Against university prof-student sex codes
Should students be allowed to hook up with professors? At Slate, Laura Kipnis argues against university regulations barring student-professor relationships.
Feminism has taught us to recognize the power dynamics in these kinds of relationships, and this has evolved into a dominant paradigm, the new propriety. But where once the issue was coercion or quid pro quo sex, in institutional neo-feminism the issue is any whiff of sexuality itself—or any situation that causes a student to "experience his or her vulnerability." (Pretty much the definition of sentience, I always thought.) "The unequal institutional power inherent in this relationship heightens the vulnerability of the student and the potential for coercion," the California code warns, as if any relationship is ever absent vulnerability and coercion. But the problem in redressing romantic inequalities with institutional blunt instruments is that it just confers more power on the institutions themselves, vastly increasing their reach into people's lives.
Kipnis was once a professor in my grad school department, though I neither studied nor hooked up with her. My loss in retrospect. Worth reading in full.
