TIL "evert" is a word.

What the actual fuck did I just read?

@1: Never read up on invertebrates, have you? Google 'evert' and 'starfish' together, and you can have some nightmares.

It's admittedly been a while since I was in academia, but I'm pretty sure you're good to go as long as you wait until grades have been posted at the end of the quarter.

While in general I would agree professors need to be very careful around students.... and generally just say no...







My brother taught a class or two at the local university; at the end of the semester, a female student asked to review her final exam (which had an excellent score, so that confused him a bit).







Well, she hit on him, they dated, they married.







So it can work - but I'm with #3 on waiting till the grades are posted; also make sure you'll never have them in a class again, make sure it's age-appropriate, and make sure you aren't just using them for quick sex. Because even if they say they are out for quick sex, that WILL come back to bite you.

@ 3, that sounds lax to me. More like you're good to so long as you wait for the student to graduate or drop out.

Why is Mr Savage heterocentring an orientation-neutral letter? That may be even worse than Prudie's recent offence of heterocentring a homonormative letter.

It's just generally not okay to hit on someone while they are interacting with you because it is their job. And it's not okay to hit on someone you have power over. This means baristas can make the first move with customers, but not vice versa, but professors and students need to wait until they are no longer in the professor-student relationship. I'm with the letter writer here. Including the bit about maybe you'll get lucky a few years later if you meet up with them again - once that professional relationship is severed. But people should be able to do their job without being hit on and students shouldn't have to worry about turning down somebody who has power over their grades. If you are both into each other and still are after the student is done with school, then wonderful. And if one of you no longer is, it's not like you missed out on that much.

Dear PROFS,

It is so, so much worse for young high school teachers.

An acquaintance of mine is a very attractive young woman in her late 20s, and is a high school biology teacher. Seems like half her students have a crush on her. She has all the issues you bring up, plus her students are all minors, if only barely. She could go to jail if she ever said yes, but they hit on her anyway. She has taken to dressing in oversized sloppy clothes and no makeup to intentionally look less appealing at school.

So, unclench a little, and be thankful that at least your students aren't jail-bait.

@ 9, that would likely be small comfort to blacklisted and out of work professors. Your career is shattered but at least you won't be going to jail, too.

Make that @8.

Either rules are different in Australia or things have tightened up a whole lot since the early 70s.
I had a relationship with my Psychology Lecturer and he was the first man I had an orgasm with. He never lost his job. And if I remember, I wasn't the only student bedding a University teacher.
Did he grade me well? Really can't remember. Guess it all wasn't very ethical. Didn't notice such things, so much, then.

Am I the only one who thinks Dan's response was excessively snarky?

What I want to know is where is the Professor while all this action with his Assistant is going on? He should intervene.

Also, the barista is the one with all the power, babe.

Is anyone else wondering why young women feel comfortable initiating, apparently ONLY with men how have a vast power/authority imbalance with them?



It isn't QUITE on par with having crush on Manson, but it is deeply creepy.

Didn't you read the letter? The prof said it happens just as much with his female colleagues.

@12

No.

@12, I thought Dan's response was restrained.
" Brushes up with Human Sexuality",
he( apparently), is conventionally good looking. HoHum.
And he assumes to tell the readers of SavageLove about his
Problems? All those hot little students, no doubt sitting in the front row, sans knickers, touching themselves- all while he's trying to Teach! Wtf, kids. Give a poor Man a break.

Sorry Venn. I'm assuming it's the snow bunnies that are melting this guy. Unless the boys wear skirts to class.

Given all the talk about rape culture on campus these days, it seems that it would be idiotic for a professor to agree to a sexual relationship with a student. If they want to keep their job, anyway.

I wouldn't be here if assistant profs couldn't date their students in the 1950's.

Polyphemus @14, this part of his letter:
"I'm male. My female colleagues have it worse. I have the privilege of just being annoyed while they have to bear much more salacious come-ons."
I'm not sure where you get the idea from this letter that young women exclusively come on to men when there's vast power/authority imbalance with them? I certainly never did and never really saw the appeal of it - I always much preferred fresh-faced university boys my own age.

