Getting Up to Speed

Though the issue of questionable relationships between students and Harvard staff members is typically viewed through the lens of the tutor-student relationship, it is far from the only context in which the problem arises.

Decades ago, it was not uncommon for faculty and students to engage in relationships. In fact, many resulted in marriage.

Warburg Professor of Economics emeritus John Kenneth Galbraith met his wife Catherine, a 1936 graduate of Radcliffe, when she was his student.

“It’s a big generational thing,” Wilson says. “Many older members of the faculty are married to their former students.”

Changing times have caused other universities to reevaluate policies regarding sexual harassment and the appropriateness of student-faculty relationships.

In April 2003, the University of California (UC) Berkeley proposed a ban on student-professor relationships in the wake of a sex scandal surrounding a student at Berkeley’s law school and the school’s then-dean. Berkeley, like many other schools, had an “unwritten rule” that students and faculty should not get involved, according to Gayle Binion, chair of UC’s Academic Senate and a political science professor at UC Santa Barbara.

After a William & Mary professor published an article in GQ magazine about an affair with his student, officials at the Virginia College banned all dating between professors and undergraduates; and following a harassment case against an assistant math professor in November 1997, Yale University also passed a ban.

Schools such as the University of Iowa and Duke University also changed their policies in response to specific incidents.

Some bans prohibit faculty from dating students they supervise or are likely to supervise; others ban any and all student-professor relationships. Punishments range from letters of reprimand to termination.

In Harvard’s publication, “Sexual Harassment: Guidelines in the Faculty of Arts and Science,” the policy on student-faculty relationships is the former—the ban regards only students a teacher is teaching.

According to the guidelines, “Amorous relationships that might be appropriate in other circumstances always have inherent dangers when they occur between any teacher or officer of the University for whom he or she has a professional responsibility (i.e. as teacher, adviser, evaluator, supervisor). [...] Officers and other members of the teaching staff should be aware that any romantic involvement with their students makes them liable for formal action against them.”

The policy as stated in the main faculty handbook, “Information for Faculty Offering Instruction in Arts and Sciences, 2004-2005,” remains unofficial. The book states that “sexual advances towards or liaisons with one’s students are inappropriate, and violate University policy,” but declares the above should be read “not as a codification of official institutional policy but as a ‘discussion document’ to be used as a point of reference.”

By the Book

According to Bates, there is an orientation at the beginning of every year informing new and returning tutors of the guidelines by which they are expected to behave. Bennett says that when news broke last spring about the Lauren Brown case, the policy was widely reiterated to tutors.