7 ms·

Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe

93 points by vilda 11y ago

lectrick 11y ago
The victimless-crime police strike again Seriously though... Unless there is an evidentiary, demonstrable long-term negative/harm to any given voluntary adult human interaction (say, to an institution, or to society at large, or to the educational process)... I think we need to live and let live. Distaste and offense are not rational arguments against something
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  That's too optimistic. The original acts in the Scarlet Letter didn't cause long-term negative/harm until society got involved after the fact.
  - lectrick 11y ago
    Can you elaborate? Adultery being a betrayal of the family is arguably a negative (insofar as the traditional legally-enforced-monogamy marriage arrangement isn't fatally flawed... lol. I predict the default will be "open" in a generation or 2, max, which may have the positive side effect of fewer secret liaisons and divorces)
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  It is not distaste that is the argument against professors dating students. It is blackmail as well as academic integrity. Did she pass just because she did a sexual favor? Is she being lenient on the argumentation of this paper just because she is dating the student? These are legitimate arguments and concerns, and while I think the rules set up to stop these problems are stepping well over their bounds, let's not try and act like there wasn't a problem to being with.
  - lectrick 11y ago
    Conflict of interest is arguable, but these regulations paint a false portrait of an "all-powerful professor" picking and choosing students to deflower as he pleases, which is most definitely the furthest thing from how it actually works. They also make "inappropriate humor" against policy, which is frankly ridiculous. Having gone to Cornell, which made John Cleese of Monty Python fame a "Professor at Large", it would appall my every sensibility if the vast swathes of inappropriate humor in Monty Python were banned.
- pron 11y ago
  Well, what sociologists, psychologist, historians and anthropologists have found over the past five decades or so (and yes, many of the findings are very much evidentiary and demonstrable), is that it's very hard to define "voluntary". We therefore don't treat volition as binary, but as a point on a spectrum, signifying how much duress, influence -- the technical term is "power" -- was involved.
  - lectrick 11y ago
    > (and yes, many of the findings are very much evidentiary and demonstrable) You saying that there's evidence, is not the same as citing even a single instance of said evidence. :P I haven't seen anything that is actual evidence, other than people shouting angrily in text that things simply should be so (which seems to be almost what you're doing). Do you have a chip on your shoulder about this? (i.e., is there someone in your past who you feel took advantage of you via a power differential?) I think full disclosure is necessary. > We therefore don't treat volition as binary, but as a point on a spectrum, signifying how much duress, influence -- the technical term is "power" -- was involved. Fair enough, but you're conflating 2 things here, people who are together because of a power differential and people who are together because of an overridden will. I don't think these are the same thing. I think a person can be drawn to another's power even as that power may wrap around them. To an outsider it may look like an overridden will but to the person on the inside it does not look the same, it looks like a form of seduction. And I think this happens, and HAS happened, all the time. There are millions of stable marriages that are based on a power differential of some sort, whether it's a beautiful woman, a wealthy man, a more intelligent spouse, or some other combination. Usually people are trading one power for another, such as beauty for intelligence. Are you suggesting we mark all of those as invalid?
jessaustin 11y ago
If the adverbial phrase "stupidly and inchoately" appears, it must be the Chronicle.
mbrutsch 11y ago
> For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. And the author wonders why things are like they are.
- copsarebastards 11y ago
  Yeah, when I got to that my thought was, "So you see the problem but you're unwilling to actually take a stand against it?"
- afarrell 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure that was a rhetorical technique designed to make people think "okay yes, I clearly do recognize that justice demands limits here." As an aside: did anyone else immediately think of acid baths rather than hormone pills back when they first read the phrase "chemically castrated"?
  - navait 11y ago
    In this sort of writing, such rhetorical techniques should be used sparingly, especially if you want to be taken seriously. Policy editorials need to stick to evidence, clear writing and solutions, not go off the rails with the polemics.
    - afarrell 11y ago
      yea, I'm going to agree. This piece is pretty disappointing in that regard.
  - JackFr 11y ago
    > did anyone else immediately think of acid baths rather than hormone pills Maybe you wanna keep that one on the inside . . .
  - allengeorge 11y ago
    I don't think that was a rhetorical device; at least - I didn't recognize it as such. Though it must be... Mustn't it?
deleted 11y ago
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- mafribe 11y ago
