The Big Chill on Campus Sex

The American struggle over sex--who may have it, with whom and under what conditions--was joined when the first Puritan slapped the cuffs on the first libertarian and led the laughs in the village square. Since then, the most personal of human activities has been subjected to a tortured array of public regulations, devised principally by church and government. Now other institutions want to patrol the sex beat.

It's happening in public agencies, where casual office banter risks accusations of misconduct. It's happening in business, where managers are warned against unprofessional levels of intimacy with those they manage. Most of all, though, it's happening in academe, where the politically correct theorists of righteousness put ever-finer points on their blue pencils.

After years of expanding freedom, campuses are tightening up again. Part of that comes from a legitimate concern about AIDS, of course. But the propriety of certain choices has also come under scrutiny. Those who fail the test of correctness must be ready to do battle.

The latest skirmish was brewing in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I went there to see how the conflict played itself out.

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The University of Virginia has always been a bit Janus-faced: The stately, cultured features of the "community of scholars" that Jefferson envisioned contrast with the slightly deranged, drunken grin of a down-and-dirty party school.

The good-time reputation has, however, been headed down the tubes for more than a decade, ever since the demise of Easters.

Easters (a.k.a. "the best damn party in the country") was a bacchanalian event celebrating the joys of excess in food, drink, sex and recreational drugs, culminating in a mass wallow in the University Avenue Mud Bowl. By 1982, though, police couldn't handle the crowds without overstuffing the city jail. So Easters was abolished.

This was followed by a crackdown on alcohol consumption, caused in part by a traffic accident involving a van full of inebriated students, and in part by an increase in the legal drinking age to 21.

Recreational drug use took its hit in 1991, when a small army of narcotics agents swarmed onto campus, busted 12 young men for possession of small amounts of marijuana, LSD and mushrooms and seized and padlocked three fraternity houses.

First parties, then booze, then drugs. Perhaps it was inevitable that sex was next. University of Virginia president John Casteen didn't need help handling sexual coercion or harassment; those are already violations of university policy and federal law. Consensual coitus, however, was unregulated. That didn't sit well with some control-minded faculty and staff members, who believed that students need protection from professors and vice versa.

Ray Nelson, dean of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences, says: "I started all this a couple of years ago when I suggested to the president that we have in place a policy addressing conflict of interest, certainly no ban on personal relationships. My motive was largely that I had heard there were some problems with teaching assistants dating their students, as they will do, and this can get into a mess. I wanted to have a tool so that if people do get themselves into a mess we have a way to get them out of it.

"I didn't want people to stop falling in love with grad students," stresses Nelson. "I think it's a wonderful way to find a wife or a husband."

The standing President's Advisory Committee on Women's Concerns had also decided that a clearly defined policy was needed. It, too, was lobbying the president, and its vision of the future was rather different.

"Young people don't fully understand the situation they're in," says committee spokesperson Ann Lane. "They talk about love, about chemistry. They don't understand that to get involved with a member of the faculty puts them in a subordinate position.

"Age is not the critical issue," she continues. "We're talking about the role of professor--which is a role of advising, encouraging, teaching, supporting--and the role of lover. They just seem obviously to be in conflict."

In the end, Casteen ruled that the matter was properly the province of the Committee on Women's Concerns, and that was where he turned for recommendations. In mid-November 1992 the committee--some two dozen faculty, administrators and students--presented Casteen with the first draft of its policy on faculty--student sexual relations. Starkly etched in boldface type were these four articles:

(1) A teaching assistant or grader shall not make romantic or sexual overtures to, or engage in sexual relations with, any student currently in his or her class.

(2) A faculty member may not make romantic or sexual overtures to, or engage in sexual relations with, any undergraduate student.

(3) A faculty member may not make romantic or sexual overtures to, or engage in sexual relations with, any graduate student in the same department who has not completed all of his or her course work, or any graduate student currently enrolled in a course offered by the faculty member, or any graduate student currently working for or being supervised by the faculty member.

(4) A faculty member who allocates funds or other benefits among student applicants may not make romantic or sexual overtures to, or engage in sexual relations with, any student who is receiving, or is in a position to receive, those benefits.

