When is Student-Professor Sex Okay?

Two sex scandals in Miami and Boulder have, well, scandalized the academic world.

The one at the University of Miami in Florida led to the resignation of professor Colin McGinn. The other, at the University of Colorado resulted in the removal of the department chair Graeme Forbes.

Professor McGinn’s case was about a series of emails and text messages between him and a doctoral student. The contents haven’t been made public and both parties have agreed not to speak about the case, but, at the very least, suggestive bantering and propositioning were involved. The Colorado case, according to the university’s internal report, involved the philosophy department’s having a culture of sexualized interaction and harassment at official meetings and social functions.

The cases led to much discussion about the particular individuals involved as well as the broader question of academic philosophy in general. The profession is about 80% male, and that statistical imbalance has raised soul-searching questions: Is philosophy’s style of confrontational (and sometimes brutal) argumentation less appealing to women? Has the lower female representation, combined with the professor-student power dynamic led to an unhealthy sexual dynamic? Or, more crudely, is the world of professional philosophy a “sausagefest,” as one unsympathetic critic called it?

(The seven academic departments that I’ve been a part of as student or professor have all seemed highly asexual to me, but perhaps I just wasn’t invited to the right parties.)

Careers are important. Education is important. Sex is important. Yet, as humans we are not strictly compartmentalized.

The Miami and Colorado cases raise a set of serious issues. Careers are important. Education is important. Sex is important. Yet, as humans we are not strictly compartmentalized—Now I am only a knowledge-seeker, Now I am only a sexual being, Now I am only a socializer, and so on. We regularly pursue many goals simultaneously—we go to parties, for example, to socialize and to eat and to learn things and to flirt. But in other contexts it is often not appropriate to pursue certain values, especially when multiple-value seeking can overcomplicate the relationship. In professional life especially, where the stakes are often high, we each need to identify principles that help us decide what values should and should not be pursued.

The Colorado and Miami cases almost read like stereotypes—senior male professors and younger female students—with three elements at work. One is the dynamic of males pursuing females. Another is the age difference: older males pursuing much younger females. And another is the power differential: from a position of authority, the professor pursues the student.

But the principles we need are more general, for other human combinations are possible.

What if the age difference is less? Robert is a 29-year-old professor of literature and Jane is a 25-year-old doctoral student.

Or if the genders are reversed? Maria is a 26-year-old assistant professor of biology and Gerhard is a 24-year-old graduate student.

Or what about gay and lesbian combinations? Tabitha is a 33-year-old professor and her student is Mariko, another 33-year-old woman who only lately decided to return to grad school.

Or what if the student initiates the flirtation, whether male or female, older or younger, gay or not?

Whatever principles of professional ethics we devise should be suitable for all variants.

The first thing is to identify values involved for each party. Is the relationship about entertainment, education, work, romance, or something else? The second thing is to prioritize the values: the values being pursued should be roughly equal in importance to each party and the satisfaction of that value for both parties should matter to both.

Two friends going to a movie, for example, know that entertainment is the purpose of the evening, that experiencing the movie together is primarily what their time together is about, and that both parties’ enjoying the outing matters to both of them. That is a healthy friendship. That’s not to say that other values cannot be introduced into the evening—venting about a hard day’s work, flirting, advice about business investments, debating politics, and so on—but they should be avoided if they conflict with the relationship’s primary purpose.

In a higher-education context specifically, the core value is learning, and the core relationship is professor-student. Each party in the relationship commits to the achieving of that value as their primary purpose. Each contributes something to the learning process—knowledge and mentoring from the professor and effort from the student. The professor receives values as a result—payment, the satisfaction of exercising teaching skills, professional advancement. The student also receives values—knowledge, career mentoring, and, hopefully, a degree.

Simultaneously, each has made a commitment to the other. The professor is to be the kind of teacher and mentor who aids the student’s educational growth, and the student is to be the kind of learner and professional-to-be who will be a credit to the professor.

None of that excludes other values from the relationship. Professors and grad students have successfully become friends, lovers, marriage partners, and so on. They can work on political campaigns or attend the same church or play together in recreational sports leagues. But anything that might conflict with the pursuit of that top value of learning should be scrutinized carefully, introduced into the primary relationship delicately, and, if necessary, set aside so as not to interfere with the pursuit of the top value. Alternatively, if there is a conflict but both parties believe that becoming lovers, say, is more important, then they should stop being professor and student.

Combining the professor-student relationship with romance is possible but obviously complicated. The student has to ask: Am I getting the grade, the recommendation, the advice because of my merits—or because I am sleeping with the teacher? And from the professor’s side: Am I getting sex only because I am a stepping stone to the student’s advancement? Am I still grading the student purely on merit?

Academic departments are typically gossipy places. One needs to protect one’s reputation against being seen as unprofessional.

And academic departments are typically gossipy places. One needs to protect one’s reputation against being seen as unprofessional. Professors don’t want the reputation of using their classrooms as sexual happy hunting grounds, and students don’t want the reputation of sleeping their way to the top.

On the positive side, as members of a department and a university, professors have made a commitment to their institutions and so have a responsibility to enhance those institutions’ reputations rather than undermine them. So too do graduate students when they join a department and a university.

Also important to underscore is the fact that graduate students are fully-grown adults. We are not here talking about teachers having relationships with under-age children or even the young adults that undergraduates are. The typical doctoral student is mature enough to have graduated from university, which typically means being over 22 years old, and has enough intelligence to be a candidate for a Ph.D. degree.

So my answer to the question of when professors can have sex with their students is: Rarely. No one-size-fits-all decision is possible for all individuals. The most important principles are good judgment by both professor and grad student and a real commitment by both to the integrity of the educational experience.

This is an edited version of an article first published in The Good Life series at EveryJoe.com

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About the Author: Stephen Hicks

Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, where he also directs the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of two books in intellectual history: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault and Nietzsche and the Nazis. His other publications include essays and reviews on education, entrepreneurship, and ethics in publications such as Review of Metaphysics, Business Ethics Quarterly, and The Wall Street Journal. He blogs at StephenHicks.org.