  As so often in life, "follow the money"! Victimhood sells. The media loves to write about a damsel-in-distress, especially it the story sexually titillates, e.g. the UVA rape hoax or the Columbia U mattress-girl hoax. It sells copy / drives clicks. Narratives of victimhood open doors. For example Rachel Dolezal was on some police committees. I would surprised if coin wasn't involved. Mattress-girl was invited to the state-of-the-union address. Highly monetisable fame.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Toward the end of the second wave (late 60s/early 70s, I think), feminism morphed from a social movement into an all-encompassing political and philosophical worldview that ultimately suffers from the same issues that every absolute social ideology does: shoehorning events and disciplines into its predetermined framework. This is the time we got the various unsavory elements like lesbianism as a political identity, the idea that male homosexuality is a result of misogyny (espoused by the Redstockings, for example), separatist feminism, "womyn born womyn" and the radical feminist transphobia espoused by Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, Germaine Greer and I think even Gloria Steinem at one point. The problem is that the feminist ideology, the movement, and the principle are all different things. In common discourse, however, the feminist principle (gender equality) is equivocated to give legitimacy to feminist political theory, which is often in conflict with it.
  - maze-le 11y ago
    > ultimately suffers from the same issues that every absolute social ideology does: shoehorning events and disciplines into its predetermined framework I think that is a very big part of the problem. Feminism was once an emancipatory movement, that eveolved into an ideology. With all the bad sideeffects ideologies bear with them. I genrally do agree on what you call 'the feminist principle', while I strongly denounce the political corsett wich it evolved into.
jseliger 11y ago
"I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" is a good companion piece to this one: https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afrai... . Laura Kipnis wrote a follow-up essay about a Title IX witch hunt, but it's behind a firewall: http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/ http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/ . In 2000 Francine Prose wrote a hilarious and sometimes sad novel called Blue Angel (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/0060882034?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/006...), which is worth reading both for its own sake and because its story and themes are compatible with Kipnis's. Decades of academic satires seem to have had near zero effect on campus politics. (I taught as a grad student at the University of Arizona and have been teaching as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College.)
- patmcguire 11y ago
  Yeah, the blowback to the article has been a bigger story than the article itself. It's worth noting she's been cleared of everything http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/laura-kipnis-is-cleared-of-wrongdoing-in-title-ix-complaints/99951 http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/laura-kipnis-is-cleared-of...
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  I read that first article about the liberal professor and his "liberal" students. The only student who seems to have threatened anything to get course material changed was a far-right student demanding that the course thoroughly cover the hypothesis that black people getting housing loans caused the Global Financial Crisis. I'd really like to see some statistical evidence that the academic thought-police are louder, more prominent, or more powerful than in previous times before I start panicking over it.
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    Why research when there's already an existing narrative about the liberal university turning our spoiled children into oversensitive, overconcerned, disrespectful, judgemental revolutionaries that lack sufficient respect for their parent's pragmatic decisionmaking? If there's any increase in oversensitiveness in universities, for me it would make sense as an indicator that the universities are becoming increasingly out of reach for people who haven't had a life privileged enough to sustain the idea that one might be able to go through life without feeling bad or sad without the person who made you feel that way being expelled from the community. Basically, they expect proper customer service, and they're used to it from the people that serve them from behind retail counters and fast food cash registers every day. With the prices they're paying, I'm not sure that they don't deserve it. If you're a tutor to royalty, there's no academic freedom; if you can't figure out that the customer is always right, you lose your head. Anyway, aren't most people who teach at universities making less than minimum wage with no health insurance? Do we really want their 'truth' to endanger the incomes of the administrators? If it looks like a temp, swims like a temp, and quacks like a temp, you can fire it like a temp. There's no doubt that there's been an increase of immediately firing anyone who generates any controversy anywhere, unless they're the ones bringing in the revenue.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
You wouldn't think 'don't fuck your undergrads' would be as controversial a statement as it is.