The three-page document also contained a controversial subclause: "Sexual relationships that are prohibited by the rules set out above presuppose that the university regulation has been violated."

Casteen has never spoken publicly about the proposal, and maybe with good reason. Had such restrictions been in effect at Berkeley in the early Seventies, John Casteen would have been unable to woo his own wife: He met her while he was an English professor and she was a grad student.

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The specter of a torrid love affair between mentor and pupil has stalked academic imaginations at least since the 12th century, when Abelard dallied with Héloïse and got himself unmanned as a result.

Happily, castration is no longer a generally accepted form of punishment for social transgressions. But some still find it intolerable if sex inserts itself into the special relationship between teacher and student. Many schools formally discourage even consensual faculty-student trysts, and a few have elaborate and specific restraints. Harvard's code, ten years old now, outlaws sexual contact between a student and a professor (including graduate teaching fellows) connected to that student.

A Harvard spokesperson described the code's enforcement apparatus as a spy system. Whoever witnesses an illicit liaison is required to report it. If you aid and abet one, you share liability with the guilty parties. If you merely fail to turn in miscreants you may be subject to sanctions.

A setup as oppressive as Harvard's finds scant support in Charlottesville. "Horrible," says one professor, who adds, "but then, that's Harvard. No one there has sex, anyway."

Although the University of Virginia may not aspire to be Harvard, there are those who believe passionately in the sexual segregation of students and teachers. Most prominent among them are two history professors: Ann Lane, director of women's studies and member of the Committee on Women's Concerns, and Cindy Aron, who chairs a subcommittee on sexual harassment.

Members of the subcommittee authored the broad regulations that were presented to the faculty senate in November. Final approval by the full committee had come only after a year of consideration and sometimes divisive dissent. It seems that the women's committee itself was split between regulators and supporters of a less rigid program.

In the end, the regulators won. Aron chiseled the majority's position in stone: "This is not about romance, it's about power. There is a power relationship embedded in the structure, and for a professor to have an intimate sexual relationship with a student is an abuse of that power."

The resolution applied to any student, any teacher. If instituted, it would set a precedent for restricting sexual liaisons. Aron, though subcommittee chair, was not a member of the faculty senate. Thus it fell to Ann Lane, who was a member, to walk point for its proposal. I went to see her.

If I had gone expecting to meet an ogre, I would soon have been disabused of the notion. Lane is an intense, articulate woman with a ready (continued on page 167)Campus Sex(continued from page 130) wit and genuine concern for her students. She happens to believe one of the core tenets of liberal dogma--that abusive human conduct can be, and must be, legislated out of existence.

She does not mince words: "We're trying to create a set of guidelines for ethical behavior in the university faculty. We're not trying to curtail students' sexual freedom. Ultimately they have that authority. What we are saying is, 'Don't fuck your students.'"

When I raise the question of consensuality, she scoffs. "The notion of consensual in an asymmetrical relationship is suspect. Such as the New Jersey case of the emotionally disturbed, retarded girl who gave her 'consent' to sex." She adds, "I'm not suggesting that students are emotionally retarded, though some are, but some faculty are even more so."

Could sexual prohibitions such as Lane's be regressive and curtail the freedom of choice a previous generation of women fought so hard for?

She dismisses this, too. "Sure, the rich and poor alike have the right to sleep on the banks of the Seine. To talk about sexual freedom when there are people in different positions of power is to use language that has no significance. It's the people in power who are always yelling for total freedom, because they already have it."

Admittedly, Lane has a goal you would like to root for: a world in which people no longer exploit one another. It's the means to that goal that raises serious concerns. Trying to supervise sexual behavior has dangerous potential, but Lane and Aron somehow viewed their proposition as not especially incendiary. In fact, they thought President Casteen might simply have it written into the university handbook, an action Lane believes he had the authority to take.

But Casteen passed it on to the UVA faculty senate and a lot of unexpected wheels began to turn.

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"There are two ways of looking at sex and romance," says Bob Kretsinger, a professor of biology who headed the faculty senate when the proposal hit. "One is that they are basically good, even if they can be disastrous, with suicides and murders, the potential consequences we all know about. The darker view is that they're inherently quite dangerous and fraught with abuse, that under the best of circumstances they can be OK but should be treated with caution and suspicion. There's a clash of perspectives, which is what we had here."

