In the case of a professor who’s sexually involved with a student whom he’s not supervising or teaching at the time, is the relationship nobody else’s business? A “yes” to that question would be neat and clean, but the actual answer isn’t that clear-cut. A college or university campus is a community, as well as, in some ways that vary from campus to campus, a relatively tight community. A relationship between a professor and a student, although perhaps private in the abstract, can have tangible effects on the academic community where it occurs. In this regard, it’s not entirely private. [Read more…]
More Gray Matter
An article by Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education appeared just after my last blog post, about the gray areas surrounding the matter of consent to a sexual encounter. Wilson’s article speaks to very much the same topic. Even the article’s original title has been at issue: it was first listed as “When Does Unwanted Sex Become Rape?” but, at the actual site, the article’s title has been revised to “Colleges Wrestle with How to Define Rape.” The controversy over the title distills two ways of thinking about sexual assault. Some people, most of them supportive of an affirmative consent policy, would say that, without question, rape is ANY unwanted sex. Other people acknowledge the possibility of ambiguity, for men and women alike, about whether sex is wanted; for those people, unwanted sex isn’t necessarily rape. [Read more…]
“me and Jimmy”
I got a call recently from the owner of a consulting agency where a former student of mine had applied for a job for which I’d recommended him. My student didn’t get the job, but another student from my college, Davidson, did. The owner of the agency—the young man’s boss—was being driven to distraction by a habit of his new hire: despite the boss’s every effort to block the habit, the young man persisted in using constructions like “me and Jimmy will take care of that matter later today.” [Read more…]
Affirmative Consent in a Gray World
In a recent piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Susan Dominus writes clearly and movingly about being at a loss for words when, years earlier, she wanted to interrupt an undesirable sexual encounter at a college fraternity party. She didn’t use “no,” she says, because of its “mundane familiarity.” For other women, she asserts, “no” seems too “confrontational.” Dominus calls for another way of signaling ambivalence about an impending sexual experience—something of a safe word, like “red zone,” that both parties would understand. The difference between “red zone” and “no” or “stop” is that it conveys not outright repugnance, but something much closer to the truth—uncertainty and sensitivity to potential emotional danger. [Read more…]
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