- deleted 11y ago
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- moridinamael 11y ago
  I still chuckle to recall my friends in grad school who TA'ed being told by professors, quote, "Don't fuck your students."
- jseliger 11y ago
  You wouldn't think an alternate perspective like "People, including undergrads, should be free to do what they want" would as controversial a statement as it is, but neither your statement nor mine are fully germane because they're broad principles that don't necessarily cover the minutia of every situation. My (abandoned) dissertation was on academic novels, and one thing I found interesting is the way feminists in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s fought relentlessly to argue that women were adults who could make their own choices, sexual and otherwise, and didn't need institutions to act like their parents. Lynn Peril's book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now has an okay but not great account of this. Sometime in the 80s or 90s, though, the script flipped, and now there is a small but loud minority calling for colleges to do the thing a lot of women wanted colleges not to do! For those of us with a sense of history, the results are entertaining.
mistermann 11y ago
I feel sorry for what the various special interests groups are increasingly doing to girls growing up, so many conflicting ideas pushing and pulling them in contradictory directions. Boys have it so much easier in this respect - yes, the downside for them is they are often the victim of trumped up "rape" charges, but at least they don't have to contend with the mental health aspects of being simultaneously told that they are both all powerful (you go girl, you can do anything) and a perpetual victim (misogyny everywhere, all the time, etc). Adolescence and young adulthood is confusing enough without experiencing it as if in a house of mirrors.
- cyphunk 11y ago
  "the downside for [boys] is they are often the victim of trumped up "rape" charges" I do not know a single person that is the victim of trumped rape charges but do know several girls who were victims of actual rape (and many more of sexual abuse). If fake rape charges is a downside for boys then it's not an actual downside, it's a trumped up downside.
  - cloakandswagger 11y ago
    Psh, what's a little false rape allegation? Man up!
    - cyphunk 11y ago
      False rape allegations are a crime. But it would be better to say that the downside of being is male is that it appears they are more inclined to rape people. Because I guarantee if you if it were not for that little fact the allegation problem probably wouldn't exist.
      - msandford 11y ago
        > But it would be better to say that the downside of being is male is that it appears they are more inclined to rape people. That's long been held to be obviously true. But a recent study shows that it may not be correct. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_...
facepalm 11y ago
Apparently "marrying up" used to be a major factor of social movement. Now feminists are barring that up. No free lunch for women, I guess. They think they only limit the options of professors, but they also limit the options of students/women (and nurses, actors, what not). Personally I will advise my kids to not study in the US because it seems too dangerous - not to be raped, but to be falsely accused. (I'm in Europe)
danso 11y ago
Speaking as a college faculty member...this essay is just fucking absurd. The problem is not just the power dynamic that the professor wields over the student, but that an intimate relationship creates an uncomfortable, likely hostile environment for everyone else who is not fucking the professor. Think about it...assuming that you (like most HNers) are male, you'd be at a distinct disadvantage -- especially in engineering and CS -- if your (presumably male and heterosexual) professors felt OK to pursue sexual relationships with the relatively few women in their classes...while the males have no chance to boost their grade with such favoritism. Even in a more egalitarian scenario, where the professor is bisexual and has no problem with being intimate with anyone in the class...well, the students who are less attractive, or choose to pursue a monogamous relationship with a non-professor...again, they're going to get screwed by the curve. The OP comes off as a self-involved brat who has been tenured so long that she doesn't remember what it's like to have to spend $20,000 to $80,000 a year (obviously, she doesn't...that kind of money for tuition is a recent phenomenon) for a college education. The rules against professor-student relationships aren't there to baby the students, they're there to protect against incentives and dynamic that fuck everyone else over, not just the student who manages to score with their professor. edit: In the rare chance that your true love coincidentally happens to be in a class you teach...OK, stranger things have happened in life. So do the adult thing: quit your job, then continue the relationship. True love should be stronger than the benefits of a tenured position. Don't screw it up for all the other poor students whom the gods did not make to be your soulmate.
- arcanus 11y ago
