The Queer Issue: You're Doing It Wrong
Horny Undergrads
How to Fall in Love with Your Professor Without Getting Him Fired
Early in my teaching career, I found a note slipped under my office door: "You're the sexiest professor on campus and if you can figure out who I am then you can have me." The note was more confusing than thrilling, especially since it was from a woman and I'm gay. Actually, I was a little threatened by the note—even as a misidentified object of desire. Universities have gotten more puritan and corporate in the past 20 years, and I had just watched a dean get dragged through the spectacle of publicly defending himself against charges of mishandling sexual harassment complaints. He was finally forced to resign.
I pondered the note for a day before I took it to the chair of the department. He quickly read it, then with a slow grin reached into a desk drawer and pulled out one of those clunky metal stamping machines that records the date and stamped the note "received." He knew I was gay, and his crazy, Kafkaesque gesture was a good joke that made me relax.
Stranger Personals
Universities have changed a lot, but there are still premodern aspects, like the classroom autonomy professors often enjoy and sometimes abuse. Deans can say what they want and have certain weapons in their arsenal, but a tenured professor usually has a remarkable degree of freedom in the classroom. The best professors care about what they are teaching and do give a damn whether or not students learn. The best teachers have an unschooled and unteachable talent to persuade and lead students toward one truth or another. Teaching is a form of seduction. At the same time, universities and colleges just happen to be hotbeds of sexual exploration and discovery for young men and women recently released from parental supervision. Bedding a professor is high on the student trophy list. Students are young, smooth, lean, and sometimes available—a high temptation for some colleagues. It can get messy.
Crazy rumors circulated for years, with sorority girls claiming to have slept with me or definitively knowing a girl who had. When I started getting unsolicited invitations and anonymous notes from young men, I was less amused. If colleagues heard that I was rumored to be fooling around with a young woman, they wouldn't take it seriously, but an athletic, handsome, creative, and sexy man—that's another story. I remember discussing one particularly persistent brilliant and sexy male student with a doctor friend, who told me that physicians often negotiate a similar blurred zone of attraction, authority, and ethics. He had one simple principle: "Never, never, never sleep with anyone crazier than you."
The student in question wasn't clinically crazy, but he was in one of those frenzies that Alcibiades describes in Plato's Symposium. He was brilliant, in love with somebody he thought was smarter than he was, and eager to get into bed with him. He was a little crazed. It would have been easy for me to sleep with him, but probably stupid: He was unpredictable and dramatic. Over the course of a semester, I negotiated my escape from his advances. He finally graduated and moved to Manhattan, where he became a painter and gay activist. (I ran into him one day near the New York Public Library; we had a nice exchange and he encouraged me to "get back in touch.")
Students like to flirt with professors, especially during office hours. It's harmless, insincere, and flattering to those of us who have annual physicals. But when students want attention, I often turn a blind eye. I have a reputation for being a misanthrope when it comes to student social events and sit with a quasi-scowl until I excuse myself from the proceedings. I met my last serious challenge at a department dinner for majors, and even though he was interested in me, I was clueless. He signed up for a seminar I was teaching, and other professors who knew that the student was gay asked what I thought of him. They were all pretty convinced he was the smartest student in the department, and he was awkwardly gay in the most adorable way. I started to warm up, pay attention, and feel some sympathy for him. We began an unspoken ritual where he would show up at my office before class and ask me if I wanted a cup of coffee. We would then walk to the cafe together, chat about nothing, and then walk to class together. I could tell he was nervous, and I thought that made him even more adorable. We slowly graduated to the occasional lunch, and I thought our conversations were more like mentoring sessions—the sympathetic gay professor coaching the young student in queer matters.
Then one day he sprung it on me: He couldn't go with me and a group of students on an overnight trip because it would just be too difficult; his interests in me were not just academic. I was impressed with how direct and honest he was, and I told him I understood but that nothing could happen between us, and I wasn't interested in him anyway because he was too young and I didn't want to settle down. He took it well, but I sensed it was tough on him. About a month later, he invited me to lunch and asked if I was sure I wasn't interested in having a relationship. It was painful, and my advice to him at the time was to hang out with more gay people; I told him (thinking back to my own experience in the '80s) to experiment and shop around, have more experience before he thought about settling into a relationship.
