Harvard Asks Its Faculty Not To Sleep With The Students

Story here.

The report claims that faculty members are not to sleep with undergraduates.

A few questions:

1) Are graduate students fair game because they are older and wiser? Can a professor directing someone’s thesis, someone for whom he will be writing an important recommendation, sleep with that someone?

2) What about teaching fellows, themselves only a few years older than those they are teaching as section men ? Don’t they have a right to a social life? Yes, the course of true love never did run smooth, but shouldn’t a poor, possibly gauche, section man have the chance to woo and win a student, to get practice in taking someone out and all that follows, in order to find a wife (or husband) before going off to a place where the pool of possible mates will be smaller? What about an exemption for all those who teach but are unmarried, and under the age of 30? Wouldn’t that be fair? And don’t we want, we readers of Pareto or Picketty, a circulation of elites, a litte redistribution of wealth through marriage, with the impecunious teaching fellow having a chance to possibly marry someone able to make his subsequent, otherwise financially difficult life, more endurable, and even allow for the possibly of procreation, so that the high I.Q. pool doesn’t dry up completely?  What’s so wrong with that?

3) Are administrators — there are so many nowadays — covered by this rule? Let’s say, for example, that the Dean of Students finds that  impressionable young girls come in for advice, during  their first confusing year away from home, and he not only get to look them over (That’s How Facebook Was Born), but  to offer avuncular advice, and win their trust, and possibly something more? Why should administrators be exempt?

4) Or suppose you are a professorofgovernment who then becomes an administrator, or perhaps you are both a professor of government and an administrator at the same iime? Are you forbidden from doing something as a professor that, as an administrator, you are not forbidden from doing?

5) What if you were to sleep with an undergraduate but not because you had any desire to take advantage of her sexually. Perhaps you only had in mind a way to make a mariage de convenance, to secure a most comfortable, future, because what interests you is Truth and Beauty, and you deserve it. Would that be okay if it were understood that not sex but money was your motive all along?

Questions for Study And Discussion!

 

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3 Responses

  1. Hugh, the tone of your post might be a bit off putting to those more fun-loving among us who aspire to the hallowed halls of academia. On the bright side, if we ended up with a greater percentage of actual scholars, that would be a good thing.

  2. A—-n Vet School Dean advise circa 65 re: co-eds, “Don’t sleep with the sheep or ewe’ll get it in the end.”

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