  > So do the adult thing: quit your job, then continue the relationship. True love should be stronger than the benefits of a tenured position. Don't screw it up for all the other poor students whom the gods did not make to be your soulmate. Fellow academic here. I'm shocked a member of faculty would suggest that is a realistic option. You of all people know how difficult it is to find a tenure-track position. Yet you are suggesting voluntary career suicide for a consensual relationship between two adults? This is both unrealistic and complete overkill. You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion. I think anyone who is unable to do so not only is a poor faculty member, they would be a poor spouse and a terrible scientist. That is to say nothing of the edge case we are discussing. Unless students/faculty are gotten much more frisky, this is a negligable fraction of the interactions between students and faculty, and is lost in the noise of much more pressing academic grievances, such a treating grad students like human beings, or giving increased consideration to the role of teaching in promotion, instead of the pure emphasis on research at tier-1 institutions.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
I'm sure everyone will now fly into a moral panic about not being allowed to have sex with whom they please. All I wish to point out is that, seemingly unmentioned in this article, the power relation between professor and student really has changed, as the academic job market has gotten that much more difficult. Other than that, carry on. Happy moral panic, and may the odds be ever in your favor!
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> [...] popularized the use of the term "survivor," previously reserved for those who’d survived the Holocaust. I agree with the author that it's wrong to use "survivor" instead of "accuser" when the guilt has not been established, but you can not reserve such a generic word as "survivor". It simply means somebody who survived something life-threatening.
gadders 11y ago
It's not hard, is it? Don't have relationships with students you teach. If you're teaching Maths and you have a relationship with a History of Art student, fair enough. However, dating one of your own students is as bad as dating a subordinate at work. Just don't do it.
- TallGuyShort 11y ago
  Agreed. This is no different than any other conflict of interest. Do you think bosses should be able to have sexual relationships with their direct reports, or with customers and vendors? There are safeguards in place to deal with such situations that remove the potentially biased individual from key decision making processes.
nateabele 11y ago
> Personally I’d start by promoting a less vulnerable sense of self than the one our new campus codes are peddling. Not possible. A less vulnerable sense of self runs dangerously close to the idea that students are accountable for their actions, which is directly antithetical to the culture of adolescence that is being dragged into ever-higher age groups.
rpiguy99 11y ago
This article fails to note that a lot of the paranoia is driven by the slow infantilization of 18 year-olds since the author was in college. When the author of this article was in college, pre-AIDs, therefore probably late 70's or early 80s, an 18 year-old was allowed to drink and would largely be considered an "adult." If you weren't in college, you were likely working full time, and not living with your parents until you were 26. You probably had an older brother, cousin, or uncle who was drafted sent to Vietnam at around 18-19 years of age. So back then when you hooked up with a professor, people probably thought you were stupid, but you were an adult and you owned your stupidity. Today colleges totally infantilize their students and it has become more like extended high school (lots of homework, attendance taken, strict rules of social conduct, etc.) than what the author experienced 35 years ago. But to be fair, it is not just colleges, what society expects out of an 18 year old has changed dramatically as well - so the way power dynamics are looked at on campus today sort of makes sense.
Steuard 11y ago
I've been a professor for close to ten years now, and I can't tell you how strongly I disagreed with this essay. Maybe it's a generational thing: a perception of what's acceptable in life even outside academia. For instance, she says, > "Somehow I don’t see the publishing industry instituting codes banning unhappily married editors from going goopy over authors," but from my perspective, the story she relayed showed exactly why publishers should (and, I think, often do) fire or strongly sanction any editor who abuses his or her position in that way. Part of the author's point seems to be, "We need to prepare students for the dangers of the world out there," which I think is entirely sensible. But her proposed solution appears to be, "Make sure that college provides practice fending off unwanted advances by people with power over you," while I'd much prefer, "Make sure that college teaches them those advances aren't acceptable." Don't get me wrong: I think sex can be awesome, and I think a whole lot of people are way too eager to make rules about what other consenting adults ought to be able to do. But the thought of a professor putting a student in a position where they fear the consequences of saying no (when they might be counting on that professor for a good grade or a recommendation letter) just horrifies me. Professors: if you want to get it on at work, you've got plenty of colleagues to choose from. And if there's some student you're convinced is your soulmate, just cross your damned legs for a couple years.

