The problem with university culture isn’t sexual paranoia

A specter haunts academia, we are told: the specter of sexual paranoia. In a much-shared essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis decries the 21st century prohibition on fraternization between teachers and undergraduates.

“When I was in college,” she writes, “hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum.” But now their adult choices are corralled by infantilizing conduct policies designed by impersonal bureaucrats who are just trying to protect themselves from lawsuits. These policies, according to Kipnis, turn students into helpless melodramatic victims, irresponsible by nature.

In her essay, Kipnis points out some reasonable exceptions to anti-fraternization policies. Can a gay male professor compliment a female student’s haircut? What if a star golfer wants to ask out her trainer? And what about the teacher-pupil lovers who want to spend the rest of their lives together? My own grandparents come to mind, he in school on the GI bill, she a slightly older no-nonsense teaching assistant. Rules are by design blind to the particulars of any situation, and rules meant to govern power dynamics between individuals are bound to be wrong on occasion. But if the letter of the law lends itself to abuse, does that invalidate the spirit?

Northwestern’s policy, which Kipnis singles out, seems pretty reasonable on its face:

When undergraduate students are involved, the difference in institutional power and the inherent risk of coercion are so great that no faculty member or coaching staff member shall enter into a romantic, dating, or sexual relationship with a Northwestern undergraduate student, regardless of whether there is a supervisory or evaluative relationship between them.

As a commandment, this yields “What if …” or “Not all …” type objections. But as a standard “Please don’t screw the students” code of conduct for coaches and faculty, it sounds eminently reasonable. And as a response to philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, who is still employed even after a Northwestern investigation found he liquored up a 19-year-old student and groped her after she passed out at his apartment (a story Kipnis conveniently skates around), the policy is restrained. If Kipnis isn’t exaggerating too much and hooking up with students used to be an assumed part of academia, then that’s an exploitative situation that demands remedy. Curricula are, after all, designed by teachers and applied to students. Under such a setup it’s virtually impossible to guarantee students’ rights to education free from discrimination under Title IX. Just as you’re not allowed to smoke in bars even if the staff wants to light up too, sex with students creates an atmosphere thick with workplace discrimination.

But even if the rule is sensible, creating a rule always has downsides — not the least of which is, as Kipnis points out, breaking rules is sexy. And worse than the policies being over-inclusive — there exists no right to teach, and no one is going to jail for consensual sex — is the threat of their being underinclusive. Plenty of exploitative and abusive relationships won’t fall afoul of whatever rule you make. And just because two people are institutional equals does not mean their affair isn’t coercive in practice. It raises that old question, What do we owe to one another?

In a blog post, medievalist Dorothy Kim writes about what happens when people know exactly what they can get away with. She describes an atmosphere of persistent harassment, where junior female academics are constantly forced to dance around the unwelcome attention of older, more established men. A whisper network tries to keep young women in the field informed about whom to avoid without rocking the boat too much. Medieval studies is far from unique: A 2014 peer-reviewed survey of social, life, and earth scientists found harassment and sexual assault common, while accountability mechanisms were ineffective and underused. Clearly the academic community is not holding itself to a standard of sexual propriety that is unreasonably high.

Whenever Americans start talking about monitoring the behavior of others, someone shouts “Witch hunt!” But the lesson from Salem is not that we should all mind our own business. It’s important to remember that the witches weren’t real, and the bystanders who let those women burn did mind their own business. In this case, by any standard you’d like to use, the threat and the harm are very real. I don’t believe we really need a rule to tell us what exploitation and coercion looks like, but that doesn’t mean we’re willing to do anything about it. As long as we hold ourselves and one another simply to the letter of the law, we can’t be trusted to protect our own communities, inside or outside academia.

In crafting these policies, the university is wearing three hats: It’s a pseudo-state making a criminal code, a corporation looking out for its legal liability and a community trying to care for its members. Even though schools may be more worried about the first two, the third is what interests me because it applies beyond the university. When we craft policies, we focus on compliance, often to a shamefully low standard (“Don’t rape.”) It’s easy to outsource our ethics to the professionals, especially in the murky and historically fraught zone of other people’s sex lives. But the result is workplace and social communities where we have abdicated our basic responsibility to look out for the welfare of our friends, acquaintances and coworkers. Without a commitment to collective care and vigilance, impersonal rules seem like the only way to hold people accountable for predatory behavior. And that’s not good enough.