Gender, Power, and Sexuality: First, Do No Harm

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By ANN J. LANE

Bill Clinton understood and acknowledged his motives, as few have. When asked why he engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky, what did he say? "Because I could."

Teachers seduce students because they can. Those few who have admitted their behavior to me in private conversations blame the terrors of middle age, loss of will, the lust aroused by students. Students sometimes succeed in seducing teachers because they can. But whoever makes the initial overture, the decision and the responsibility rest with the teacher.

Sex is not the issue. Sexual prudery is not the issue. Sexual freedom is not the issue. Power is the issue. The inevitable power difference between teacher and student, whatever the teacher's intention or motivation, makes it impossible for the student to be a fully consenting adult. What is called "romance" between professor and student is often rooted in power and control. A teacher's role is to provide intellectual guidance and professional support and advice. Such a role is antithetical to that of lover and constitutes an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust. Most of us pay lip service to that. But how many secretly backtrack, telling themselves that students today are different, more mature than they once were? And how many resist what most other industries have in place, a professionwide policy about consensual relationships?

In the course of writing a book about "sex and the professors," I have come to realize that in every department of a reasonable size, in every college and university, there are colleagues who are having or have had sexual relations with one or more students. But those relationships are secret: Many faculty members deny that "consensual" relationships happen on their campuses. Despite the adoption of codes at many colleges banning sexual harassment as well as consensual relationships, academics would rather ignore those relationships and their effects until something triggers wider public attention. The knowledge that students have of sexual relations between faculty members and students is widespread. In the most recent survey I conducted, in March 2006, in a class of 190 students at a state university, 37 percent of the students reported knowing of at least one such relationship.

When a new national story hits the papers, the issue of sex between faculty members and students explodes again, as it did in 2000 with a story in GQ magazine, in which an English professor at the College of William and Mary described his sexual encounters with a student. A few years later, the writer Naomi Wolf described the shock and pain she remembers from when the eminent Harold Bloom made a sexual overture to her when she was a 20-year-old Yale senior. On some campuses, fallout from an affair between a student and a professor prompts the institution to adopt policies banning such relationships, as was the case in 2002 with Ohio Wesleyan University.

While sex between faculty members and students has a known history, as many long-term marriages illustrate, the story has changed dramatically since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In the last several decades, female students have come to be seen by male professors as more experienced, adventurous, and knowledgeable than the professors themselves are. In the course of my research, several middle-aged male professors confided in me that they regard women in their classes as a pool from which to draw upon to emancipate themselves from the sexual inhibitions of their generation. Some look at long, perhaps no longer exciting, marriages and then face in their classes young, sexually active women — often imagining them as more sexually active and knowledgeable than they are. To the professors, these students are not girlish as women of their own generation were. They now call themselves "women," one professor told me, and that is what they look like, and that is how they act.

Sexual relations between faculty members and students do occasionally involve woman faculty members and male students, as well as same-sex faculty members and students. But most relationships occur between male faculty members, frequently older and married, and female students, and in a significant number of such relationships, the woman students suffer, some seriously. The "consent" of students is secured before they have the experience and knowledge to understand their situation or the meaning of the concept of informed consent.

As a result of my work at the University of Virginia on a policy that would have prohibited sexual relationships between faculty members and students (the final version did not prohibit but expressed disapproval of such relationships), I started to receive requests to speak at colleges. People began to contact me with their stories — mostly, but not entirely, negative, and mostly, but not entirely, from women about male professors. Most shared two characteristics: the need to tell their stories in surprisingly intimate detail and the intense dread of being identified.

I'll draw on one of those stories to illustrate the complexity for the student of understanding her situation. Cynthia was a striking blonde in her mid 30s, movie-star gorgeous, subtle and sexual, and also very smart and hard-working. She was teaching full time at a small, not prestigious college and was married to a faculty member at the college. Years before, as an unmarried graduate student at a highly reputable university, she had developed what she called an "erotic relationship" with her professor that lasted two years. He had made the initial overture, urging her to choose him as her dissertation adviser. He was 25 years older than she, with an "open" marriage, or so he said. He often sought her out at department events, hovering in ways that were possessive and suggestive. She was uncomfortable but flattered by the attention.

