CONFERENCE of ACADEMICS for SEXUAL EQUITY

CASE
Conference of Academics for Sexual Equity(CASE) is an association of
academics, and those with prior academic affiliations, committed
to the principle of consent regarding intimate relationships.
In advocacy of this principle, CASE rejects the principle
advocated by some academics that academics in asymmetrically
related positions be banned from having intimate relationships.
Specifically, we regard it as an inappropriate intrusion
for universities to ban consenting intimate relationships
between students and professors; students and administrators;
junior professors and senior professors, etc.

 
While CASE is opposed to academic banning of intimate relationships,
we do not endorse or encourage particular types of intimate
relationships. In terms of student-professor relationships occurring
while a class is ongoing, we hold that such relationships are often
fraught with potential difficulties; however, we feel that it is
inappropriate for authority to coercively repress such relationships.
We believe that ALL amorous relationships should be based upon the
principle of mutual consent, respect and affection. Whether relationships be inside or outside of academia, we
encourage all involved persons to fully and responsibly explore
the ethical ramifications of their behavior.

 
CASE rejects the concept that consenting adult sexual relationships
can fall under the rubric of sexual harassment.  Sexual harassment
cannot occur unless there is UNWANTED sexual attention.  CASE regards
the attempts of universities to coerce the behavior of consenting
academics as a form of sexual harassment in itself.  In this regard,
we are also concerned that such banning policies may also be employed
as a guise to regulate and demean persons who are involved in
same sex or interracial or inter-age relationships.  Our concern
also includes the effects of academic banning on all kinds of
academic relationships, such as non-sexual friendships and mentoring
relationships.

 
CASE is particularly concerned with the cartoon caricatures of
professor as predatory lecher and the student as innocent
victim. Such caricatures deny the diversity and heterogeneity
of university life and function to denigrate and degrade fellow
academics, both students and professors. In terms of dealing with
such caricatures, CASE provides speakers, both men and women,
who will openly address ethical issues relating to asymmetric
academic relationships and the banning of such relationships.

 
CASE has been created by academics and former academics who
are or have been involved in long-term committed relationships
that originated in an academic context.  CASE welcomes all persons
who are supportive of the CASE philosophy.   Whatever your personal
situation may be, please do consider joining us and helping us
secure the right of intimate association for adults in academia.

 
Barry Dank, CASE Founder and Coordinator; ASC-l moderator;
case@csulb.edu; Barry Dank is a professor of sociology
at California State University, Long Beach 90840


 
 
 
                   Times Mirror Company Los Angeles Times

(c) September 16, 1994, Friday, Electronic Edition


 
  
HEADLINE: A LESSON IN LOVE?; THE LATEST CAMPUS DEBATE IS WHETHER
STUDENT-PROFESSOR ROMANCES ARE ABOUT POWER OR PASSION

 
BYLINE: By BOB SIPCHEN, TIMES STAFF WRITER


   It may start with a bawdy passage from Chaucer or a heated
explication of cell mitosis. A student's eyes meet a professor's. Hearts
pitter-pat.
 
   And before you can say "Educating Rita," homework has a whole new
connotation.
 
Students returning to campus this fall will likely find the debate about
"consensual relations" one of the hottest fronts in the ongoing gender
wars.
 
   From guidelines discouraging professors from dating people currently
enrolledin their classes to blanket bans on fraternization between
faculty and students,college administrators from Cal State Fullerton to
Harvard have proposed or passed edicts on the subject.
 
   In reaction to what some see as the authoritarian underpinnings of
the "banning movement," a loosely knit group called CASE -- Consenting
Academics ForSexual Equity -- has taken the matter onto the Internet,
where opponents are gathering via E-mail.
 
   Virtually everyone who has jumped into the debate will concede that
some student-professor flings can blossom into loving relationships --
even marriage.Virtually everyone deplores harassment by professors or
any exchange of sex for grades.
 
   If the various sides agree on anything else, it is that this issue,
like manyother societal concerns these days, pivots on a handful of
fundamental terms: power . . . consent . . . responsibility.
Beyond that, the argument moves quickly into the subtle semantics of
gender politics.
 
   Well before CASE sent the discussion sizzling through cyberspace,
hanky-pankyhad been translated into the abstruse murk of academese.
Student-professor shenanigans became "intimate asymmetrical
relationships," deriving from "power differentiated positions."
 
   Professors, in other words, have more clout than students. Therefore
interactions between students and instructors are unequal.
 
   "So what?" smirk opponents of restrictions.
 
   "So stop it!" huff those who see themselves as supporters of
students' rights.
 
