E Ruth Klein

E R Klein argues that no good reason has yet been given for academic institutions to condemn consensual sexual relationships between students and lecturers. To reply, see details at the end of the article.

Let’s just skip the obviously immoral quid pro quo case – which forces the reader to picture a stinky old crusty lecherous male professor extorting his lovely naïve eighteen year old female student with the fear of the "F" – and get to the real action. Today, in college and university campuses all over the world, smart and sexy students are having crushes on, flirting with, and actively sexually pursuing their professors who are at least as smart and sexy. The evidence is overwhelming. Students and professors not only want to have sex with each other, they are having sex with each other.

The number of anecdotal examples that have been brought to my attention by professors and students alike are too numerous to cite. However, here are a few published examples. Jan Breslauer told Playboy Magazine that "she majored in political science and minored in a few select gentlemen of the faculty." Rolling Stone recently had an entire cover story on the "highly charged erotic life of the Wellesley girl," where randy co-eds, who were tired of lesbian relationships (or of riding what they dubbed the "Fuck Truck" to Harvard to pick up men), would "target" their male professors – men who had that "professor sex appeal". It seems Plato was right. One begins the long epistemological road to true knowledge via desire. Millennia later, in the midst of all this high-energy sexuality, no one can claim that academic work is not getting done – students get an education, new ideas are born, technology is conceived, and scholarship flourishes. So what’s the problem?

I suggest that the problem is twofold. First, there is academia’s postmodern commitment to relativism. Absolute truths, global norms, and the overall establishment of traditional criteria for academic excellence, are no longer taken seriously. Traditional epistemic concepts such as objectivity have been so demonised that one cannot criticise anything or anyone without being silenced as a fascist coloniser trying to impose their own political desires in the garb of the universal. The upshot is that today’s academic finds it impossible to even conceive of the following state of affairs: That professors, despite the context of their relationships with students – from admiring protégé to intellectual rival; from disappointing mentee to unbelievable lover – can be objective.

A case in point is the work of academic ethicist Steven Cahn. Cahn argues against professors and students developing even friendships, let alone romantic/sexual relationships, on the grounds that "every teacher should be scrupulous in ensuring that no student receives preferential treatment." However, it doesn’t take long to realise that when a professor gives a specific student an "A" (as opposed to an "F") this act treats students "unfairly". The response, of course, would be to distinguish justice from fairness, arguing that the reason the two students in such a case are treated unequally is because one earned the grade of "A" while the other did not. That is, within the scope of grading, inequality of treatment is not only justified, it is inherent to the system. Within this context, then, Cahn believes there are objective standards of academic excellence and that the professor is quite capable of making the appropriate adjudication. That is until he is in a personal relationship with the student being evaluated. Then we see the "wrath of Cahn".

Why? I’m not sure. Is it that Cahn is merely projecting his own weak psychology, his inability to separate the two parts of his life? Surely he would not commit this basic fallacy. Is it that Cahn is an expert in human psychology, empirically certain that no one, no matter how well meaning, could ever see through their emotions to the objective truth of the student’s work? On the one hand, even if he were so trained, this claim, like that of the psychological egoist, is either unfalsifiable or false. After all, what kind of empirical evidence would Cahn accept as disconfirming? (If none, then his thesis is on the same epistemic footing as astrology.) On the other hand, if he allows the possibility of such objective persons, even one, then he will need to do more work to show that such relationships are always "preferential" where it counts. Surely Cahn must be aware of this dilemma, so this too can’t be his reason.

Maybe Cahn, unknowingly, has bought into the rampant relativism of the postmodernism institution? After all, if there is no objectivity to be had in any arena, then it follows, albeit trivially, that professors cannot remain impartial (whether they are sleeping with their students or not.) Since this "postmodern turn" would probably be quite distasteful to Cahn, and since the first two reasons are simply unreasonable, it is not clear what exactly is the wrong-making property of student/professor relationships.

