College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (21 page)

such desire can be pretty strong at first sight. Not everyone’s emotions follow these patterns, of course, but they do not seem particularly uncom- mon, either.

The second reason I am skeptical of the greater power and tenacity of feelings in a sexual relationship as compared to a friendship is that it relies on a somewhat simplistic, and possibly sexist, view of emotions, including sexual feelings. The idea that emotions in general are to be sharply distinguished from reason, and cloud rather than aid one’s delib- erations, has a long history in Western philosophy, but, however strong Pat’s feelings, it is implausible that Pat would be
unable
to assess clearly the merits of Sam’s philosophy paper. This is not to say that Pat
will
assess the essay fairly, but the claim that Pat is (even probably)
incapable
of doing so may appeal to an illegitimate excuse grounded in a contin- gent history of disavowing control over one’s passions. I think it helps to get a sense of the sexist roots of this idea to test one’s intuitions against cases involving various permutations of the sex of the professor and stu- dent. Compare the case of a male professor and female student with that of a female professor and male student. Are you more likely to think that the professor’s judgment will be colored in one case rather than the other? Is this because you think the professor in that case is really incapable of controlling his or her judgment, or for some other reason?

To return to the distinction between feelings and actions: if you think that a professor can resist the temptation to act on sexual feelings for a student, then you should think that a professor can assess the extent to which those feelings are affecting his or her assessment of a student’s work. So it will be difficult to defend
both
the claim that friendships are accept- able but sexual relationships are to be avoided,
and
the claim that profes- sors in love (or lust) are incapable of grading fairly. Furthermore, as we will soon see, there are steps that can be taken to eliminate grading bias.

The Benefits of Friendship

What of the potential benefits to the student of a friendship with a profes- sor, which Golash argues outweigh the dangers of favoritism? She men- tions only the good of friendship itself, which she claims is great and rare enough in the normal course of events that restricting one’s range of pos- sible friends even further “seems intolerable.”
10
But most people would agree that if friendship is valuable and rare, loving sexual relationships are

at least as valuable – and rarer. This, then, fails as an argument for allow- ing student-professor friendships on the one hand but rejecting sexual relationships on the other.

Avoiding Injustice

As several writers have noted, there are steps Pat can take to avoid the possibility of the kinds of injustice we have been considering. The grad- ing of Sam’s work can be checked, or simply performed, by someone else. Letters of recommendation standardly describe the writer’s rela- tionship with the student. Falsifications of this part of the letter, like any other, by act or omission, would be reprehensible, but there is nothing different here about friendship or a loving relationship. In fact, if any- thing, it may be that Sam will end up worse off as the result of an honest letter from Pat, since it would be difficult for any reader to assess the accuracy of the resulting evaluation. But students get letters of recom- mendation from more than one source, and the other letters should allow a prospective employer or graduate school admissions committee to con- textualize the letter in question. Such measures should also eliminate the appearance of injustice, which some have given as a reason for prohibit- ing intimate faculty-student relationships.

One thing Sam can do is avoid taking classes with Pat. However, it is worth considering that those who find student-professor relationships scandalous are likely to find them so whether or not Sam is in one of Pat’s classes. Why should this be? Two answers occur to me. The first is the power issue that has come up a couple of times already. To recap: though this is a cause for serious concern, it is not something unique to the student-professor relationship, nor is it an insurmountable obstacle to consensual relationships. (Anyway, professors have less power over other students at their institutions than those in their classes.)

The second is that students tend to be significantly younger than pro- fessors. This is overlooked surprisingly often in discussions of student- professor relationships, perhaps because it is not strictly a necessary feature of them. But imagine a world in which most people went to uni- versity only after ten or twenty years in the workforce. Even if this resulted in a correspondingly more aged faculty, I suspect that student-professor relationships would not be considered so scandalous in such a context. What this suggests is that it is the disparity in age between students and

professors that is the source of a significant part of the concern about relationships between them. We may suspect that in such relationships the pure sexual attraction of the older partner to the younger is playing a disproportionate role in the relationship, mirrored, perhaps, in the attrac- tion of the younger partner to a false sense of security the older partner may convey.We may also think that the older partner’s greater experience with relationships gives that partner more power over the younger. But these features are common enough in relationships outside of academia. Like the power imbalance between professor and student, such factors may be cause for concern, but they are no reason to condemn professor- student relationships in particular.

Policing Pat and Sam

Where does all this leave us? I have argued that the fuzzy border between friendship and a loving sexual relationship, and the fact that we expect the latter (if it develops at all) to develop out of the former, suggest that whatever attitude we take towards the one, we ought also to take towards the other. In particular, it is difficult to see how we could clearly and consistently approve of the former while disapproving of the latter. Two questions follow: first, what attitude ought we in fact to take towards such relationships?; second, should we develop policies to deal with such relationships?

In answer to the first question, I think my discussion of the harms and benefits of student-professor relationships has demonstrated that we should not condemn such relationships simply on the basis that they are between a professor and a student. However, there can be bad relation- ships between students and professors, just as there can be between all sorts of people, and there is a significant number of “risk factors” present in the typical academic environment. Thus, when considering a relation- ship, either from a third-party perspective or, especially, as a student or professor contemplating entering such a relationship, one should pay heed to the imbalance of power between the parties, the role any age dif- ference is playing in the relationship, and the potential for unjust treat- ment of the student involved and other students.