@20: While I see your point, I counter that generations of people fail to be born every minute based upon the decisions we make every day, ethical or otherwise. Every time that we could have sex with someone and don't we end millions of potential lives before they even have the chance to exist.

I definitely agree with the sentiments of the letter writer on the whole, and I don't entirely understand where Dan's coming from with his reply.

However, I also agree with those who imply—and, perhaps, this is where Dan is coming from with his response—that it's a little odd that he would bother to write a nationally recognized sex advice columnist to make this point. He does not explicitly respond to Dan's previous writings, nor does he request advice. He just asserts, without much in the way of pretense or attempt to justify the appropriateness of the venue, that students and professors shouldn't date.

Again, I think that's a good rule to follow. A relationship between educators and pupils poses a worrisome conflict of interest. But the venue the writer of this letter chose, and the way in which he decided to present this idea? Most peculiar.

@11
Well, I haven't heard about many Australian universities being sued over educational sexual harassment, but it's been the race here in the U.S. for at least a decade or so. I see it as somewhere on par with therapists not sexually engaging with their patients (a la the late Anne Sexton, for example). In an extremely litigious culture, the universities do not want to be held liable for anything untoward, so there are all manner of conduct manuals for faculty, staff, and students concerning appropriate professional/educational interaction. At my college, a student successfully sued the university and every professor on her doctoral committee over the sexist tendencies of one professor who never directly harassed her (I assume the term she used was "failure to support"), but rather created a "sexually hostile environment" (and this was one of my professors, too, so I know exactly what she was talking about, since as a male student, I was on the downside of the hostile environment). To put it plainly, this professor played favorites: if you weren't a cute (preferably blonde) soprano who wore shorts or short skirts while sitting at the front of the class, there was no way you were getting anything higher than a B in any of his courses.

This is the kind of thing that has academicians pissing themselves. Doctoral candidates were frozen out of their degrees because of it; no professor wanted to sit on graduate committees, fearing even a whiff of impropriety through thought, act, or omission.

Then there was the obnoxious gay Assistant Dean of Students, who was a bit of a diversity hire, unusual for my buckle-of-the-Bible-Belt college. His DoS job included upholding codes of conduct. One of the students in his language class was a closted nineteen-year-old man that should have been strictly hands-off just because the ASSISTANT DEAN OF STUDENTS was doubly bound by professional conduct policy. Nonetheless, not only did he initiate a sexual relationship with this student, but when the student tried to break it off, the ASSOCIATE DEAN OF STUDENTS went stalker on the kid, not only threatening his grades, but threatening to out the kid to his extremely conservative parents. Oh, if it were only just tacky. Naturally the ASSOCIATE DEAN OF STUDENTS was summarily dismissed and the school settled with the kid to try and keep a lid on the press.

As for me, I didn't have sex with any professors in my department. I did have sex with a biology prof who was my academic dean (and I was on the dean's list well before he ever met me, over-achiever that I am), two architecture profs, and the husband of a music prof that was never responsible for any of my grades (though she was my orchestral stand partner for many years and booked me for several gigs -- ironically, always sending her husband to drop off the contracts for me to sign; I should probably also mention that the husband in this case had been my first stringed instrument teacher when I was a sixth-grader, but our academic relationship had been over for ten years by the time we first hooked up).

So, just to avoid power-differential buyer's remorse, it's bad for professors to even entertain the thought of banging a student, not just because of opprobrium, but as a matter of legal liability.

@13 In the states (I can't speak to anywhere else) Assistant Professors aren't really 'assistants' to a professor, they're real professors who haven't been tenured yet. When you do get tenure, you become a Full Professor. TAs, Teaching Assistants, are the actual assistants to professors.



Nope. Shit does not make sense. Not a bit.



Its worth mentioning, though, that TAs face a similar problem, but are generally students or grad students themselves, so the bar ought to be a bit lower. General rule: wait till grades are posted to bang your TA. Wait till you graduate or drop out to bang your prof.