Parenthetically, Cahn aside, postmodernism is in no position to make a case against student/professor love. Although the epistemological nuances of this "movement" are outside the scope of this provocation, I can’t help pointing out that if there can be something like a purpose to postmodernism it must be some kind of move toward what Kristeva, after Lacan, calls jouissance – which has the dual meaning of "playfulness" and "orgasm". As such, what more needs to be said. Acts of love, even "forbidden" love, can’t possibly be forbidden. Ironically, however, it is the sex(ed)-slave of postmodernism, feminism, that has done more than any other theorists to perpetuate the myth that such relationships are, without argument, simply wrong.

Feminist theory, consistently and misguidedly, presupposes that, at some level or other, all power relationships involving men are evil. The argument runs something like this. Men have all the power, men are evil, so all power relationships with men are evil. The second premise is, of course, ridiculous. The first is nearly as problematic. With respect to the scope of this topic, I challenge the feminist "fact" that in any kind of romantic or sexual relationship between a male professor and a female student that it is the man who has all the power. Actually I believe in such contexts he has none of it. For one thing, in the realpolitik that is heterosexual sex, it is the young female body that is, dare I say it, "on top". Classic stories tell of men who fight wars and abandon kingdoms to find solace in their young love. In the ivory tower the stories are not so epic, but often just as dramatic. It is the men who, when things go awry, stand to lose quite a bit, including their jobs. What do these young women really risk? A broken heart? Isn’t this a calculated risk in any romantic/sexual relationship? When I have addressed this subject at various and sundry academic institutions some young woman always volunteers that she is sleeping with her professor and that it is she, not he, who has all the power. One even claimed to have her professor, and I quote, "by the balls". (I assumed she meant figuratively.)

There may be many reasons why a woman chooses to get into a relationship with her male professor. For example, Lisa Zeider wrote to Gentleman’s Quarterly claiming that "from the school of hard knocks, I got what I wanted and needed: educational sex, an opportunity to play out my ambivalence toward controlling men and an aversion to preening academics." Despite the mean-spiritedness of this desire my point is simple: the relationship was clearly her choice. Therefore, even if it is assumed that the male professor is in the "power position" I find it hard to believe that no woman ever chooses to be in such a relationship. The famous feminist Dr Bell Hooks claimed, in the Utne Reader, that the power differential betwixt herself and her professor created "a stimulating and transformative atmosphere where my intellectual and emotional growth was enhanced by the encounter." Women choose to have sex with all kinds of men, in all kinds of power positions, for all kinds of reasons. Why does feminism refuse to admit that such relationships can possibly be consensual?

Maybe because it assumes that when it comes to relationships with men, women are incapable of consent. Catherine McKinnon, for example – the woman who brought us the infamous "all heterosexual sex is rape" claim – offered a feminist account of choice on NBC television in the 80s when she espoused that: "If sex is something men do to women, then viewing ‘yes’ as a sign of consent is misguided." And in the context of student/professor relationships, the evidence that young women are unable to consent is, question-beggingly, that they choose to have sex with their male professors. In the words of Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Werner in The Lecherous Professor:

Occasionally there are women students who are attracted to faculty. [...] This faculty role may be attractive to some, because it combines intellectual attainment and power, but being attracted to an individual’s role and consenting to a relationship are vastly different. [...] Few students are ever, in the strictest sense, consenting adults. A student can never be a genuine equal of a professor insofar as his professional position gives him power over her. Access to a student occurs not because she allowed it but because the professor ignores professional ethics and chooses to extend the student-faculty relationship. Whether the student consents to the involvement or whether the professor ever intends to use his power against her is not the point. The issue is that the power or role disparity always exists, making it virtually impossible for the student to act freely as she would with a male peer. [...] In a faculty-student relationship, the enormous role (and frequent age) disparity inhibits the woman so that she herself may have trouble understanding and predicting her feelings.

