"The bottom line is that the University is against sexual harassment," said MacKay-Smith. "A personal relationship opens up the possibility for widespread misinterpretation and abuse."

The same policies that exist for professors are also valid for tutors in the houses, according Deborah Foster, senior tutor at Currier House and lecturer in folklore and mythology.

"Under no circumstances must a resident tutor be involved in any way with a student," said Foster. "It's an unequal power equation, and it's inappropriate."

Foster said if a relationship between a tutor and student does arise, the tutor is normally asked to leave.

"It's very well known that this is not acceptable," said Foster. "You can't regulate human emotion, but it's very important to have protection for the student who has no power in this kind of scenario."

Warburg Emeritus Professor of Economics John Kenneth Galbraith likely had no idea that student-faculty relationships would become such a hot issue today, 55 years after he started a relationship with a student while he was professor of economics at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

"I fell in love with a young female student," Galbraith wrote in a 1983 letter to then-Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky, published in Galbraith's 1986 book A View From the Stands. "A not wholly unpredictable consequence of this lapse from faculty and professional decorum, as now required, was that we were married.