Slowly Cynthia realized that everybody — students, teachers, and staff members — was talking about them. It eventually occurred to her that the reputation she was developing was not good for her, and she decided to leave the institution as soon as she received her master's degree, although she had not planned to do so. She was afraid to tell her adviser, though he never threatened her and did not punish her when she finally did leave. Cynthia was cool and composed as she told this story. She described herself as liking to "live on the edge" and, having a great deal of sexual experience, she said that she approached the entire episode without much anguish. She moved on. Her unplanned decision to switch universities in the middle of her graduate studies was a problem, but she handled that well, too, she assured me.

Several weeks after we had talked, she wrote to me with additional reflections, which she had not allowed herself to explore until my lecture. "Just thinking about it makes me upset now." The stress she felt then was only now apparent, she said, noting that she had developed an ulcer in her last year in the master's program. She recalled that one of her professors took her aside to inform her about her sullied reputation (note that it was her reputation that was sullied, not her adviser's). She was perceived as a "bimbo, and a blonde one at that." One of the readers of her master's essay commented to her, with surprise, "I had no idea you were this bright." At the time, she had considered herself a consenting adult. Today, nearly 10 years later, as she deals with her own students, Cynthia considers the responsibility to have been her professor's. What continues to bother her is that she fell for his attentions, she who had been so sexually wise. "I now believe it is important to try to rein in this behavior, to limit as much as possible the probability that young people will be seduced as much by the flattering attention of a learned person, an authority who seems to pay court to one's mind, as by anything physical," she said.

From conversations with woman students and graduates like Cynthia, it is increasingly clear that many have a poignant desire not to be victims, not to be overwhelmed by stories of violence against women, glass ceilings, and wage gaps. For most, their goal is personal success. These younger women, especially those under 30, do not want to be angry at the world, as earlier feminists were. They want to be part of it, achieve success in it. We older feminists wanted that too, believed we had a right to it, and, when denied, fought back as a cohesive group.

Young women today do not want to relinquish the belief that they can handle everything on their own. When they are the objects of sexual overtures from their teachers, many do not see the manipulative power at work. They insist that they are fully adult and capable of taking care of themselves. They reject efforts to protect them as "infantilizing."

Not all college and university women are so naïve. The more mature recognize that the reality is different. Their maturity allows them to comprehend their vulnerability.

The reality is that we live in a society that is still ambivalent toward women's struggles for achievement, independence, and equality. Although girls are increasingly told they can accomplish whatever they choose, they still hear the opposite message coming from the larger culture, urging them to be deferential and compliant. The juxtaposition of contradictory messages undermines the students' ability to comprehend the reality of their situation and blinds them to their defenselessness. That vulnerability becomes apparent when the teacher-student sexual relationship ends, as it invariably does.

As director of women's-studies programs for 20 years, I have heard countless stories from women, and some men, confirming my observations. Students throughout the years have described the difficulty of walking into a chemistry building, an anthropology class, or a dean's office, in terror of encountering a former faculty lover. Undergraduates have described to me the painful decision to change a major to avoid such an encounter. More than one graduate student has told of the need to drop out or switch to another graduate school.

In other parts of society — the business world, the mental-health professions, the legal profession, government, and the armed services — policies address what are deemed inappropriate relations. Social workers, psychologists, lawyers, doctors, and ethicists talk openly about the subject, and their professional organizations have regulations prohibiting sexual relations between those in authority and those subject to that authority. Although the issue in the academy has received attention, it is individual institutions that are creating policies and addressing the issue, not the profession as a whole.

Are we so different, and if so, why? Do the faculty commitment to autonomy in the classroom and the relationship between teacher and student set the academy apart? Independence and freedom from outside authority make college teaching particularly attractive, especially for tenured professors. The long history of the university in the United States underscores the struggles for academic freedom — the independence of faculty members from intrusion by administrators, boards of trustees, or outside political pressure. That privileged autonomy is cherished. But the commitment to academic freedom never included or took any notice of accountability of faculty members to students. Academic freedom spoke to, and continues to speak to, the rights of faculty members.

The relationship between teacher and student, somewhat parallel to that between pastor and parishioner, therapist and client, doctor and patient, requires the kind of trust that will allow the student to make herself open and vulnerable to risks that are at base intellectual but go far beyond the rational. Candid teachers acknowledge the erotic component in teaching and learning, but teachers must not satisfy their needs by way of students. We learn much from our students, but our responsibility is to help them, not us. To undermine that delicate teacher-student process by introducing sexual intimacy is an unforgivable violation of that trust. With mature students, the question may seem to be different, but the power relationship, regardless of age, remains.