    Barry Dank,  a professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach who
organized CASE last spring, says he has as strong a record as anyone of
encouraging students to file complaints against harassers. But such
cases, he adds, have nothing to do with students who enter freely into a
relationship with a professor -- or with anyone else.
He blames much of the anti-fraternization activity on "authoritarian
feminists. . . . They take this motherly image -- 'We'll protect you
whether youwant our help or not.' How hypocritical! How offensive!"
 
   In the late 1970s, Dank locked horns with Anita Bryant, whose "Save
Our Children" campaign attempted to ban homosexual teachers from public
schools. He sees similarities between that "crusade" and this one, which
also presumes to protect innocent students, and paints men as sexual
predators.
 
   "I'm alienated from the idea of putting women back into the category
of 'women and children,' " he says, "from the whole victimization cult.
. . ."
 
   Norma Chinchilla, a sociology professor and director of the women's
studies program at Long Beach, doesn't think much of the case made by
CASE. Concern about relations between instructors and students who date
is fueled by compassion, not ideology, she says. "So many women faculty
members end up havingto put the pieces together after these things go
awry, after these students havemajor trauma."
 
   Bernice Sandler, a scholar with the National Assn. for Women in
Education, a 3000-member professional support and development group, has
studied numerous surveys of harassment on college campuses. She says
that 20% to 30% of undergraduate women and 30% to 40% of women in graduate
programs report
that professors have subjected them to behavior that is defined as
sexual harassment by those conducting the surveys -- although the
students did not initially consider it such.
 
   By the same token, she says, women who have had relations with
professors often believe that the affair is consensual as it occurs but
later become convinced that they were exploited.
 
   Some feminist scholars even contend that consent is a meaningless
term in relations of this sort.
 
   "The Lecherous Professor" (University of Illinois, 1984), an
influential bookon harassment, states that view emphatically. In a note
added to the 1990 edition, co-author Billie Wright Dziech argues: "Where
power differentials exist, there can be no 'mutual consent.' The
infinitesimal number of cases in which professors/teaching assistants
and students do develop genuine and seemingly abiding attractions can,
as the book suggests, be treated on an individual basis without denying
students protection from the campus Lotharios who claim 'consent' every
time they seek to bed a confused or intimidated victim."
 
Chinchilla recalls a student who came sobbing into her office after a
male faculty member had dumped her.
 
   "She said, 'I was so flattered. He was the first man I had ever met
who wasn't interested in my body, but was interested in my mind.'
 
   "She found that incredibly wonderful. But then she found out it
wasn't her mind that he was interested in. When I suggested that maybe
she wanted to make acomplaint, because after she had backed off she felt
really pressured in her act, she said, 'No, it was my fault for not
realizing what was happening in the first place.'
 
   "A lot of students never complain. They feel it's their fault."
 
   In fact, says Ann J. Lane, a history professor and chair of the
women's studies program at the University of Virginia, most of the
students alleging sexual harassment against professors on her campus say
the relationships began as consensual ones.
 
   Last year Lane spearheaded an effort at Virginia to enact guidelines
that included a ban of all relations between undergraduate students and
their professors. Lane says she was astonished at the intensity of the
national debate on the guidelines -- which the administration ultimately
refused to enact.
 
   "The purpose of the regulation was to empower students. . . . Many
students said, 'I didn't know how to say no.'
 
   "How do you say no," asks Lane, "to someone who's your father's age
and on your dissertation committee? . . . I have students who drop out
of school, who say 'I can't go back into the chemistry building.' "
 
   To those who say students are adults and don't need to be told how to
behave,Lane replies: "We do that all the time. We tell these adults what
courses they can take, what alcohol they can drink."
 
   Which is not to say, Lane contends, that she and those who support
her views are interested in regulating the sexual lives of students. "It
would be impossible. It's the professors we're talking about."
 
   Students who say they are involved in good relationships with
   professors are as reluctant to speak on the record as those who say
   they have been devastated. Both fear repercussions.
 
A woman who asked to be identified only as a graduate student at a
Midwest college, for instance, tells of falling in love with a professor
while she served as his graduate research assistant.
 
   The couple waited until the student was no longer the professor's
charge before consummating their attraction. But then one of the young
woman's classmates spotted the couple at an off-campus cafe.
 
   "She called a meeting of my other classmates (in the department). . .
. The department chair called us in and said, 'This will stop.' "
 
   The couple refused to break up. So the chair refused to issue a
letter critiquing the student's progress. Meanwhile, word of the
relationship spread.
 