93 points by vilda 11y ago

The victimless-crime police strike again Seriously though... Unless there is an evidentiary, demonstrable long-term negative/harm to any given voluntary adult human interaction (say, to an institution, or to society at large, or to the educational process)... I think we need to live and let live. Distaste and offense are not rational arguments against something

fluidcruft 11y ago
That's too optimistic. The original acts in the Scarlet Letter didn't cause long-term negative/harm until society got involved after the fact.
- lectrick 11y ago
  Can you elaborate? Adultery being a betrayal of the family is arguably a negative (insofar as the traditional legally-enforced-monogamy marriage arrangement isn't fatally flawed... lol. I predict the default will be "open" in a generation or 2, max, which may have the positive side effect of fewer secret liaisons and divorces)
wodenokoto 11y ago
It is not distaste that is the argument against professors dating students. It is blackmail as well as academic integrity. Did she pass just because she did a sexual favor? Is she being lenient on the argumentation of this paper just because she is dating the student? These are legitimate arguments and concerns, and while I think the rules set up to stop these problems are stepping well over their bounds, let's not try and act like there wasn't a problem to being with.
- lectrick 11y ago
  Conflict of interest is arguable, but these regulations paint a false portrait of an "all-powerful professor" picking and choosing students to deflower as he pleases, which is most definitely the furthest thing from how it actually works. They also make "inappropriate humor" against policy, which is frankly ridiculous. Having gone to Cornell, which made John Cleese of Monty Python fame a "Professor at Large", it would appall my every sensibility if the vast swathes of inappropriate humor in Monty Python were banned.
pron 11y ago
Well, what sociologists, psychologist, historians and anthropologists have found over the past five decades or so (and yes, many of the findings are very much evidentiary and demonstrable), is that it's very hard to define "voluntary". We therefore don't treat volition as binary, but as a point on a spectrum, signifying how much duress, influence -- the technical term is "power" -- was involved.
- lectrick 11y ago
  > (and yes, many of the findings are very much evidentiary and demonstrable) You saying that there's evidence, is not the same as citing even a single instance of said evidence. :P I haven't seen anything that is actual evidence, other than people shouting angrily in text that things simply should be so (which seems to be almost what you're doing). Do you have a chip on your shoulder about this? (i.e., is there someone in your past who you feel took advantage of you via a power differential?) I think full disclosure is necessary. > We therefore don't treat volition as binary, but as a point on a spectrum, signifying how much duress, influence -- the technical term is "power" -- was involved. Fair enough, but you're conflating 2 things here, people who are together because of a power differential and people who are together because of an overridden will. I don't think these are the same thing. I think a person can be drawn to another's power even as that power may wrap around them. To an outsider it may look like an overridden will but to the person on the inside it does not look the same, it looks like a form of seduction. And I think this happens, and HAS happened, all the time. There are millions of stable marriages that are based on a power differential of some sort, whether it's a beautiful woman, a wealthy man, a more intelligent spouse, or some other combination. Usually people are trading one power for another, such as beauty for intelligence. Are you suggesting we mark all of those as invalid?

jessaustin 11y ago

If the adverbial phrase "stupidly and inchoately" appears, it must be the Chronicle.

mbrutsch 11y ago

> For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. And the author wonders why things are like they are.

copsarebastards 11y ago
Yeah, when I got to that my thought was, "So you see the problem but you're unwilling to actually take a stand against it?"
afarrell 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that was a rhetorical technique designed to make people think "okay yes, I clearly do recognize that justice demands limits here." As an aside: did anyone else immediately think of acid baths rather than hormone pills back when they first read the phrase "chemically castrated"?
- navait 11y ago
  In this sort of writing, such rhetorical techniques should be used sparingly, especially if you want to be taken seriously. Policy editorials need to stick to evidence, clear writing and solutions, not go off the rails with the polemics.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    yea, I'm going to agree. This piece is pretty disappointing in that regard.
- JackFr 11y ago
  > did anyone else immediately think of acid baths rather than hormone pills Maybe you wanna keep that one on the inside . . .
- allengeorge 11y ago
  I don't think that was a rhetorical device; at least - I didn't recognize it as such. Though it must be... Mustn't it?