Sex between professor and student goes beyond the privacy of two people; it affects the community they share with other students and professors. Sexual relations between male teachers and female students, however well intentioned, undermine the creation of gender equity. Women may be in the university, but treating them as objects of sexual desire is a way of sending a message to all women, reminding us once again that we are not intellectual equals. Until the 20th century, the university was a place for men of privilege to teach other men of privilege. Today women make up the majority of college students, but many still feel out of place — impostors in drag, as one writer put it.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established that discrimination on the basis of sex was unlawful. The legal guidelines banning sexual harassment were established later, in 1980, by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and were broadened to apply to the university. The definition of what constitutes sexual harassment continues to change and expand, but whatever it is, it is illegal. In principle, everyone opposes sexual harassment, however defined.

No such consensus exists about consensual relationships. In fact, they were initially assumed to be acceptable and noncoercive. It is true that consensual relations are different, or seem to be, because there is no substantial agreement as to whether these relations are good or bad; should be banned or ignored or encouraged; whether it is anyone's business, including the college administration's, to address such relationships; whether such relations are a legitimate communication between consenting adults; or whether they inevitably are an abuse of power.

The university should be a safe place in which students can study and learn in ways that help them cope with the adult world they are in the process of joining. Most academics take those responsibilities seriously. Young people may think of themselves as adults. Teachers must honor that sense of self while recognizing that most students are not fully adult.

Professors hold positions of privilege and authority with students that are not mirrored in the larger culture. College professors are highly educated, but our incomes are lower than those of most others with comparable educational backgrounds. Our assumed wisdom is not esteemed as highly as it is professed because we are paid so poorly and the activities are often seen as irrelevant. The seeming respect is simultaneously tinged with disdain, for we are often seen as hiding from the serious struggles of the world.

When students discover that their parents are not the source of all wisdom or even basic intelligence, the repository of new interest is their teachers. Students — undergraduate, graduate, and professional — have been in school all their lives, and they take us seriously. What we often get from our students is respect, recognition, even adoration, infatuation, and veneration. Such an explosive situation can lead to exploitation and manipulation. And it does, for a few, but a few can damage many.

If students often exaggerate the brilliance of their teachers, teachers often exaggerate the sexual experience and sexual sophistication of their female students. Some woman students wear what to middle-aged and older men appears to be provocative clothing. These students are physically mature, they seem to know they are, and they seem more composed, more centered, more in charge of themselves than they are and than they feel.

When I began my book, I thought I would find few surprises. Quite the contrary. I was astonished at how many more intimate relationships between faculty members and students exist than I had imagined, and I had imagined a considerable amount.

I was astonished at how much information graduate students, and many undergraduates, have about the intimate lives of their professors. Students gossip, share confidences, study their professors more than we realize, as do all at the lower rungs study carefully those above them.

I was astonished by how clueless many faculty members, primarily male, are concerning the impact of their behavior or that of their colleagues on students. I was astonished at the insistence of professors, particularly but not entirely male, who are appalled at the idea of professors' engaging in sexual behavior with students and insist that their colleagues would not do, and do not do, such a thing.

Is there a profile? Not one that is reliable. Various colleagues across the nation explained to me why the transgressive professors are primarily from the departments of English, sociology, history, political science, art, biology, or the schools of business, architecture, medicine, and law. They are, I have been informed, almost always gay men, straight men, lesbians, middle-aged men, men about to retire, very young men raised in a sexually free culture, married men, single women, sexually starved middle-aged women, white men, black men, Latinos. Did I leave anyone out? In reality, all my confidants are correct.

What is very much needed, and immediately, is an open and continuing conversation at colleges and universities and especially in professional organizations on the need for guiding principles for ethical behavior between faculty members and students. Students, the least powerful, need the education to understand their vulnerability and how they can protect themselves. It is crucial to begin that public conversation now to educate the entire community about the need for policies on ethical relations between teachers and students.

We all know about the Hippocratic oath that doctors take: Do no harm. Perhaps we need a comparable pledge in the teaching profession. We have hundreds of tomes written over hundreds of years describing the goals and aspirations of institutions of learning. No one has said — until now — that they should be places safe from sexual misconduct by apparent consent.

Ann J. Lane is a professor of history and director of studies in women and gender at the University of Virginia.