Harvard used to just say “it’s wrong,” but left it up to the faculty’s ethics in the school’s infinite faith in its own superior virtue. My Freshman Humanities professor, poet William Alfred, was married to a former student. As is usually the case in this matter, ethics alone often wasn’t enough to restrain the lust of many aging, prestigious, powerful professors facing a veritable cornucopia of luscious, young, ambitious co-eds they could court using brains, worldly wiles, charm and the promise of good grades. Now the profs have more to bolster their self-control…from the New York Times:
Harvard University has adopted a ban on professors having sexual or romantic relationships with undergraduate students, joining a small but growing number of universities prohibiting such relationships. The move comes as the Obama administration investigates the handling of accusations of sexual assault at dozens of colleges, including Harvard.
The ban clarifies an earlier policy that labeled sexual and romantic relationships between professors and the students they teach as inappropriate, but did not explicitly prohibit professors from having relationships with students they did not teach.
Harvard said in a statement released Thursday that the change was made after a panel reviewing the institution’s policy on Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, determined that the university’s existing policy language on “relationships of unequal status did not explicitly reflect the faculty’s expectations of what constituted an appropriate relationship between undergraduate students and faculty members.” It said the committee revised the policy “to include a clear prohibition to better accord with these expectations…Besides banning sexual and romantic relationships between professors and all undergraduates, the policy also bans such relationships between teaching staff, such as graduate students, and the students who fall under their supervision or evaluation.
Good. Long overdue.
This is also an excellent use of Harvard’s status and leadership, as the oldest and most famous institution of higher learning. Other universities will now suddenly be responsible as well.
Gee, do you think Harvard took my advice?
Nahhh.
Ethics Alarms 
So The Pelican Brief was wrong all along.
How will Harvard professors pass on their super-intelligent genes now?!
There went my keyboard.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of linked traits that are not so desirable.
WHY did I just now think of “links” like THAT?!
By fission, most likely… as usual.
In response to Tex!
Aw Jack. Next they’ll something crazy like outlaw sex with Congressional pages and White House interns. Can’t a guy have any fun any more? They may have to raise tuition at colleges if this continues. Who will want to get a PhD and work for those crappy salaries if there are no more perqs?
Took long enough. You know, the relationship is about the same as a Drill Instructor having a relationship with a boot (trainee)? High ranking NCO, young and presumably not-so-wise recruit, basically in his/her power…sort of reminds you of politicians, doesn’t it?
I feel this press release is very misleading. Every University I have every attended or worked for (in the last 15 years) had a ban on faculty sleeping with the students. What does Harvard mean by the “small but growing number of universities prohibiting such relationships”. Do they mean the “small but growing number of elite private schools who have reserved the ‘perk’ of faculty getting some on the side with impressionable and vulnerable undergrads?” Only one school I ever attended didn’t have such a policy when I first arrived, but implemented one soon after. The only faculty that protested such a policy were the humanities faculty from Elite Northeastern Universities who claimed that such a policy reeked of outdated, Puritanical, backwards American values and that they had transcended such things. I am very shocked, but not surprised that it has taken Harvard this long to implement such a common-sense measure.
That’s really interesting, Michael R. It went on in the ’70s at the “Elite Northeastern Small College” I attended as a geographical factor then. And I suspect it’s still not explicitly prohibited there, but I don’t know. Maybe it has been prohibited for years. It would be nice to think so.
In the state universities I have been (in 4 different states in 3 different regions), that type of behavior has been forbidden for at least a couple of decades and much longer at most. My friends at state schools take it as a given. My female friends from Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools took it for a given that you can sleep with your professor if you wanted a better grade. I heard Mount Holyoke tried to ban the practice about 15 years ago and the students protested fiercely for the right to sleep with the faculty (it apparently was one of the rush activities for some campus groups).