As late March 1993 approached, Kretsinger was in a sweat. Senate consideration of the proposal loomed. He'd determined that while most of his cohorts favored some written policy, there was widespread uneasiness about Article 2. The blanket sex ban was seen as far too comprehensive. Kretsinger contacted the Committee on Women's Concerns and told the members that they were going to have problems with that particular clause.

Kretsinger was informed that the proposal would remain as written. The faculty senate met on March 23rd, and late in the day history department chair Mel Leffler put the women's committee proposition on the table. He asserted that "this is so obvious, I can't imagine any of my colleagues opposing it," and he called for a vote.

Those in favor had in fact turned out in force, and a quick, decisive victory seemed assured. It was Kretsinger's moment to stand up or cave. He stood.

Not everyone has had a chance to see this proposal, he said. Therefore, as chair he must invoke the regulation requiring the full senate to consider motions for at least a week before they can be voted upon. The proposal was placed on the agenda for the April 22 meeting.

Kretsinger had done all he could do by tossing opponents a temporary reprieve. What they did with it was up to them.

One of the most outspoken of those opponents was Tom Hutchinson, a gregarious, bearded professor of systems engineering with a booming voice and deeply libertarian beliefs. He, like the president, happens to have married a woman he met when she was an undergraduate and he was a faculty member. "A tawdry little affair," Hutchinson tells me, "that's lasted, oh, about 35 years now."

Following the meeting in March, Hutchinson formed a loose coalition of like thinkers to draft an alternative to the women's committee proposal. He had no interest in simply amending it. "Even if you softened its impact, it was still an outrageous proposal," he says. "It would be like putting gloves on the inquisitors to make their victims more comfortable.

"This is a friendly university, and I may be a little more friendly than most. We're encouraged to have relationships with our students outside the classroom. That's healthy. I don't want to see it stifled."

At this point a female student arrives to turn in a term paper. Hutchinson excuses himself, takes the paper, chats with the student for a moment and gives her a big hug before she leaves.

"Now, at Harvard," he says with a smile, "I guess I'd have to report that."

I ask him if he discounts the problem.

"Well," he says, "conflicts of interest do occur. But the public sees only the negative side to these relationships, and I believe that's more than offset by the large number of positives that can and do result.

"In actuality, what we have is a kind of natural-selection process for intellectuals." He grins. "If you want to marry a cowgirl, you should go to Nebraska. If you want to marry someone who's in the intellectual sphere, you must mix with persons in that sphere. We in the academic snob society, if you will, marry persons we're associated with. And we have children who are like us. Is that a bad thing? No, it's a natural-selection breeding process."

Hutchinson had four big problems with the submitted proposal: the university saying "shall not" to its faculty, the blanket sexual prohibition of Article 2, the impossibility of trying to differentiate a "romantic overture" from a chummy conversation and the presumption of guilt found in the clause "presuppose that the university regulation has been violated."

During the week following the March meeting, there was a furious exchange of e-mail among Hutchinson, his friend Patricia Click and several dozen others.

Click, a reticent professor of humanities, served as counterbalance to the boisterous Hutchinson. She spoke with equal strength for an alternative, but in a calmer, quieter voice.

"I believe in empowerment," she says. "Education is the basis rather than protection. I found the original policy patronizing, particularly to the women students. It should be an internal thing that you talk about with every generation of students, not just a rule on paper. Because a rule on paper loses its impact, but if you have to constantly reinterpret what something means, then you're constantly aware of the problem."

She also has her own slant on Hutchinson's assessment of the University of Virginia as a friendly place. "There's a very Southern idea of familiarity," she says. "We do a lot of hugging and flirting. Things that would probably be offensive to our Northern counterparts, we're just raised doing."

The Hutchinson-Click group's work resulted in a proposal, ultimately supported by about 40 senators, that was circulated to the full senate more than a week prior to the April meeting in order that it could legitimately be brought to the floor then.

