Ms. Mentor

Should Your Private Life Be Public News?

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Question (from "Doris"): I'm a new assistant professor at Smalltown Research U., where my colleagues are 10 to 15 years older than I am. Nothing social has really clicked. But there are many lively, smart graduate students around my age who've been making friendly overtures. Should I be worrying about boundaries?

Question (from "Lavinia"): Because I teach courses on the history of sex, my students often want to talk about their unfinished business -- particularly date rape and sexual assaults. I'm a sexual-abuse survivor myself but don't talk about that in class. I wonder how open I should be with students who hesitate to go to therapists and prefer to confide in me.

Question (from "Matt"): I'm a grad student contemplating an academic career. I also practice S-and-M, responsibly and carefully. If I get a college teaching job, what are the chances that this will cause some dreadful scandal?

Answer: Ms. Mentor sighs and recalls the sage counsel drummed into all her agemates, during the late Victorian era: "Don't do it in the road. You'll frighten the horses."

This month's subject is really discretion: What to share with whom, and whether your private life should be public news. While doing her daily deletion of e-mailed ads for nude celebrities, Ms. Mentor observes sourly that sex has become the most public subject in American life -- yet one with the fewest clear rules.

Doris is not asking, literally, about sex. But if she socializes with the graduate students, and she is their age, and she enjoys their company -- there will be at least frissons and flutters. And then what?

Doris is wise to avoid romantic entanglements. Many colleges now have strict rules against faculty-student sex, even for those not in the same field. Ms. Mentor reminds her young readers that until sexual harassment was given a name, in the last quarter-century, it was much too easy for professors to seduce students and then abandon them to broken hearts and spoiled careers.

Some peculiar individuals still tout such relationships as superb "learning experiences." But cynical Ms. Mentor wonders why such seminars, if they are so enriching, are not offered to everyone. Why not require Professor Playboy to have sex with all his students?

Ms. Mentor will now stop ranting and return to Doris, who -- if she becomes chummy with graduate students -- may find it awkward to write letters of recommendation for good friends whose work is mediocre. She may have torn loyalties when she yearns to gossip about her older colleagues. She may be ill at ease at late-night parties with graduate students if exciting substances are served.

Especially in her first years in a small-town fishbowl, Doris might do best to socialize with students only at public events or sedate dinner parties. Independent and untroubled by rumormongers, Doris will have more time and energy for research and collegial friendships via phone, Internet, and conferences. Once she's academically secure, Doris may want to seek a job at Big City Anonymity U., where she can do as she pleases away from campus.

Lavinia, also wisely, considers the power and propriety of a professor's role when students want to talk about intense and painful personal problems. Many a newish faculty member revels in that kind of sharing, the chance to mentor those not too much younger. It can be one of the thrills of teaching.

And yet sometimes faculty motives are not so pure. Lavinia may be warm and compassionate, but other young professors may be seeking ego boosts at their students' expense. Even Lavinia, as she admits, is not a trained therapist. This does not mean that she is unable to help: Often a listening ear is a gift. But Lavinia may not recognize psychological patterns that a trained therapist would see, and she cannot prescribe anything.

In worst cases, too, universities have been sued for not providing adequate psychiatric help for students who ultimately took their own lives.

Ms. Mentor suggests that Lavinia seek out compassionate and trained counselors on her campus, or in town -- at, for instance, battered-women's programs. Invite counselors to come to her classes as guest speakers, so that students will know who is available and approachable.

But informally, in her office, should Lavinia share her own story? While Ms. Mentor knows that rape crisis centers would not exist without the brave speakouts and consciousness-raising of women's groups in the 1970s, she now believes that a certain distance should be kept between faculty members and students, for the sake of the students' learning. Students should not have to pretend to be bright and objective with someone whose sheets they've been rumpling hours before. Nor should they be thinking of their professors in sexual terms.

However, if Lavinia is teaching older students in a community college in a big city, then she may decide to trust her good instincts and find a discreet balance between the professor and the helper. She may want to use the standard formula for talking about oneself without talking about oneself: "I have this friend who has this problem...."

As for Matt, he, too, must be infinitely discreet if he insists on practicing his sadomasochism. Ms. Mentor feels that his sex life is not her business, if he is doing whatever he is doing with consenting adults. But he should not be doing it with students, ever, and he should not be flaunting it in college towns and scaring the horses.

Young faculty members are often distressed to learn that their students perceive them as graders and judges, rather than as human beings with all the essential drives. Teachers who step outside the reward-or-punish role to become friends with students may enjoy a fulfilling camaraderie, especially in sports.

But if you become a sexual partner, or a comrade in confessions, or a fellow participant in odd rituals, you have overstepped the boundaries that allow students to make their own choices. You have interfered with their intellectual growth for your own purposes, and that is wrong.

Question: I'm a small, young-looking, new faculty member who's often taken for a student and brushed aside and even cussed out. Would I be wrong to get dorky glasses and frumpy clothes to appear older and more serious?

Answer: NO.

SAGE READERS: In winter Ms. Mentor's mailbox is filled with missives from the cold, the sad, and the melancholy -- while the summer evokes rage and revenge fantasies. She is sure that all that energy should be harnessed somehow, by someone.

She has heard from several correspondents who find their older colleagues' teaching uncreative or the course material too thin for an entire semester: "Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width Syndrome," one young fellow calls it.

Ms. Mentor invites correspondence about the rhythms of the academic year, the changes in perspective as faculty members grow older, and any other wintry thoughts. As always, she welcomes rants, gossip, and miscellaneous queries. Anonymity is guaranteed. Ms. Mentor rarely answers questions personally, but assures all that spring will come in 2004.