Harvard bans dating between profs and undergrads

Harvard University said on Thursday that it was changing the sexual and gender-based harassment policy for its Faculty of Arts and Sciences to prohibit faculty and undergraduate students from engaging in romantic relationships of any kind (PDF).

The new policy, which applies to Harvard College and its graduate school but not its law or medical schools, bans sexual relationships between faculty and undergraduate students in an effort to define appropriate behavior more clearly and adhere to the requirements of Title IX, a federal education law that bars discrimination on the basis of gender. The previous policy discussed “unequal status relationships,” discouraging professors from having relationships with students who were enrolled in their classes.

Harvard has been reviewing its sexual harassment and assault policies in part because it is one of more than 90 colleges and universities that are under investigation by the Department of Education because of students’ complaints about how their sexual assault cases were handled. In December, the department found that Harvard Law School’s response to sexual harassment and assault had violated Title IX’s requirements about prompt and equitable handling of such cases.

As administrators discussed the school’s sexual harassment policies as a whole, they decided they wanted to more explicitly state that undergraduates and faculty should be barred from romantic involvement, regardless of whether a student was in the professor’s course. The rule will also apply to graduate students, forbidding them from relationships with professors who supervise their work and from relationships with undergraduates whose work they may supervise.

“We just wanted to make it more straightforward, and more obviously address that we have a pedagogical responsibility for all undergraduate students at Harvard College, not just the ones in our own classrooms,” said Alison Johnson, a Harvard history professor who led the committee that reviewed the guidelines.

Johnson told Al Jazeera that the committee had wanted to create a more comprehensive statement on sexual harassment-related issues, and emphasized that the policy update was not based on any particular complaint on campus about student-faculty relationships. She said the new policy is not a drastic change. “I think this is consistent with already existing culture at Harvard,” she said.

Other universities already have similar bans in place. Yale University banned romantic relationships between students and faculty in 2010, according to Bloomberg, which reported that the school had since disciplined some faculty for violating that policy. The University of Connecticut moved to ban student-faculty relationships in 2013. And Arizona State University’s student senate ruled in January to extend its policy against professors dating students enrolled in their classes to including students who can “reasonably be expected” to be under a professor’s academic or employment authority, according to The Arizona Republic.

The question of student relationships with faculty has not received much attention in the recent debate about sexual consent and appropriate behavior. Sexual assault of students by other students, however, was the subject of a presidential panel, which released recommendations for addressing the problem of campus sexual assault in April 2014.

But the movement to reform the way universities handle sexual assault has its roots in the issue of student-faculty relationships. In 1977, female students at Yale filed a lawsuit alleging that their male professors had tried to proposition them with offers of better grades in exchange for sexual favors, though it was eventually dismissed. Students at U.C. Berkeley formed a student organization to combat sexual assault in 1978, lodging a complaint to the chancellor about a sociology professor who was accused of harassing more than a dozen students.

Sofie Karasek, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the leaders of the school’s anti-sexual assault movement, told Al Jazeera in an email that while most of the cases she hears about involve students, it’s important to halt harassment on campuses across the board. “While it seems that most cases are between students, not faculty and students, prohibiting potentially exploitative relationships is still an important step forward that other universities ought to take if they have not already done it.”