The alternative--in keeping with Hutchinson's belief that there already existed a powerful unwritten code of conduct among professors discouraging certain behaviors--was advisory rather than prohibitive. It recommended that faculty and teaching assistants should not engage in amorous or sexual relationships with those over whom they had direct teaching, supervisory or evaluatory responsibilities. The policy was to be self-regulating.

It was a reasonable proposal that adults might have been able to discuss in a relaxed, sensible fashion. By this time, however, the media storm was lashing Charlottesville with full fury. Someone had sent The Washington Post a copy of the four-part proposal from the Committee on Women's Concerns. Charlottesville was suddenly ground zero of the war between the sexes.

Coverage had begun in earnest with a piece published in the Post on March 29. Its author, Jonathan Yardley, wrote this lead:

Not to be outdone by its allegedly more strident rivals to the north and west, the University of Virginia is preparing to take a headfirst plunge into the balmy waters of political correctness. Whereas other institutions have been content to evict dead white males from their curricula or to tell students what they can and cannot think and say, Mr. Jefferson's academic village proposes to go all the way. It means to climb between the sheets with its students and professors.

The feeding frenzy was on. CNN came calling. So did Larry King Live, Today and Oprah. A newspaper in Scotland wanted the story. Ann Lane was interviewed for German television. Tom Hutchinson appeared on the CBS Evening News, and Bob Kretsinger could escape his incessantly ringing phone only by hiding out in the biology department's refrigerated specimen room.

"The interest level was insane," Hutchinson recalls. "At 7:30 one morning I was satellite-linked to a radio call-in show from Bogotá. As if they didn't have more important problems down there. And you can imagine the distortions. I don't speak enough Spanish to talk off the cuff, but I understand it pretty well, so I was listening to how they translated my answers. When I heard the Committee on Women's Concerns come out as the Committee of Worried Women, I knew we were in trouble."

CNN tapped student council president Anne Bailey, who was incensed by the women's committee proposal. "It's an invasion of the private lives of consenting adults," she told the nation. "It reeks of paternalism. We're old enough to go to war and to have abortions, so I think we're old enough to decide who to go to bed with."

Which put her squarely at odds with Lane, who countered: "Free sex is not a right. Society is an agreement on the part of people to give up some of their privileges in exchange for community control. And in any case, there are certain cultural benchmarks of maturity, and 18 isn't one of them."

Within the general student population, too, things were happening. Simon Bloom, a politically active pre-law major, told me of a woman friend's fears about a relationship she had with a professor.

"It wasn't sexual," he says. "It entailed her going over to his house, cooking him dinner, things like that. Purely platonic, two people who enjoy each other's company. But she's in his class."

Because of his friend's concerns, and a personal belief that a fly was being chased with a sledgehammer, Bloom got involved with the group writing the alternative proposal. He takes issue with Lane's contention that sexual exploitation of students is "academe's dirty little secret," and with the supporting words of Angela Kline, a student member of the women's committee, who had insisted, "Relationships between faculty and students and harassment of students are both rampant."

Bloom, who spent two years as a dorm resident assistant and served on both the honor and judiciary committees, replies: "I have never heard of a faculty member dating someone in his or her class, or having sex with them, and I've never heard stories of faculty members making unilateral overtures."

Bloom's experience notwithstanding, overtures do happen, and not always in the same direction. One young, handsome professor says, "There's never a semester in which a student doesn't come up to me and say, 'I want to get to know you really well.' But most of us are responsible enough not to do that sort of thing."

So just how pervasive are unwanted advances? No one knew, though everyone had an opinion. For comparison purposes I asked the university Women's Center for statistics concerning harassment, and it provided me with these:

In 1992 it received 47 requests for help with sexual harassment. Of the complaints, 26 came from students, 15 from faculty and six from non-university personnel. Those accused of harassing the 26 students were divided roughly equally among faculty, teaching assistants and student peers.

"Out of a community of 18,000, this seems to me an extraordinarily small number," Tom Hutchinson says.

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On April 22 the full senate convened. In order to accommodate the jungle of TV lights, cameras and snaking cable, as well as all the visiting bodies armed with pens or laptop computers, senators were relocated from their normal cozy meeting room to the spacious Wilson Hall auditorium.

