Harvard, like other research universities, punishes professors for spending time with undergraduates. An hour spent teaching an undergraduate is an hour that could have been spent working with a post-doc or graduate student to get a research paper or grant proposal out the door. Via a new policy, Harvard has now banned sex between consenting adult undergraduates and teachers. Thus there is truly nothing tangible that a professor can gain from talking to an undergraduate.
The Boston Globe article on the new policy talks about ethical issues, but in an era where “A is average” the traditional ethics problem of influence over grades does not exist.
To me the deeper ethical questions are why professors grade their own students (see my “Universities and Economic Growth” article) and how it can be ethical to send graduates out into the world without any independent, and therefore credible, certification of their competence. But since these issues don’t involve sexual activity, apparently nobody cares…
Note that they do not ban sex between professors and grad students. Given the age differences, sex with undergrads by profs was always kind of creepy (and I think not that common to begin with). OTOH, there is a long tradition of (female) grad students sleeping with (and in the past, at least) often marrying (male) professors. At one time, it was more or less assumed that, given the all consuming demands of the lab, grad students and (hopefully unmarried) profs. would have little opportunity for a social life outside of work so that it made sense for them to socialize with each other – this was not only not discouraged but actively ENcouraged – or else where would those poor girls get a date? Likewise, (male) grad students were expected to socialize with (female) undergrads. Again in the past, it was common and more or less expected that men would date women who were slightly (but not TOO MUCH) younger, which actually makes sense given that men tend to be less mature than women for any given age.
Note that the new policy leaves this arrangement undisturbed, with only the proviso that the romance cannot begin until the final grades have been submitted. Of course, judging from the number of female high school teachers who have been caught sleeping with their male students, nowadays the older partner is just as likely to be female as male.
I actually kind of give Harvard credit for not banning such relationships. Modern feminism has a real puritanical streak and I would not be surprised if when the policy was being debated there were many in favor of banning all faculty -student relationships due to inherently unequal power relationships, blah, blah, blah.
I love the implication in the first paragraph that the prospect of sleeping with their undergraduate students was the ONLY reason for Harvard professors to have any interaction with them.
The second paragraph makes an excellent point, and I wish this argument was made more often elsewhere. Its actually really stupid for the same people who are teaching a course to also do the grading or certification of the course. At best, teaching and grading are two different skill sets, so its unlikely the same professor (or professor/ TA team) would do both well. At worst, this creates a bad ethical climate where the best grades go to brown-nosers.
There is a cynical argument that what society wants of its office drones and lower level professionals to be good at brown-nosing and make-work and so this is what our universities are configured to prepare people for. Otherwise the students wouldn’t be prepared for the “real world”. But this is really an argument that you can’t have excellent or even competent institutions in a deeply corrupt society. It concedes the point that higher educational institutions are part of the problem.
I would like to see a cultural shift towards higher education certifying students at doing various tasks at certain levels of proficiency (by the way, this can be “soft skills” such as being able to write, read and accurately summarize complex documents, manage organizations, and make good policy recommendations), and businesses would know directly which skills its applicants coming from universities would have. There could even be a process of returning every so often to get re-certified, which would be another revenue stream for universities. But I’ve also become quite cynical that most business are as interested in skills when they hire and retain people as they claim to be.
Izzie: Your idea that it is okay for professors to have sex with graduate students strikes me as odd. There is much more opportunity for a conflict of interest to arise with a graduate student than with an undergraduate. The professor-grad student relationship is truly employer-employee and the professor who has a bias can do a lot to advance the graduate student’s career. The professor-undergrad relationship is more like employee-customer. Maybe the professor who had been influenced by a personal relationship would write a more elaborate letter of recommendation for an undergrad but there isn’t too much else that he or she could do.
The Harvard policy bans relationships with direct supervisees. However, you can still pick up the other grad students at the dept. wine & cheese hour. You are not their employer.
Employer -employee relationships are probably more demoralizing to OTHER employees than they are to the people involved. But that is not the excuse given for banning them.