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mafribe 11y ago
As so often in life, "follow the money"! Victimhood sells. The media loves to write about a damsel-in-distress, especially it the story sexually titillates, e.g. the UVA rape hoax or the Columbia U mattress-girl hoax. It sells copy / drives clicks. Narratives of victimhood open doors. For example Rachel Dolezal was on some police committees. I would surprised if coin wasn't involved. Mattress-girl was invited to the state-of-the-union address. Highly monetisable fame.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Toward the end of the second wave (late 60s/early 70s, I think), feminism morphed from a social movement into an all-encompassing political and philosophical worldview that ultimately suffers from the same issues that every absolute social ideology does: shoehorning events and disciplines into its predetermined framework. This is the time we got the various unsavory elements like lesbianism as a political identity, the idea that male homosexuality is a result of misogyny (espoused by the Redstockings, for example), separatist feminism, "womyn born womyn" and the radical feminist transphobia espoused by Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, Germaine Greer and I think even Gloria Steinem at one point. The problem is that the feminist ideology, the movement, and the principle are all different things. In common discourse, however, the feminist principle (gender equality) is equivocated to give legitimacy to feminist political theory, which is often in conflict with it.
- maze-le 11y ago
  > ultimately suffers from the same issues that every absolute social ideology does: shoehorning events and disciplines into its predetermined framework I think that is a very big part of the problem. Feminism was once an emancipatory movement, that eveolved into an ideology. With all the bad sideeffects ideologies bear with them. I genrally do agree on what you call 'the feminist principle', while I strongly denounce the political corsett wich it evolved into.

jseliger 11y ago

"I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" is a good companion piece to this one: https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afrai... . Laura Kipnis wrote a follow-up essay about a Title IX witch hunt, but it's behind a firewall: http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/ http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/ . In 2000 Francine Prose wrote a hilarious and sometimes sad novel called Blue Angel (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/0060882034?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/006...), which is worth reading both for its own sake and because its story and themes are compatible with Kipnis's. Decades of academic satires seem to have had near zero effect on campus politics. (I taught as a grad student at the University of Arizona and have been teaching as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College.)

patmcguire 11y ago
Yeah, the blowback to the article has been a bigger story than the article itself. It's worth noting she's been cleared of everything http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/laura-kipnis-is-cleared-of-wrongdoing-in-title-ix-complaints/99951 http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/laura-kipnis-is-cleared-of...
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
I read that first article about the liberal professor and his "liberal" students. The only student who seems to have threatened anything to get course material changed was a far-right student demanding that the course thoroughly cover the hypothesis that black people getting housing loans caused the Global Financial Crisis. I'd really like to see some statistical evidence that the academic thought-police are louder, more prominent, or more powerful than in previous times before I start panicking over it.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  Why research when there's already an existing narrative about the liberal university turning our spoiled children into oversensitive, overconcerned, disrespectful, judgemental revolutionaries that lack sufficient respect for their parent's pragmatic decisionmaking? If there's any increase in oversensitiveness in universities, for me it would make sense as an indicator that the universities are becoming increasingly out of reach for people who haven't had a life privileged enough to sustain the idea that one might be able to go through life without feeling bad or sad without the person who made you feel that way being expelled from the community. Basically, they expect proper customer service, and they're used to it from the people that serve them from behind retail counters and fast food cash registers every day. With the prices they're paying, I'm not sure that they don't deserve it. If you're a tutor to royalty, there's no academic freedom; if you can't figure out that the customer is always right, you lose your head. Anyway, aren't most people who teach at universities making less than minimum wage with no health insurance? Do we really want their 'truth' to endanger the incomes of the administrators? If it looks like a temp, swims like a temp, and quacks like a temp, you can fire it like a temp. There's no doubt that there's been an increase of immediately firing anyone who generates any controversy anywhere, unless they're the ones bringing in the revenue.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

You wouldn't think 'don't fuck your undergrads' would be as controversial a statement as it is.

