A recent article about a Harvard study on Generation X faculty members has created some buzz on the Internet this week. The study includes this observation from a participant: “[Gen X] is much less formal. When people in their fifties started out, there was much more distance between faculty and students. If you were meeting with a student, it was for strictly academics and business purposes. … [In contrast, my colleague] down the hall (born in 1966) has always got students in his office. He plays tennis with them. It’s just a completely different relationship …” (page 4).
That observation reminded me of a confession I once heard from a colleague some years ago.
As “Dr. Friendly” picked up her son from day care, she recognized one of her new students, “Sue,” whose son happened to be in the same class. Sue was a slightly older student, not really much younger than Dr. Friendly, and as they chatted several days a week, their children started playing together in the hallway. One day they decided to make a play date at the local zoo. Soon the play dates had turned into a babysitting exchange and shared meals with their families. Even their husbands hit it off and started playing golf together.
Near the end of the semester, Dr. Friendly was grading Sue’s paper and found it to be sloppily edited, poorly researched, and, in reality, headed for a very low grade. She dithered for a few moments, wondering how the grade would affect their friendship. She wondered if Sue had presumed that she would grade the paper less critically. In that moment, she realized that their relationship was probably inappropriate, given the difference in their relative “power” during the semester, and she regretted allowing herself to drift into it. We all know the dangers of faculty-student romances, but there are other kinds of potentially inappropriate relationships as well.
Anytime grades, letters of recommendations, or even job assignments are placed at the mercy of such relationships, there is danger aplenty. When a professor pauses before making a decision about any of these things for a student, whether it’s a babysitter, a tennis buddy, or a fellow barbershop-quarter member, it’s a sign that care needs to be taken to preserve the propriety of the relationship.
What are the warning signs of inappropriate relationships among faculty and students?
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14 Responses to Testing Faculty–Student Relationships
tuxthepenguin - March 8, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Your first paragraph is exactly the opposite of David Evans’ last post.
ksledge - March 8, 2010 at 3:57 pm
I was just thinking the exact same thing.
swish - March 8, 2010 at 6:13 pm
I’ve known professors of various generations who tend to be friendly and “fraternize” with students — and many who don’t. But even if the generalization were valid, it’s really not necessary for the point. The issue of inappropriate relationships need not be confined to any generational cohort.The generational issue might be relevant, however, in that certain behaviors may now be taken much more seriously than in years past. A pat on the shoulder or a compliment can turn into a harassment suit. So I would guess that older professors might be more likely to overlook the danger in such minor gestures of shared humanity …
22038540 - March 8, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Faculty members need to be very careful in having any but very transparent and relatively distant relationships with their students. What they need to think about is this: if a student complains, and the institution faces a choice between expensive litigation and dismissing the faculty member, with whom is the university’s lawyer likely to side? Faculty need to remember that the general counsel is not THEIR lawyer, but the UNIVERSITY’s lawyer.
lizgibbons - March 9, 2010 at 6:42 am
Donna Farhi has written a book which discusses and gives opportunity to reflect on relationships such as these. It’s excellent; the second half of the title is “Exploring the Teacher-Student Relationship.” Don’t let the first half of the title deter you (“Teaching yoga”), it contains much ethical wisdom and is appropriate for any professor.
snwiedmann - March 9, 2010 at 7:43 am
How would Dr. Friendly have felt about having those chats with Sue, while their children played together nearby,in front of the other students in Sue’s class? One gauge we can use as faculty to test the wisdom and appropriateness of our relationships with students is just that: Are you willing for all your students to know about the nature and extent of the special relationship with student X? If not, the relationship is probably problematic in some way. You can be friendly without being friends. This is, perhaps, one of the most important lessons for faculty to learn — and practice.
suffering - March 9, 2010 at 10:23 am
A professor, my husband, secured grants which provided three years of out of state tuition to three students, free laptops, free student fees and $1600/month for expenses. All of the students flunked out of the original degree program, so he spent a lot of time getting them into another dept.’s program. Maybe one of them will finish. My husband has taken NO money/salary for himself from the grants. The one potentially successful student has “borrowed” over $20,000 (yes, twenty thousand) from my husband over the past 2-1/2 years. He’s taken most of it out of our “emergency” account and paid the student in cash. I just recently found out about it. Another one of the students has “borrowed” between $2,000 nd $3,000.He defends his actions by saying he’s their “mentor” — apparently teaching fiscal responsibility is not important — and it’s his money to do with what he wants, he says.He’s a senior citizen (over 65 years old), sometimes is confused and can’t remember things. His family has noticed this.I feel like going to the police and reporting financial exploitation of a senior. Trying to get information out of the students is difficult if not impossible. They both insist the money was a “gift” — including advancement on a paycheck that was late in arriving! Not in my book.Suggestions from readers? HELP!!!
