Council weighs relationship ban

Author: H. Kay Merriman

On Monday, students and faculty filled the seats and lined the walls of McCardell Bicentennial Hall 216 to hear the " 'Consensual' Relations in the Academy: Gender, Power, and Sexuality" lecture by University of Virginia professor and author Ann J. Lane. In her introduction of the speaker, Assistant Professor of History Amy Morsman revealed why the College determined that it was necessary to host a speaker about sexual relationships between students and professors at this time.

"Faculty Council has been crafting a policy which would prohibit professors from having amorous relationships with students," Morsman said.

Lane reiterated the Council's belief that the College needs to establish a policy regarding this topic. In the late nineties, she and three other members of the faculty at the University of Virginia were approached by the President of the college to review and update UVA's sexual harassment policy. She and her colleagues determined that the policy was accurate, but was missing a component about sexual relations between faculty and students. This was the beginning of Lane's interest in the controversial topic.

Lane repeatedly used a medical analogy when talking about the continually redefined term "consent." She said that the medical world requires "informed consent" in order to perform a surgery on a patient. Her concern was that students' situation of lesser power when in a relationship with a professor or other faculty member would not allow them to give "informed consent."

"You have to know enough about what you are consenting to in order for it to be legitimate," Lane said. "But what does it mean when you are having a relationship with someone who has great power over you?"

She also reiterated that students are "not fully adult" and "can be manipulated."

"The responsible person is not the student. The student is the victim," she said.

In her opinion, forming a relationship with a student is a way in which a professor neglects his or her duty to prepare students for life after college.

"A professor - student relationship can either be a safety net or a place in which the sexual objectification of women is reinforced," Lane said.

When questioned about the existence of positive faculty-student consensual sexual relationships, Lane stated that if the couple was willing to be open about it and alert the dean and the community, she did not see a problem with the relationship. She divided relationships into two categories: "the genuine relationships" and "the others who just have sex with students all the time."

"A policy stops the predators," she said, "and there are more of those than I thought there were."

Lane acknowledged the problem of tenure and the fact that it would be nearly impossible to fire a tenured faculty member should he or she be caught having sex with students. However, she is confident that if the College were to start forcing new hires to sign a binding statement and to agree to not partake in sexual relationships with students that the issue would subside.

"Start now and in twenty years it will be a different school," Lane said.

Lane was appalled by the lack of this type of law in academia because she sees it in other institutions.

"So many other professions have it and we don't," she said, citing the corporate world and the military as examples.

The College's Faculty Council will continue work on Middlebury's potential policy during the upcoming weeks. A few of the faculty spoke up near the end of the lecture to say that Middlebury values the students' opinions on this issue.