SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I'm-not-touching-this-with-a-ten-foot-pole dept.
The Guardian has a fascinating piece entitled Sexual paranoia on campus – and the professor at the eye of the storm. There is a lot going on in this article/interview and it touches on a lot of different issues in both society and higher-ed in general. Some choice quotes:
But you do end up making strange bedfellows. The people supporting free speech now are the conservatives. It's incomprehensible to me, but it's the so-called liberals on campus, the students who think of themselves as activists, who are becoming increasingly authoritarian. So I'm trying to step carefully. It's not like you want to make certain allies, particularly the men's rights people.
Kipnis's original essay was provoked by an email she received about a year before, informing her that relationships – dating, romantic or sexual – between undergraduates and faculty members at Northwestern were now banned. The same email informed her that relationships between graduates and staff, though not forbidden, were also problematic, and had to be reported to department chairs. "It annoyed me," she says. The language was neutral, but it seemed clear that it was mostly women this code was meant to protect. She thought of all those she knew who are married to former students, or who are the children of such couples, and wondered where this left them. It seemed to her this was part of a process that was transforming the "professoriate" into a sexually suspicious class: "would-be harassers all, sexual predators in waiting".
On a personal note, when I interact with students (which is every day), it's always either with an open office door, or in a public area. So as not to be discriminatory, I do the same for all students, men, women, or others. This sort of culture on campuses does make everyone suspicious of everyone else and it makes it hard to trust others. Students can't trust the instructors because they might "do something", staff can't trust the students because even a false accusation can be career ending, so there's this overall chilling effect that occurs when what should be a collegiate environment turns into an us vs them thing. This is definitely worse in some places than others, but there is an undercurrent of it everywhere. I applaud Laura Kipnis for bringing these issues to the light -- if we're going down this route, it should at least be a conscious community decision rather than bureaucratic policy handed down from University Counsel and risk assessment teams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2017, @06:06PM
When I was a grad student doing the TA-thing, I do remember the pleas to "Please help me pass this class"; most of the time it was coming from the guys (I'm a guy, BTW). I don't seem to recall the "*wink*wink*nudge*nudge*know*what*I*mean*" part, though. Maybe the gals in my classes were just never quite that desperate? I do, on the other hand, remember one gal who I could sense a budding relationship beginning to form; she was a smart and motivated student. Nothing ever came of it though. Sometimes I wonder just what could have been. *Sigh*
That being said, I do think the policies set forth by universities are prudent and well-intentioned. This is not about stifling your social life or you "being kept in your place" but laying out measures to protect both the student and the university staff; more cynically you might say that this is the university's CYA policy to protect themselves from getting sued. My experience while in academia was that, while they had no intention of interfering with what two adults get up to on their own time, they laid out the rules so that both parties knew what the consequences could be if things suddenly went sideways. If you decided to flout the rules no one was going to go after you; but you also couldn't expect the university to stand by you if you did decide to dance too close to the line concerning the policy. Just my take on it.