First Person

I Walk the Line

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By Pamela Johnston

"Doctor J!"

I've learned to live with the fact that my students apparently don't see the irony in giving a shortish (and decidedly nonathletic) woman this nickname. Still, I can't help smiling when I hear it. That day the greeting came from James, a student I hadn't seen in nearly a full semester -- a smart boy with a good heart and bad study habits, a student I'd worried about from the moment I first met him.

I waved in response, glad to see him, relieved to know he was still on the campus. That's when he came loping toward me across the courtyard, his arms flung open to give me a hug.

Let me say, first of all, that I consider myself a warm and friendly person, although I am not a social hugger. More important, I realized in that moment that I wasn't sure whether it was appropriate for me to hug a student.

There are certain occasions in which I wouldn't question that -- commencement, for instance, where hugs are as natural a part of the landscape as mortarboards. But that morning I was standing in the middle of a campus courtyard, in the middle of a regular day.

Still, I didn't want James to feel embarrassed by the gesture. He had come to my office many times over the last two years, to discuss girlfriend trouble and difficult family dynamics as well as the challenges he had faced in various classes. I had offered a sympathetic ear or a kick in the pants, whatever he needed. I had been his adviser since he arrived two years before, and I valued the connection I had made with him. The fact that I hadn't seen James for several months had led me to worry that he'd finally quit school, as his parents had requested many times, to find a full-time job that would help to support his large family.

So I was glad to discover that wasn't the case. Surely, I told myself, there was nothing wrong with a hug to let him know that.

But there are, in fact, many good reasons for drawing and maintaining a line between students and professors -- the line between friendliness and friendship. While I may sometimes act toward my students as a friend would, listening to them when they need to talk or giving advice, I think it's important for my students to understand that I am not their friend -- or, at least, not in the same way their peers are. Friends are equals. Accessible and open as I try to make myself, the fact is that I have more authority on our campus than any of my students do.

That's most obvious in the classroom. I work hard to create a learning environment where student voices are heard just as often as my own, but I don't pretend anyone forgets that I'm the person who starts and ends a class meeting, who will turn in grades at the end of the semester. Although students come to me with questions and concerns about those grades, the final decision is always mine.

But students also come to me outside the classroom with questions and concerns that have nothing to do with grades. In those cases my authority extends beyond the classroom and into my office. Some of my colleagues refer such students to a campus counselor, afraid that crossing the line from professor to sympathetic listener will compromise their objectivity.

I share that concern. It's hard to give a student the D she's earned when you know the difficult personal circumstances that contributed to her performance. But I joined the faculty at a small college because I wanted the opportunity to know my students as the complex people they are, not merely as names I've matched with faces for a few months.

So where does the line between friendly behavior and friendship start to blur?

I remember a professor at my doctoral institution who was always cordial and approachable, although not overtly friendly -- not until the day after I'd passed my oral exams, at which point she put an arm around my shoulders and offered her congratulations. The change in that professor's demeanor was clearly attached to my new status as a full-fledged peer and potential colleague. I had crossed an important line, it seemed, in taking those final steps toward graduation. Now it was possible for the two of us to be something more like friends.

In that moment I perceived the balance this professor had struck in her life, the clear line separating her professional and personal selves.

I didn't know how thin and obscured that line could become when I started teaching at a small college, where I see the same students in several different classes over the course of four years. We spend a lot of time together, so naturally we get to know one another well. But because I'm the professor, it's up to me to remind my students that we are not friends, that there are some lines they cannot cross.

Not long ago, for instance, I had to tell a student I respect and admire -- a student with whom I've worked closely on several projects -- that she couldn't make disparaging comments about one of my colleagues. Not to me. Not in my office.

Some of my graduate-school colleagues actively tried to blur those lines by holding office hours in a local coffee shop rather than the communal graduate-student office. "That C is so much less threatening when you're just two people having a chat over coffee," one colleague explained. But obscuring the line doesn't erase it. When you present yourself as a friend, a C might seem more like a betrayal than an accurate assessment of the student's performance.

Yet students sometimes cross that line to reveal information that begs for our attention, and in those moments, how should we respond? Do we gloss over them, implicitly telling the student that this is information we would rather not know? Do we refer the student to a campus counselor, preserving the ostensibly objective student-teacher dynamic but risking the implication that we just don't care? Or do we cross the professional line and respond as a friend might, with sympathy and compassion -- and, occasionally, a hug?

I realize my male colleagues have to be much more careful in this dicey territory. In fact, when I mentioned the scene with James to my husband, also an academic, his response was immediate: "I would never hug a student." And it must be said that in a training video I watched with my colleagues at the beginning of this year, the people who crossed the line between friendly familiarity and sexual harassment were nearly always male, their victims female. (Nearly, but not always. A token female scientist in the video told her lab assistant, "I expect the people who work for me to do anything I ask. And I do mean ... anything." )

I suspect that brand of overt suggestiveness is fairly uncommon outside the carefully crafted world of training videos, where everyone's intentions are (painfully) clear. Much more common is the hand on a knee or a shoulder, the friendly hug, any of which might be offered spontaneously, in joy or sympathy, and received -- or perceived by onlookers -- as evidence of something else.

When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors was fond of throwing an arm around my shoulders whenever I bumped into him on campus. That was the same professor who began the semester by saying, "Call me Jack." I remember feeling annoyed, rather than put at ease, by a professor who tried to break down the student-teacher barrier, treating our classroom as a community of equals. I knew it wasn't really true, since only one of us had the grade book.

But back then it didn't occur to me to complain about that arm around my shoulders. I found it embarrassing, not suggestive, so I just avoided him when I could. The point is, he should never have crossed that line in the first place: It wouldn't have occurred to me to throw an arm around a professor, and it shouldn't have occurred to him.

Fortunately I can't imagine one of my male colleagues greeting a female student that way now. We all know better, and training videos make sure of that. But none of the training helped me decide how to greet the student who just wanted to give me a hug. I'll admit that it surprised me to feel so conflicted over what seems like such a simple thing. But I've come to the conclusion that the position we occupy in our students' lives isn't simple at all: We inhabit that odd space between their adulthood and their independence. It helps to remind ourselves of that whenever we offer them our guidance.

I'm confident that all of my students know this much: When they're ready to walk across that stage at commencement, they'll find me waiting for them on the other side with open arms.