The problematic idea that women, even young women, know less about their own desires than some feminist theorist aside; the fact that college age students, even women, consent to much more serious activities, for example, to kill and die for national security, aside; the hubris of believing that a student and professor can never be equal aside; what is really at issue is the power of men. Men’s power, under feminist theorising, is so demonic, and yet so intoxicating, that if one is actually attracted to such power the only possible explanation can be coercion.

Underlying this bias is the broad-based feminist apostasy that the only women who are truly conscious are those that have adopted "consciousness" – the desire to view the entire world through a feminist lens. After all, once one puts on one’s feminist glasses one can easily see that men run everything, and that all men are oppressive, therefore everything (except, interestingly, the adoption of the feminist standpoint to begin with), is a consequence of male oppression. As such no act can be consensual. Therefore, despite the fact that many women often find the power of men to be emotionally invigorating and professionally challenging, within the blinders of feminism, men’s power always violates, never enhances, a woman’s life. If one does not see the evil in men’s power then, according to feminism, one is simply unconscious – oppressed and manipulated.

This victim mentality – that women are incapable of channelling, absorbing, or growing from male power – is nothing less than patronising and demeaning. And with respect to young female students such feminist attitudes are actually getting in the way of what they want – to be, and to be viewed as, sexual beings interested in male attention. Maybe this is why I am able to document in Undressing Feminism that today’s college-aged woman claims to need feminism "like a hole in her head". Maybe feminism should admit that when it comes to sex with men, even with one’s male professors, sometimes a choice is just a choice.

The above, of course, does not address all areas of debate concerning student/professor relationships. For example, it doesn’t address same-sex relationships, or the rare relationships between male students and their female professors-where the various power structures so valued by feminists may outweigh each other making them possibly the most perfectly balanced sexual relationships on earth. Nor does it discuss the recent epidemic of "codes" of sexual behaviour that often subsume consensual relationships under the dangerous legally-charged language of "sexual harassment". Nonetheless I trust that readers will see this piece in the spirit it is intended, as an attempt to "open debate" about the presupposed immorality of student/professor relationships.

Finally, let me suggest that there may exist even more subtle PC beliefs underlying the overall academic distaste for such relationships. That is, even if one goes out of their way to avoid the "visual" I mention at the beginning, one finds it hard to fully challenge this paradigm. So I will add the following to help with a conceptual "shift": (1) Interestingly I have yet to see any "sex code" that actually speaks to the students, asking them, for example, to please not tease or (sexually) "feed" their professors. Why is this? Are students, especially our women students, really so innocent? (2) Isn’t it possible that the seemingly bad-making property of such relationships is actually a product of academic society presupposing that such relationships are inherently bad? For example, why is it that we believe it would be so damaging if other students "found out" about such a relationship? Could it be because we fear students will sue the school on the grounds of "unfair" treatment? But isn’t this a power that institutions actually give students by always viewing such relationships as immoral, forcing them to be kept as "secrets" to begin with? Concomitantly, why is it that we believe the specific student involved is harmed by having other students know of the relationship? Again, isn’t this just a vicious circle created by the institution’s desire to view such relationships as taboo?

I conclude by saying that I advise my colleagues to avoid such relationships, but not because I believe there are any non-political reasons for such advice. Furthermore, I wonder if such relationships may be so important to individual happiness that unless an institution can argue effectively for harm, they should probably do everything they can to avoid punishing professors on such grounds.

However, given that the reality of today’s academic climate is such that unless one believes it is better to have loved and lost (one’s job and reputation) than never to have loved at all, they should probably keep their pants on.

How to join the debate

Send your responses to E R Klein’s essay (no longer than 600 words) to TPM Open Debate, 38 Everett Road, Manchester M20 3DZ, or email the editor here. Please keep your response focused on only one or two specific points. Closing date for replies is 31 March 2004..

Contributions may be edited for length and clarity. The author and editors are unable to reply to contributions not selected for inclusion.

E Ruth Klein is a philosophy lecturer and author of Undressing Feminism (Paragon House)