Sleeping with the professor

Compulsory heterosexuality, consent and the pedagogical environment

Is it the result of patriarchal socialization when a student crushes on her teacher? In Amia Srinivasan’s essay “On not sleeping with your students”¹ she suggests that professor / student sex isn’t necessarily problematic because the power imbalance between them might invalidate the student’s consent, after all, these are adults and statutory rape laws no longer apply. Instead she claims that intimate relationships with students threaten the quality of the pedagogical environment, not only for the student involved with the professor but also for the other students in the class: “if I know that my professor sees me not (only) as a student to be taught, but (also) a body to be fucked, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel sitting in his classroom?”

Srinivasan notes that before the 1980s most US schools didn’t have explicit rules against professor / student relationships. The move to create such policies followed the early victories prosecuting sexual harassment in the workplace which rested in part on arguments made in an early version of Catherine MacKinnon’s The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. Over time, both the unofficial norms and explicit rules regulating these relationships got stricter. In 2015, following Yale’s example in 2010, Harvard extended the ban on intimate professor / student relationships to apply not only to students the professor taught, graded or advised but to all students.

She talks about the familiar experience, particularly among those who, like her, have gone on to become professors themselves, of having had “teachers—at school, at university—[who] prompted in us new desires and wants” and draws an analogy to psychotherapy and the potential for “something akin to transference [...] in the students in whom we prompt similar desires”. And so, she highlights the significant potential for romantic feelings to arise in a student towards their teacher, the individual guiding them through new, challenging and exciting intellectual domains. However, she notes that, importantly, Freud stressed that the “analyst must not, [...] respond with either love or hostility to the analysand, and must not use the transference as a vehicle for their own emotional or physical gratification.”