pmckechn - March 9, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Somebody who is ‘sometimes … confused and can’t remember things’ is past it and ought to retire. That’ll solve the problem of ‘lending’ money to students.As for Dr. Friendly, Sue had got no hold over her if their friendship consisted only of the things Gene C. Fant, Jr. reports. He doesn’t tell the end of the story, but I hope she hardened up and gave Sue the correct grade.
akprof - March 9, 2010 at 5:50 pm
PLEASE get your husband evaluated by a health provider skilled in working with seniors – that had to be your first step in determining if he had been exploited in a legal sense (it’s pretty clear that, even if he is not disgnosable with some ailment, he had been exploited – I’ll bet he has a reputation among graduate students for being a “soft touch”.). Do get him evaluated medically!
readandwept - March 10, 2010 at 9:05 pm
“How would Dr. Friendly have felt about having those chats with Sue, while their children played together nearby,in front of the other students in Sue’s class?”I don’t know why she wouldn’t have felt fine about it. I guess norms vary, but in my department it is fairly common for faculty (junior and senior) to develop personal friendships with grad students. I suppose it can be awkward when fairly harsh feedback needs to be given, but we’re all professionals here. And professional colleagues need to navigate personal and professional ties of all kinds.
mssmiley - March 11, 2010 at 11:50 am
The teacher student relationship has to be what it is “teacher to student.” Whenever one person holds a position of unequal power, the lines should be drawn and maintained. As a student advisor, I try to mentor students, but also maintain boundaries, because there are times when students don’t want to hear the hard truth, or you have to tell them that they are not eligible to enroll in a course, or that they are not graduating. Bottom line, don’t cross the line.
selewis - March 11, 2010 at 2:52 pm
It’s important to distinguish between true friendship, on the one hand, and “being buddies,” on the other. Personally, I have no interest in the latter. True friendship involves caring for the other’s destiny. I have no problem grading the students who are my friends, precisely because our friendship involves my caring for their development as students (and as human beings). If I didn’t give the work the grade it deserved, I would be betraying the friendship.
chroniclebarnacle - March 11, 2010 at 9:10 pm
Dear Suffering- are you serious??? Take the checkbook and any other means to access the family money away from him asap and get him some professional help. You might want to get some conselling yourself. I am not being ugly but a serious line was crossed here. Good luck to you-
michaelharrawood - March 12, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Yeah. . . I dunno. If we really want to say Friendly and her adult student cannot maintain the boundaries of their professional and personal connections, we are leaving it to the institution to set those boundaries. Cristina Nehring wrote a very interesting piece for Harpers a few years ago about institutions monitoring their faculty-student relations and making the determination of what we would naturally and perhaps without critique call “appropriate relations.” Her institution sanctioned a professor in one of the sciences after they started a relationship while she was a grad student in English. Different discipline, different building, other end of the campus. Now they’re married and have kids.I also am married to a former student. She fell in love with me when she came in as a freshman, and, even though we played it cautiously by the book and didn’t get together until well after she graduated, everybody knew about it all along. It is certainly also the case, as Nehring suggests in the Harpers article, that my wife worked harder and performed better because of her feelings for her teacher. The whole faculty of our little liberal arts college came to the wedding. I guess I am luckier than Nehring and her husband.If a touch on the shoulder or a compliment can potentially lead to charges and dismissal, I think we have an obligation to formulate some sort of discursive resistance to a logic of accuation and surveillance that belongs to the institution and not to its workers. Maybe this is because I teach in humanities and have a vested interest in big vocabularies and complex sentences; my job only has value in a world where “You look nice today” doesn’t have to mean “Let’s f*ck.” I can understand why institutions and their lawyers might want guidelines like this. But we don’t have to like it.So. What are the warning signs? Shall we write up a top-ten list? Let the Dean or OEO provide us with one? Honestly, I don’t know. I do know, however, that faculty and students will never be successful talking about this if we keep using the institution’s language.Michael HarrawoodHarriet L. Wilkes Honors CollegeFAU