Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 3, 1993 TAG: 9305030076
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG and LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Not from the resolution, which is similar to one that became policy at her own College of William and Mary three years ago, but from the way the resolution has sometimes been portrayed: as prudish, puritanical and arcane.
"It's distressing," said Ventis, director of women's studies at William and Mary. "Our point is not to curtail sexuality, but to prevent exploitation where possible."
There are other arenas, too, in which relationships between people and their supervisors are being discussed.
It is happening in the workplace: in law offices and at corporations.
"It's not just a higher-education issue," said Louise Dudley, a UVa spokeswoman. "It's being looked at everywhere people are in positions of authority. It's not just another example of colleges trying to be politically correct."
But it is in higher education that this discussion seems to be getting the most attention.
William and Mary's policy, thought to be the first of its nature passed in Virginia, discourages amorous relations between faculty and students where there is an evaluative role. But if faculty and students do become involved, they are encouraged to report the situation to supervisors who will make sure the student is treated - and graded - fairly.
UVa's proposed policy, which takes a firmer tone, simply says that faculty should not engage in amorous or sexual relations with students over whom they hold positions of academic or administrative authority. The policy must go before the Board of Visitors before it becomes campus law.
But already on UVa's grounds it has been widely accepted - by people who originally had hoped to ban faculty/student dating outright, and by those who thought that idea was too paternalistic and an infringement of personal and civil rights.
Other Virginia colleges, with more loosely defined stances, are watching Mr. Jefferson's university to see how faculty and students will deal with the proposed policy.
Hollins College's Committee on Sexual Harassment has met for the past year, reworking the school policy on sexual harassment. The policy - which applies to students, faculty and staff - includes discouragement of relationships between faculty and students, said sophomore Brantley Fry, a committee member.
"But we didn't put in anything definite," Fry said. "We're going to leave it open for now and wait to see what happens at UVa."
The Charlottesville university's new recommendation "limits consensual relationships, but for good reason: It prevents abusive power," Matt Cooper, president of UVa's student body, said last week.
The original recommendation "denied our autonomy as adults who can date who we want to. One argument was that we weren't old enough to make mature decisions and that we would end up getting hurt."
Radford University and Virginia Tech deal with student-faculty relations in the manner of most universities in the state, that is, as a part of the sexual harassment policy.
Both discourage student and faculty relations in situations where the faculty member evaluates the student.
And both Tech President James McComas and Charles Owens, head of academic affairs at Radford, know of a handful of faculty who have dated students anyway.
"And I know, though it was before my time, of faculty who have married students," Owens said. "That happens. But it's not widespread. I know of about two or three cases in the past four years."
There are others who would say the numbers are higher, particularly when "faculty" includes graduate assistants, who are close in age to the students they are teaching.
Sharon Davie, director of the women's center at the University of Virginia, saw 47 people in her office last year with complaints of harassment.
Of those, 16 were graduate students and 10 were undergraduate students. Many of their concerns were about faculty.
"With the graduate students, in almost every case, the person that was doing the harassing was a faculty member," Davie said. The undergraduates were split among problems with faculty, teaching assistants and peers.
"Occasionally, students would come in to talk about being approached by a faculty member or a coach. In some cases, sexual language was used. In other cases, there was a request to go away for a weekend. Sometimes it was more subtle, sometimes more direct."
The students showed emotions ranging from embarrassment and humiliation to confusion or anger.
In many cases, Davie said, "they feared a reprisal. Sometimes the students felt very powerless that they could get out of it without any academic damage."
In most student/faculty relationships, Davie said, "this doesn't happen at all."
But if there were only one case each year, proponents of these policies say, it's important to have guidelines.
"At the very least, there is heightened awareness that certain behaviors are not acceptable," said Jean Scott, who sees only a handful of complaints come before her sexual-harassment committee each year at William and Mary. "And perhaps nothing has brought that on more than Anita Hill."
There are those who say a policy will do nothing to stop the actions in the first place, and this, even Cindy Aron, who helped lead the hard-line proposal before UVa's faculty senate, admits is true.
But the policy does give the university recourse, she has said. It lets people know that the behavior is unacceptable.
To Howard Warshawsky, chairman of the Faculty Affairs Committee at Roanoke College, UVa's proposal seems "a little strange, in the sense that I'm not sure what the motivations are." Banning a certain type of abusive action - such as sexual harassment - is fine, Warshawsky said.
"But just banning relationships that normally are considered perfectly legal and ethical, in hopes of preventing possible abuses, seems to be excessive," he said.
The Roanoke College faculty handbook includes a statement advising faculty that the "establishment of a relationship with a student that exploits the trust and dependency of the student or one that would impair the teacher's professional judgment" is grounds for dismissal.
A woman's college would seem to some a place where opportunities such as those that UVa wants to prohibit would readily present themselves.
But Hollins College senior Elizabeth McClurkin says relationships between faculty and students there remain the stuff of rumor mills.
"I've heard of good friendships, but never of sexual overtones in those friendships," said McClurkin, treasurer of the college's Student Government Association. "The faculty members don't try to go out and find relationships. They know what their professional conduct should be."
Besides, she said, "the majority of male faculty members are older, and so it doesn't really create the type of situation where a student would want to have a relationship."
As people on both sides of the issue discuss it, they talk about what has happened to friends of friends or even hypothetical peers. Those who have been in these situations themselves so far have stayed out of public debate.
The academic discussion about sex and relations thus far is, in truth, far from sexy, though news crews continually try to make it so.
A story in Newsweek about the controversy was accompanied by a photo of UVa President John T. Casteen kissing his wife, whom he met when he was an assistant professor and she was a graduate student at Berkeley, Calif. He has not said whether he was supervising her at the time, opting to keep that matter personal.
There was laughter at a UVa meeting when a student inadvertently substituted the word "intercourse" for "discourse" midspeech. And it was this clip that was picked up by radio stations.
Though some people have made outright fun of the policy, that slip of the tongue actually was comic relief, said UVa's Davie. "It's still hard to discuss sex. People were saying it wasn't an appropriate topic for us to be dealing with. Sometimes, humor is a way of dealing with the more comfortable."
But others, she said, have used satire as a weapon, minimizing the ideas behind the policy and questioning whether the abuses exist at all.
And now and then, there are those snide comments about the policy - comments that William and Mary's Ventis loathes.
"I think people are missing the point," Ventis said. "We're trying to encourage healthy relationships, not exploitive ones. And that to me is not puritanical, it's not prudish and it's not a laughing matter."
by CNB