Years ago, a friend of mine met a guy on a fetish site and exchanged a lot of very detailed messages with him before giving him her real-name email address. His next message said they had to break things off, and was signed with his real name. Yeah, that was her prof. He taught her major, so she spent the next two years sat in his seminars trying not to think about his comments on pony play.

@ 25 You'd think he'd start any encounter with "do you go to such and such school, because I'm associated with it and don't want to get into anything dodgy" before getting detailed about fetishes.

Oh, well, probably he did after that.

Personally, I'd love to have college students hit on me occasionally. I'm pretty sure I could take the advances in stride and politely decline, being married and all. But oh, the spank bank fuel for later!

@24: Actually, Assistant Professors are real, full-time professors, who rise to the ranks of Associate Professor (sometimes before getting tenure), and then may--but often do not--rise to the rank of Full Professor. Tenure comes in there--if it does--along the way, but never guarantees the rank of Full Professor. In addition, those teaching undergrads and often grad students may be Contingent Faculty (otherwise known as "adjunct professors"), Lecturers, Instructors, and Visiting Scholars or Visiting Professors. These designations refer to the terms of employment, not the authority they have over students, and the title "Professor" is an accurate and appropriate form of address for all of them.

All fulfill the exact same role and function as far as undergraduates students are concerned.

Graduate Students who teach or do research are called TAs (teaching assistants), GSAs, GSIs, GTAs depending on the institution (in the U.S., anyway) and would not be responsible for teaching grad students. Their relationship to undergrads could be seen as a greyer area, and they are often much, much closer in age to their students, but the relationship is still an inappropriate one (though it happens frequently and is dealt with far less harshly when it gets discovered). However it is really grad students, TAs or not, whose careers can be unfairly affected by their sexual relationships--ongoing and positive or over and bitter--with their professors.

I know a lot of people have crushes on their profs--I did. I know profs get interested in their students--I never have, but lots do. I know of happy and enduring marriages that have resulted from those inappropriate relationships, which I suppose in retrospect "authorizes" and justifies them, but even though some of them work out that way or are short-term, happy flings with no ill effects or serious consequences, they are still fundamentally, ethically inappropriate. If there's mutual interest, it should wait to be acknowledged and acted-upon until after the student is no longer a student--in my opinion, not merely that quarter or semester or in that professor's class, or in that department, but at the university entirely.

This is one woman's--one professor's--opinion.

And I agree with ansuzmannaz @22, that Dan's column was an odd place to just write in with this unsolicited, scolding lecture.

@21 I was a mature age student(23)and my Lecturer was in his early 30s, so not a big age gap. The other students were younger than me.
@23; no idea either, state of play now in Aus Unis. The early 70s, things round here a lot looser.

@24 @28

Next your going to tell me an Associate Supreme Court Justice isn't some kind of intern.

@12 "excessively snarky?" - not even slightly. Dan has mellowed a lot with age, but occasionally we still get a little glimpse of his old style from the "Hey Faggot" days. I wish it would happen more often.

I'm so triggered right now.

@22: I wasn't arguing for teacher-student dating, only giving one datapoint. I agree the power imbalance is so problematic that teacher-student dating should be prohibited just as chain-of-command dating is in the military or supervisor-supervised dating is prohibited in most companies now.

Which then creates a whole other reason not to date your students - because it is a "CLeM" ("Career Limiting Move"), the student has extraordinary power to maintain the relationship, extort special treatment, etc.

@22:

Yup; I wouldn't be here if not for the Holocaust.

Dating instructors and students is a perk of education. Dating current students is pretty dodgy. I think it's not horrible if (as a TA at least it's possible) you have no influence on grades. I personally did not see a problem dating current instructors, a grad lecturer and TA. I believe I was respectful and not pushy, though. I see no point to warning the students off, they generally don't want to disrespect their grader and follow the rules. Taking advantage of that kind of crush should endanger your career though. Odd it's so much trouble for LW to say no or report harassment if he's not interested. I also want to chime in to say that teaching high school and the crushes of minor students can create much more threatening legal as well as career circumstances.