As for the second question, judgments about the need for a policy here, as often elsewhere, will come down to whether the severity and likelihood of harm to others outweighs the great good of freedom (in this

case to decide what kinds of intimate relationships to enter into, and with whom).What follows here from the vague border between friendship and sexual relationships is that any such policies should be directed at both kinds of relationship. That said, there is a range of possible policies, from more stringent ones requiring professors to declare any relationships they enter into with students, and to follow certain procedures, such as reassigning grading, and so on, to less stringent ones, emphasizing the potential dangers of such relationships and recommending certain pro- cedures, without requiring anything.

It seems to me that the less stringent approach is more justifiable for a couple of reasons. First, there is generally very little oversight of how fac- ulty assess students, whether through grading or writing letters of recom- mendation. This is not necessarily a good thing, though it is too complicated an issue to address here. But if we want to ensure fairness in faculty assessment of students, we should ensure it across the board, not just in cases where a student-professor relationship is cause for concern. Faculty may be swayed just as easily, and more commonly, by sexism, rac- ism, homophobia, favoritism, or overcompensation for any of these, as by being in a relationship with a student. To have a policy only about inti- mate relationships smacks of Puritanism. Second, as I mentioned above, problems arising from student-professor relationships can be in part the result of more systemic issues such as sexism or a distorted view of the nature of sexual relationships. Campus-wide dialogue and education is probably a more effective way of solving these problems at the root than instituting policies that attempt merely to suppress their symptoms.

NOTES

1. Deirdre Golash, “Power, Sex, and Friendship,” in Alan Soble and Nicholas Power (eds.)
   The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings
   , 5th edn. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), pp. 449–58, here p. 458 n. 2. Nicholas Dixon focuses on male-professor–female-student relationships for similar reasons in “The Morality of Intimate Faculty-Student Relationships,”
   The Monist
   79 (1996): 519–35.
   

2. Dixon makes a similar point in “The Morality of Intimate Faculty-Student Relationships,” p. 521.
   

3. See, for example, Golash, “Power, Sex, and Friendship,” pp. 450–2.
   

4. Golash, “Power, Sex, and Friendship,” pp. 452–3; Dixon, “The Morality of Intimate Faculty-Student Relationships,” pp. 522–5.
   

5. Golash, “Power, Sex, and Friendship,” p. 452.
   

6. Edward Shils also defends this view in “The Academic Ethic,” reprinted in
   The Calling of Education: The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education
   (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 3–128, here pp. 58–9. Those who condemn both friendship and sexual relationships between faculty and students include Steven M. Cahn,
   Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia
   (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986), pp. 35–6; Nicholas Dixon, “The Morality of Intimate Faculty-Student Relationships”; and Peter Markie, “Professors, Students, and Friendship,” in Steven M. Cahn (ed.)
   Morality, Responsibility, and the University: Studies in Academic Ethics
   (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 134–49.
   

7. Golash, “Power, Sex, and Friendship,” p. 454.
   

8. Greta Christina, “Are We Having Sex Now or What?” in Alan Soble and Nicholas Power (eds.)
   The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings
   , 5th edn. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), pp. 23–9. Christina does not explicitly mention all of these acts, but she prompts thought about such a range.
   

9. Golash restricts her discussion at this point to graduate students, but the same issues seem to arise in connection with undergraduates, especially at small schools where faculty are expected to spend significant time with undergraduates on an individual basis.
   

10. Golash, “Power, Sex, and Friendship,” p. 454.
    

D ANIELLE A. L AYNE

CHAPTER 10

PHILOSOPHERS AND THE NOT

SO PLATONIC STUDENT-TEACHER RELATIONSHIP

Higher Yearning 101

Sticky as the subject may be, everyone has an opinion about student-faculty sexual relation- ships. The commonplace image that comes to mind when we think of these affairs normally stars an aging, disenchanted male English profes- sor, complete with leather elbow patches on his tweed jacket and an innocent drinking problem hidden in his office desk drawer. Most tend to

picture him seducing and then exploiting young women by offering his attractive, but less than clever, students “extra assistance” while pro- ceeding to teach them more than the poetry of Lowell or the narrative form of Hemingway.

Regardless of this standard pop-culture reference, for the most part, the academic discipline of philosophy has a much longer history of offering its students more than merely the “love of wisdom.” Strikingly, this sexual tension between students and educators in the discipline of philosophy has ancient roots and can be traced all the way back to Socrates’ desire for the young male philanthropist Alcibiades. Similarly, in twelfth-century France, the logician Peter Abelard infamously instructed his young student Heloise in much more than the standard
trivium
and
quadrivium
of medieval education. While more recently, Martin Heidegger’s “private

tutorials” with then 19-year-old Hannah Arendt raised a considerable number of eyebrows at the University of Marburg.

Clearly, some philosophers border on being promiscuously involved in the lives of their pupils and thus an examination of each of these affairs may help clarify some of the perennial issues facing student-faculty rela- tionships on today’s university campuses. In this essay, I discuss the pos- sible naturalness and, perhaps, unavoidability of desire and intimacy in the classroom, alongside questioning the responsibility and possible exploitation or abuse of power that may occur when the usual boundaries between educators and students blur. To be clear, in no way will I con- demn or condone such exploits between faculty and students, but merely hope to provoke some thought on the subject via narrating the affairs of a few unforgettable examples of higher yearning in higher learning.