   "I felt like I had the scarlet letter on my head," the woman says. "I
consider myself fairly liberal, but I am very offended by the feminist
insinuation that as a woman I am incapable of making my own decisions.
 
   "We all make mistakes," she continues. "If dating a professor is a
mistake, we learn from it. But we could make that same mistake with a
businessman or banker. . . . If you are a male in this society, you
always have more power thana woman, so any relationship could be
considered asymmetrical."
 
Like that student, Daphne Patai, a professor of Spanish and Women's
Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has tapped into
CASE's nascent electronic debate on the Internet.
 
   She hasn't formally affiliated herself with the group. But Patai, who
co-authored an upcoming book -- "Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales
>From the Strange World of Women's Studies" (Basic Books, 1994) -- does
worry about the "crusade mentality," on campuses.
 
   "Professors," she says, "are not ogres, and students are not
   children. . . . When I was a grad student, women had to be in the
   dorms at 10:30 or 11:00. . . .In the bad old days, people lost jobs
   because they had relations with students. Do we want to do that all
   over again?"
 
   At least some critics of student-faculty relations scoff at the
notion that it must come to that. Judith Sheine, an assistant professor
of architecture at UCLA and Cal Poly Pomona, notes that she and many of
her female colleagues have,on occasion, been hit upon by young men in
their classes.
 
   The proper response, she says, is simply to "act professorial." One
way or another, she says, she and the professors she knows get the
student's focus backon the class. "As a faculty member, it seems to me,
you should have some self-control."
 
   Dank, of Long Beach, is rankled that the argument so often is cast in
such highbrow tones -- as if professors were all-powerful gods and
students mere mortals. The issue for him hinges on logic, not sex --
although the sex aspect is what keeps the thinking skewed, he says.
 
   For instance: If conflict of interest is such a concern, why do ban
supporters tend to ignore other obvious breeches, such as professors who
have colleagues' children or spouses in their classes?
 
   By Dank's analysis, the challenge to "asymmetry" stems not from true
concern about conflict of interest or compassion for fragile young
souls, but from "older females attempts to control younger females."
 
   There is, Dank answers, a historic tension between the generations.
He sees it like this: Older men have never been averse to younger
women's charms. Younger women are naturally -- perhaps biologically --
attracted to men of powerand wisdom, who happen to be older as a rule.
So young women are always drainingthe pool of mature, intelligent men
from which middle-aged women hope to find mates. This is especially true
at the university, where older men and younger women continuously rub
together, so to speak.
 
   Academic feminists, naturally, resent that, he says. And they're
willing to force bureaucratic controls on younger women to keep them in
line, he adds.
 
   Chinchilla, increasingly cast as Dank's nemesis at Long Beach,
doesn't buy his analysis.
 
   "I think that's an incredible fantasy on his part," she says. "It
makes thesemiddle-aged men seem so incredibly attractive. The reason
they're dating their 18- and 19-year-old students is because women their
own age are on to them."
 
   But that's not really the issue, Chinchilla says: "If the classroom
becomes sexualized, if the boundaries become blurred in ways that hint
at intimacy, I think the learning environment becomes contaminated."
 
   Joan Blythe, an associate professor of English at the University
of Kentucky, took a different tack during the exhcange on the subject
in Harper's Magazine last year.
 
   "Those pushing for a ban ," she said, fear real life, especially the
protean power of lust.  College for them is about isolation from the
real world, not introduction to it."
 
   The Harper's exchange drew a blistering response from readers,
including many academics.  Blythe (I'm the most retiring person in the
around") was stunned and offended.
 
  In retrospect, she is more circumspect. Sex is complicated, she says.
Crueltyof any sort, on the other hand, is rather simple.
 
"People must learn to be personally responsible," she says. "That's the
problem with our young people -- they need to learn to be more
responsible for their lives and for their bodies."
 
   But that's only part of the problem: "I'm very sympathetic with women
   who are beset by arrogant, mean, self-serving professors. Apparently
   there are a lot of them out there. I'm glad I don't know them. It's a
   tragedy."
 
   The antidote to naive irresponsibility and cunning selfishness may be
conveniently close at hand, she says.
 
   "Rather than having a ban on faculty-student sex, we should have a
requirement that everyone read Milton and Shakespeare. I think when we
neglect the older authors we lose the great lessons about being loving
and responsible. We forget the values of strong community.
 
   "In the classics, there's a great celebration of the joy of being
alive, of the amazing gift of life and the world and the responsibility
you have toward it."
 
   If professors and students were better grounded in those values, she
says, their passion for each other might, at least occasionally, give
way to a passion for knowledge.