deleted 11y ago
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moridinamael 11y ago
I still chuckle to recall my friends in grad school who TA'ed being told by professors, quote, "Don't fuck your students."
jseliger 11y ago
You wouldn't think an alternate perspective like "People, including undergrads, should be free to do what they want" would as controversial a statement as it is, but neither your statement nor mine are fully germane because they're broad principles that don't necessarily cover the minutia of every situation. My (abandoned) dissertation was on academic novels, and one thing I found interesting is the way feminists in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s fought relentlessly to argue that women were adults who could make their own choices, sexual and otherwise, and didn't need institutions to act like their parents. Lynn Peril's book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now has an okay but not great account of this. Sometime in the 80s or 90s, though, the script flipped, and now there is a small but loud minority calling for colleges to do the thing a lot of women wanted colleges not to do! For those of us with a sense of history, the results are entertaining.

mistermann 11y ago

I feel sorry for what the various special interests groups are increasingly doing to girls growing up, so many conflicting ideas pushing and pulling them in contradictory directions. Boys have it so much easier in this respect - yes, the downside for them is they are often the victim of trumped up "rape" charges, but at least they don't have to contend with the mental health aspects of being simultaneously told that they are both all powerful (you go girl, you can do anything) and a perpetual victim (misogyny everywhere, all the time, etc). Adolescence and young adulthood is confusing enough without experiencing it as if in a house of mirrors.

cyphunk 11y ago
"the downside for [boys] is they are often the victim of trumped up "rape" charges" I do not know a single person that is the victim of trumped rape charges but do know several girls who were victims of actual rape (and many more of sexual abuse). If fake rape charges is a downside for boys then it's not an actual downside, it's a trumped up downside.
- cloakandswagger 11y ago
  Psh, what's a little false rape allegation? Man up!
  - cyphunk 11y ago
    False rape allegations are a crime. But it would be better to say that the downside of being is male is that it appears they are more inclined to rape people. Because I guarantee if you if it were not for that little fact the allegation problem probably wouldn't exist.
    - msandford 11y ago
      > But it would be better to say that the downside of being is male is that it appears they are more inclined to rape people. That's long been held to be obviously true. But a recent study shows that it may not be correct. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_...

facepalm 11y ago

Apparently "marrying up" used to be a major factor of social movement. Now feminists are barring that up. No free lunch for women, I guess. They think they only limit the options of professors, but they also limit the options of students/women (and nurses, actors, what not). Personally I will advise my kids to not study in the US because it seems too dangerous - not to be raped, but to be falsely accused. (I'm in Europe)

danso 11y ago

Speaking as a college faculty member...this essay is just fucking absurd. The problem is not just the power dynamic that the professor wields over the student, but that an intimate relationship creates an uncomfortable, likely hostile environment for everyone else who is not fucking the professor. Think about it...assuming that you (like most HNers) are male, you'd be at a distinct disadvantage -- especially in engineering and CS -- if your (presumably male and heterosexual) professors felt OK to pursue sexual relationships with the relatively few women in their classes...while the males have no chance to boost their grade with such favoritism. Even in a more egalitarian scenario, where the professor is bisexual and has no problem with being intimate with anyone in the class...well, the students who are less attractive, or choose to pursue a monogamous relationship with a non-professor...again, they're going to get screwed by the curve. The OP comes off as a self-involved brat who has been tenured so long that she doesn't remember what it's like to have to spend $20,000 to $80,000 a year (obviously, she doesn't...that kind of money for tuition is a recent phenomenon) for a college education. The rules against professor-student relationships aren't there to baby the students, they're there to protect against incentives and dynamic that fuck everyone else over, not just the student who manages to score with their professor. edit: In the rare chance that your true love coincidentally happens to be in a class you teach...OK, stranger things have happened in life. So do the adult thing: quit your job, then continue the relationship. True love should be stronger than the benefits of a tenured position. Don't screw it up for all the other poor students whom the gods did not make to be your soulmate.