Kretsinger, facing his duties as chair, was nervous. "I wanted to be neutral and fair," he says. "But I have a brain and gonads. I have opinions, too." And his opinion was that the alternative proposal should prevail over that of the women's committee.

He gaveled the meeting to order at 4 o'clock, and it wasn't long before the tension in the room exploded into open conflict. Cindy Aron, representing the Committee on Women's Concerns, rose to support its proposal, but Kretsinger stopped her. Their measure had not been formally placed on the floor, he ruled. No, screamed supporters, the measure was still under consideration from the March meeting.

As proper parliamentary procedure was argued back and forth, Tom Hutchinson saw his chance. He hustled Patricia Click to the podium and her amplified voice stilled the bedlam. "I have a proposal," she said. She moved, Hutchinson seconded. The Click proposal went to the floor. Now, no other proposal could be introduced until the new one was debated and voted on.

The new proposal could, however, be amended. So Ray Nelson tossed in a wild card. He got up and surprised many in the hall by offering a measure of his own as a "friendly amendment." As he read his short list of regulations, a feeling of relief began to spread. Here was a compromise that perhaps everyone could live with.

Proscribed were amorous or sexual relations, or overtures, between faculty members and any student over whom they hold a position of authority. "Faculty" was defined as "all teaching assistants and graders, full-or part-time university personnel who hold positions on the academic or general faculty, or who teach, coach or evaluate students, allocate benefits or conduct research." Violators, moreover, could receive anything "from letters of reprimand to dismissal."

To no one's surprise, the Nelson compromise pleased the women's committee supporters. Their proposal was facing certain defeat, yet they were being handed something with teeth in it.

More puzzling was that most of the Click proposal's backers were also satisfied. Yes, the sex ban was gone, along with the presumption of guilt. But they seemed to have lost on every other count. The Nelson amendment said "shall not" rather than "should not," an important distinction. The prohibition of "overtures" remained in place. The definition of "faculty" was sweeping. Sanctions were prospectively tough. Nevertheless, in a close tally, the amendment was accepted, so it effectively replaced the Click proposal.

Click's allies were angry. Their votes, combined with absentee ballots that ran 10--1 in their favor, had put them on the verge of victory. But their objections were ignored. The floor was opened to debate on the Nelson amendment, though it soon became apparent that people were actually going to speak for or against the original women's committee proposal, which had become a dead issue.

Cindy Aron called their policy "a necessity" to ensure that "all relationships between students and faculty are legitimate relationships."

Two young women concurred, testifying to horror stories involving students and their professor lovers.

On the other side, Tony Iachetta, a 39-year faculty veteran, spoke of the futility of legislating morality. "It doesn't work. No policy would be better than a bad policy." As another attendee put it, the prohibitionist approach would create paradise "if you're a lawyer."

Still, in the end, it was Ray Nelson's compromise that was voted on, and it passed overwhelmingly.

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In the aftermath of the debate, I thought about what had been gained and lost. True, the University of Virginia had chosen not to max out its political correctness. Yet it had approved a sweeping policy change. And nationally, there was plenty to be troubled about. I had only to look to Harvard, as many schools are apt to, to see a grim vision of the future. Institutional regulation of personal behavior, from forced drug testing to sexual restrictions, is on the rise. To a disturbing extent, our employers and administrators--even the people we work and study with--are becoming cops.

So the question arises: If we acquiesce to this meddling in our private lives, just what do we consider worth fighting for?

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Toward the end of the debate on the amendment, Simon Bloom rose to address the crowd. He sensed that the group needed to lighten up. So he concluded his remarks by saying, "We cannot consider any proposal that has the potential to limit, restrict or preclude quality intercourse at this university."

The comment earned him a standing ovation. It was, he says, "the only thing everyone agreed on."

Too bad nobody put it to a vote.

[Before we put this story to bed, two sources close to the Virginia negotiations told Playboy that the result of two years of rancor and maneuvering is that the following will be added to the faculty handbook under the heading Conflicts of Interest: "Faculty members should avoid sexual relationships with students over whom they are in a position of authority by virtue of their specific teaching, research or administrative assignments. "A light dawns in Charlottesville.--Ed.]

"A tawdry little affair,' Hutchinson tells me, 'that's lasted, oh, about 35 years now.'"