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> 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

by 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.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
danso 11y ago
> 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. Fellow human being here...I'm shocked you think that true love is so easy to find :). I was being half-facetious...but yes, if you do happen to find your one-and-only, you should do the mature thing and pursue the relationship in a way that doesn't damage the academic potential of all the other students. Or at least wait until the student has graduated. > You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion. Sorry but this is a serious LOL to me. At many medical schools, staff doctors are forbidden to take even a $50 dinner from a pharmaceutical company. Much of that policy is grounded in the desire to avoid the appearance of impropriety...but you have to think of it from the perspective of the pharma company. They have up-to-the-day data on prescribing habits of doctors. They have the analytics that show that even casual visits by an attractive/charismatic pharma salesperson has a direct impact on the doctor's prescribing habits. I doubt that the pharma companies have data on what happens if such visits turn into sexual relationships, but I'm going to guess that the correlation only gets stronger. So let's assume that grading policy is more objective, more sanctified than the process of objectively prescribing life-saving drugs...even if that were the case, the problem is not just about meting out grades, but priorities. You must have experienced the phenomenon in which students who take the time to go to office hours often do better than students who don't...because they've spent hours picking your brain about the right way to think about things. Well, when you've chosen a student (or even several) to have intimate relationships...the hours that you have to freely conduct your duties with non-significant-others is reduced. Maybe you're objective enough to give your lover a B instead of bumping him/her up to an A...but are you really going to ignore them when they ask for help on their papers and homework? And again, the problem is not just the practical reduction in time that you have to carry out your duties, or the impact on your objectivity...the problem is also the appearance of impropriety. Maybe you are the stone-cold objective professor who manages to keep love and work completely separate (keep in mind that now we're really in fantasy land at this point)...but your students do not have a window to your soul. Their guess is that you are in the 99% of human beings that can't be objective in that situation, and their trust in the academic process is going to be somewhat jaded. And a university does not benefit from a reputation of faculty who freely pursue relationships with students; you can imagine that many parents do not see such relationships as a bonding between consenting, free-willed adults.
TallGuyShort 11y ago
It doesn't really matter if YOU THINK you can keep the feelings separate. What matters is that it damages the trust and confidence that students and everyone to whom their credentials are shown have in your judgement. It's a choice between career suicide because you choose to pursue a certain relationship instead, or career suicide because your integrity is in question.
s73v3r 11y ago
I would think that, regardless if the professor is capable of separating their feelings, it's always going to look like favoritism.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Then I guess we should ban being human. Even the most egalitarian people are not free from biases, nor they have consistent and stable mood. And even if a perfect egalitarian demigod were to be making decisions, someone would still find something to misinterpret in his/her actions in order to build an outrage-inducing story. Reducing negative effects of human nature is hard as it is, but it becomes pretty much impossible when there are people with malicious intentions looking for you to do a single wrong step.
scott_s 11y ago
I think danso's response is a good one, but I wanted to add to a response to: "You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion." Absolutely I believe that. Humans are host to a smorgasbord of cognitive biases and capable of the most astounding of rationalizations. The rules should acknowledge this.

by arcanus 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

danso 11y ago

> 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. Fellow human being here...I'm shocked you think that true love is so easy to find :). I was being half-facetious...but yes, if you do happen to find your one-and-only, you should do the mature thing and pursue the relationship in a way that doesn't damage the academic potential of all the other students. Or at least wait until the student has graduated. > You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion. Sorry but this is a serious LOL to me. At many medical schools, staff doctors are forbidden to take even a $50 dinner from a pharmaceutical company. Much of that policy is grounded in the desire to avoid the appearance of impropriety...but you have to think of it from the perspective of the pharma company. They have up-to-the-day data on prescribing habits of doctors. They have the analytics that show that even casual visits by an attractive/charismatic pharma salesperson has a direct impact on the doctor's prescribing habits. I doubt that the pharma companies have data on what happens if such visits turn into sexual relationships, but I'm going to guess that the correlation only gets stronger. So let's assume that grading policy is more objective, more sanctified than the process of objectively prescribing life-saving drugs...even if that were the case, the problem is not just about meting out grades, but priorities. You must have experienced the phenomenon in which students who take the time to go to office hours often do better than students who don't...because they've spent hours picking your brain about the right way to think about things. Well, when you've chosen a student (or even several) to have intimate relationships...the hours that you have to freely conduct your duties with non-significant-others is reduced. Maybe you're objective enough to give your lover a B instead of bumping him/her up to an A...but are you really going to ignore them when they ask for help on their papers and homework? And again, the problem is not just the practical reduction in time that you have to carry out your duties, or the impact on your objectivity...the problem is also the appearance of impropriety. Maybe you are the stone-cold objective professor who manages to keep love and work completely separate (keep in mind that now we're really in fantasy land at this point)...but your students do not have a window to your soul. Their guess is that you are in the 99% of human beings that can't be objective in that situation, and their trust in the academic process is going to be somewhat jaded. And a university does not benefit from a reputation of faculty who freely pursue relationships with students; you can imagine that many parents do not see such relationships as a bonding between consenting, free-willed adults.

TallGuyShort 11y ago

It doesn't really matter if YOU THINK you can keep the feelings separate. What matters is that it damages the trust and confidence that students and everyone to whom their credentials are shown have in your judgement. It's a choice between career suicide because you choose to pursue a certain relationship instead, or career suicide because your integrity is in question.

s73v3r 11y ago

I would think that, regardless if the professor is capable of separating their feelings, it's always going to look like favoritism.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Then I guess we should ban being human. Even the most egalitarian people are not free from biases, nor they have consistent and stable mood. And even if a perfect egalitarian demigod were to be making decisions, someone would still find something to misinterpret in his/her actions in order to build an outrage-inducing story. Reducing negative effects of human nature is hard as it is, but it becomes pretty much impossible when there are people with malicious intentions looking for you to do a single wrong step.

scott_s 11y ago

I think danso's response is a good one, but I wanted to add to a response to: "You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion." Absolutely I believe that. Humans are host to a smorgasbord of cognitive biases and capable of the most astounding of rationalizations. The rules should acknowledge this.