arcanus 11y ago
> So do the adult thing: quit your job, then continue the relationship. True love should be stronger than the benefits of a tenured position. Don't screw it up for all the other poor students whom the gods did not make to be your soulmate. Fellow academic here. I'm shocked a member of faculty would suggest that is a realistic option. You of all people know how difficult it is to find a tenure-track position. Yet you are suggesting voluntary career suicide for a consensual relationship between two adults? This is both unrealistic and complete overkill. You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion. I think anyone who is unable to do so not only is a poor faculty member, they would be a poor spouse and a terrible scientist. That is to say nothing of the edge case we are discussing. Unless students/faculty are gotten much more frisky, this is a negligable fraction of the interactions between students and faculty, and is lost in the noise of much more pressing academic grievances, such a treating grad students like human beings, or giving increased consideration to the role of teaching in promotion, instead of the pure emphasis on research at tier-1 institutions.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

I'm sure everyone will now fly into a moral panic about not being allowed to have sex with whom they please. All I wish to point out is that, seemingly unmentioned in this article, the power relation between professor and student really has changed, as the academic job market has gotten that much more difficult. Other than that, carry on. Happy moral panic, and may the odds be ever in your favor!

stefantalpalaru 11y ago

> [...] popularized the use of the term "survivor," previously reserved for those who’d survived the Holocaust. I agree with the author that it's wrong to use "survivor" instead of "accuser" when the guilt has not been established, but you can not reserve such a generic word as "survivor". It simply means somebody who survived something life-threatening.

gadders 11y ago

It's not hard, is it? Don't have relationships with students you teach. If you're teaching Maths and you have a relationship with a History of Art student, fair enough. However, dating one of your own students is as bad as dating a subordinate at work. Just don't do it.

TallGuyShort 11y ago
Agreed. This is no different than any other conflict of interest. Do you think bosses should be able to have sexual relationships with their direct reports, or with customers and vendors? There are safeguards in place to deal with such situations that remove the potentially biased individual from key decision making processes.

nateabele 11y ago

> Personally I’d start by promoting a less vulnerable sense of self than the one our new campus codes are peddling. Not possible. A less vulnerable sense of self runs dangerously close to the idea that students are accountable for their actions, which is directly antithetical to the culture of adolescence that is being dragged into ever-higher age groups.

rpiguy99 11y ago

This article fails to note that a lot of the paranoia is driven by the slow infantilization of 18 year-olds since the author was in college. When the author of this article was in college, pre-AIDs, therefore probably late 70's or early 80s, an 18 year-old was allowed to drink and would largely be considered an "adult." If you weren't in college, you were likely working full time, and not living with your parents until you were 26. You probably had an older brother, cousin, or uncle who was drafted sent to Vietnam at around 18-19 years of age. So back then when you hooked up with a professor, people probably thought you were stupid, but you were an adult and you owned your stupidity. Today colleges totally infantilize their students and it has become more like extended high school (lots of homework, attendance taken, strict rules of social conduct, etc.) than what the author experienced 35 years ago. But to be fair, it is not just colleges, what society expects out of an 18 year old has changed dramatically as well - so the way power dynamics are looked at on campus today sort of makes sense.

Steuard 11y ago

I've been a professor for close to ten years now, and I can't tell you how strongly I disagreed with this essay. Maybe it's a generational thing: a perception of what's acceptable in life even outside academia. For instance, she says, > "Somehow I don’t see the publishing industry instituting codes banning unhappily married editors from going goopy over authors," but from my perspective, the story she relayed showed exactly why publishers should (and, I think, often do) fire or strongly sanction any editor who abuses his or her position in that way. Part of the author's point seems to be, "We need to prepare students for the dangers of the world out there," which I think is entirely sensible. But her proposed solution appears to be, "Make sure that college provides practice fending off unwanted advances by people with power over you," while I'd much prefer, "Make sure that college teaches them those advances aren't acceptable." Don't get me wrong: I think sex can be awesome, and I think a whole lot of people are way too eager to make rules about what other consenting adults ought to be able to do. But the thought of a professor putting a student in a position where they fear the consequences of saying no (when they might be counting on that professor for a good grade or a recommendation letter) just horrifies me. Professors: if you want to get it on at work, you've got plenty of colleagues to choose from. And if there's some student you're convinced is your soulmate, just cross your damned legs for a couple years.