truly consensual.

"It's not just about power," Binion said. "It's about the asymmetry of the life situation. For faculty members, they have relationships, they break up, their lives go on. They're established. For students, these things can have dramatic repercussions. We're saying the faculty member has to be the one to take responsibility. You can't just say the student says it was OK."

At several schools, including William and Mary and Ohio Wesleyan, the policies were prompted by highly publicized incidents involving sexual relationships between professors and students.

At the University of California, such a policy was already under discussion when the dean of the university's Boalt Law School at Berkeley, John Dwyer, resigned after a student accused him of sexual harassment. Dwyer, who was not married at the time, said that he had one consensual encounter with the student -- whom he did not teach or supervise -- and that his actions represented "a serious error in judgment."

The Berkeley policy prohibits faculty members from entering into consensual relationships with any student for whom they have, or "reasonably expect" in the future to have, academic responsibility. Faculty members who violate the policy are subject to disciplinary action ranging from a reprimand to dismissal, penalties typical of the policies in effect at other institutions as well.