UBC may ban sex between its faculty and students
Times have changed on North American campuses from the 1970s and ’80s, when B.C. law professor Craig Jones says it was common for faculty members to become romantic with students and in some cases go on to marry them.
“In those days it sometimes seemed the student body was seen as a kind of dating pool for professors, especially the young faculty. But the culture has completely changed since then,” said Jones, who teaches law at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.
The interim president of the University of B.C., Martha Piper, is considering moving further from the freedom-oriented past to follow a handful of U.S. universities that have imposed an outright ban on professors having romantic relationships with students.
Even though UBC already has a conflict-of-interest policy that covers sexual affairs between faculty and students, Piper said this week she remains “concerned about how consent and conflict are defined in an environment where there is a power imbalance.”
While Piper emphasized it’s important to “respect the decisions of consenting adults,” she also said freedom of choice must be weighed against protecting students.
She didn’t specify which range of students a potential ban might cover.
“I think it’s important that university leaders engage faculty, students, staff and leading experts in discussing and examining this complex issue,” Piper said.
UBC is developing a protocol for handling sexual assault complaints. But Piper’s urging that campus officials also look into consensual faculty-student relationships is different, with a UBC spokeswoman saying it’s “too early” to say how it might happen.
While Piper does not believe any Canadian university bans professor-student relationships, Harvard this year became the latest of a few campuses in the U.S. to forbid professors from having any “sexual or romantic relationships” with undergraduates.
Harvard’s policy is less restrictive when it comes to graduate students: It prohibits faculty from having romantic relations only with graduate students who are under their supervision.
Jones, a former president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, believes moves by Harvard and Piper to impose further restrictions on relationships between professors and students “may be a solution for a vanishing problem.”
Since ethical values on campuses regarding sleeping with or otherwise exploiting students have utterly transformed from decades ago, Jones believes “appropriate safeguards,” particularly conflictof-interest guidelines, are already in place to protect students from professors who would try to coerce them into sex.
“Despite our best efforts, we know that people will fall in love in all kinds of circumstances. We have to balance people’s liberty in this most intimate area of their lives against the possibility that power can be exploited,” Jones said.
“This is a fraught area to bring in more legislation,” Jones said, adding that “the culture is already doing a pretty good job” of steering faculty and students away from romantic liaisons.
Piper acknowledged UBC’s conflict-of-interest rules already restrict relationships between students and faculty.
“UBC policy requires faculty members to conduct themselves at all times in accordance with the highest ethical standards and specifically recognizes that there is an inherent power imbalance between faculty and students,” Piper said in a statement.
“Faculty members must avoid or declare all conflicts of interest, including those that involve consensual relations with their students. Faculty members should not grade or supervise a student with whom they have a personal relationship. If this policy is violated, a faculty member will face disciplinary measures.”
Even though Jones said he believes there is no question faculty hold sway over students in many ways, he turned the argument around by warning that a more sweeping policy against relationships could hand students an inappropriate degree of leverage over professors.
“If we punish professors for entering into relationships with students, the student’s ability to report a professor to university officials gives her or him an enormous amount of coercive power over the professor.”
Michael McDonald, the former head of UBC’s Centre for Applied Ethics, supports Piper’s attempt to start a campus-wide exploration of student-faculty sexual relationships, however.
“I’m a bit conservative on these kinds of things,” McDonald said.
Even though many people believe post-secondary students are “adults who can look after themselves,” McDonald said some students are immature and some faculty continue to lack insight when it comes to crossing boundaries in romantic relationships.
Piper, McDonald and Jones all said they know of solid lifelong relationships and marriages that have emerged out of professor-student liaisons. But that didn’t stop them from endorsing various degrees of safeguards against the ways that faculty can take advantage of students.
The same exploitative relationships that can occur on campus can also happen in private companies, the military or police forces, said McDonald, where those in positions of power enter into relationships with those under them.
Even though most universities and colleges require faculty who have a romantic link with a student to report the potential conflict of interest to administrators, McDonald said he believes the overall guideline should simply be: “Don’t get involved.”