For some years now, the legal definition of consent has been in question and in flux. Simply speaking, consent is mutual agreement between two people; the implication is that a sexual encounter can’t involve assault if two (or more) people all enter into it willingly. [Read more…]

No question, in many teacher-student relationships, the student plays a significant role and may even take the lead. Students have a share of the responsibility; they exercise consent, in some sense of that word. In some (a few?) instances, everybody wins: the relationship, which may fizzle, doesn’t ultimately hurt anyone and may even fuel intellectual exchange, as Cristina Nehring contends. But in many more cases, the student who thought she was consenting will discover that, instead, she was deluded and, what’s more, taken advantage of. [Read more…]

When I ran the topic of professor-on-student sexual harassment by a friend of mine, a distinguished second-wave feminist who continues to do good political work in her 80s, she responded, “I remember so well the huge crush one of my best friends had on her chemistry teacher in college. I think she would have been willing to submit to almost anything. Fortunately, the only thing he ever asked her to do was baby sit so he and his wife could go out to dinner. Had he been one to prey on young women, he would have found a willing companion.” Had he been a predator, would the student, as “willing” as she was, have been harassed? For me, the answer is “yes.” In that situation, no matter how enamored she was, it was up to the professor to be an adult and recognize the student’s vulnerability and the relationship’s inappropriateness. [Read more…]

The crux of this question is whether one person—a student—with less power than another person—a professor—can consent to a sexual relationship. Today, many people, many of them feminists, would say, “No.” Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, authors of the still relevant (though 30-year-old) book The Lecherous Professor, are among them. They write about “The Consenting Adult Myth”:

Few students are ever, in the strictest sense, consenting adults. A student can never be
a genuine equal of a professor insofar as his professional position gives him power over
her. Access to a student occurs not because she allows it but because the professor
ignores professional ethics and chooses to extend the student-faculty relationship.
Whether the student consents to the involvement or whether the professor ever intends to
use his power against her is not the point. The issue is that the power and the role
disparity always exist, making it virtually impossible for the student to act as freely as
she would with a male peer. (p. 74) [Read more…]