Nice advice, especially for the 1980s, but graduation came, he became legal, and I was surprised, truly, to realize that one needs to be careful about these things. Love was happening. It is still happening several years later. There is an age difference, to be sure, but no power or authority issues. He seduced me, but now we're partners.
Teachers and students have been falling in love forever. If you're just looking to bed your professor, you might have a good shot, but remember that it could easily get messy and it might also be terrifying for him—unless you want to ruin his career, you need to take your diploma before you take off your clothes. If you're a professor, remember how awkward it will feel when you walk across campus and see that guy (now clothed) with his schoolmates, talking and turning their heads to look at you. A student might be easy and tempting, but he could also develop a very painful crush on you, and you need to be responsible for the collateral damage. The bottom line is this: Think, respect each other, don't use stupid cliché excuses, and don't fuck anyone crazier than you. Oh, and if you're in graduate school, all bets are off. 
Professor X teaches at a local university.
That prejudice is due to the fact that the supposed risk of impressionable/vulnerable students being ruined by some more powerful professor is totally tied up with the male/female power dynamic. Straight female profs hooking up with male students falls under the "Isn't he lucky" card that gets played all the time when older women fuck younger men. Lesbian female profs/students have the We're Other and So Cool Get Out of Jail Free Card.
The ugly fact is this: the vast majority of sexual harassment complaints will be aimed at male profs, straight (almost always) or sometimes gay. the wider cultural bias based on male sexual predation applies here.
I'm absolutely sure that exists, and fairly sure that it isn't very relevant...and there are things more important than whether or not you get to fuck someone or must wait a few years---a young student might not understand that, but an older---or much older---teacher ought to do.
Of course, I know that I should wait before I eat another marshmallow, and have nominal control over my hand and jaws, but hey lookit that, it's in my mouth.
6
In no case may faculty members engage in intimate or sexual relationships with students they supervise, advise, teach or evaluate. If such a relationship already exists, the faculty member must immediately report the relationship to the department chair and school dean and terminate the relationship. If such a relationship existed in the past and has ended, the faculty member must report the relationship to the department chair and school dean.
As stated in the code of ethics/conflict of interest policy, faculty members must maintain a professional distance from students… In particular, faculty should not invite student(s) to their homes or personal studios unless it is a formal class activity, involving all students in the class and receiving prior written approval from the department chair.
A faculty member who fails to abide by these strictures is subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination of contract.
Lots of schools have policies like this, but not most full-scale universities (v. private arts colleges). Far too many of the administrators over generations are married to the former students. And enforcement is tough.
@5
The power dynamic thing is interesting to contemplate. It's usually portrayed as the Prof has the Power, given age and institutional position. But I think that the younger student has the power: the erotic power. the idea that the professor is always the one running things is just ridiculous. It need not be the relentless undergrad: it can be the tempting undergrad, the machiavellian undergrad, the young man or woman who knows they have the upper hand as far as hormones and desire are concerned.
@6 That's standard boilerplate, written by lawyers for other lawyers. Sorry for the threadjack, but if you want to judge the quality of your HR and disciplinary procedures, anywhere, not just in the academy, just look at how they're enforced and by whom. There are very few incentives to take a hard line on performance or ethical infractions, especially when you can't put a dollar sign on someone's achievements or someone's line of business.
Look at one of my former employers, which regularly collects awards for ethics. Out of the 20 or so people that I worked with daily, I note the following:
Ethical Transgressions
1) a married C-level exec was in a long-term affair with another exec, whom he'd promoted to senior management, and despite being ordered to stop by general counsel.
2) A manager turned over her entire team every 12-14 months for 5 years (white collar turnover for the rest of the company? 8-10%), plus at least a half dozen complaints to HR related to bullying and harassment in the 3 years I was there. Said manager was promoted all the way up to AVP during this time frame.
Organizational transgressions
3) One HR manager refuses to work with an entire department, without repercussions. Another HR manager at an entirely different location has to handle that department.
4) A HR senior manager has to authorize six figures in severance per year, since line management can't properly (legally) document dismissal for cause.
Professional Competence Transgressions
5) In the last 12 months, the head of accounts has lost one minor engagement, one major account, and parts of a second major account, on which he/she had to cut the billing rate on to retain despite being early in a multi-year contract.
6) In the last 12 months, the CFO has lost finance's major revenue stream due to concerns from the general counsel's office.
And this is a company that wins awards. Imagine what yours is like.
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