Ann Lane
Director, Center for Studiess in Women and Gender
Professor of History, U.Va.
"Sex and the Professors"
November 8, 2002

Introduction: In 1993, Ann Lane served on a University of Virginia committee that proposed guidelines to limit sexual relationships between faculty and students. While this original proposal failed, UVA’s faculty senate did approve a compromise policy recommendation that advanced to university administrators for action. What resulted was a revision to UVA’s conflict of interest policy requiring faculty to avoid sexual relationships with or making sexual overtures to students over whom they are in a position of authority. The media frenzy spurred by the UVA debate has died down. But professor Lane’s interest in the subject hasn’t waned. She is now working on a book tentatively titled, "Consensual Sex in the Academy: Gender, Power, and Sexuality."

Ann Lane: I have not spoken on the subject to my own school except for one brief moment, which I will get to eventually. And I have done a lot of work on this book in the subsequent years. Interestingly, I can’t….this won’t mean much to students, but the faculty here…I have never had any trouble getting a publisher. I can’t get a publisher. I have never had trouble getting a grant. I haven’t been able to get a grant. And the story is always the same…and it is reflected in the visit by a man from CNN who interviewed me and taped the class. And then went back to the editorial board at CNN and said the same thing the publishers had said and the grant people said. They have never experienced such a contentious battle in their board. It was split right down the middle, screaming not about me, not about the proposal, about the subject. The subject is very controversial. So all I have to do is finish writing the book and then I can maybe find a publisher.

I have been talking about this for the last several years. And I have probably fifty hours worth of lectures which if I got started on, I could keep on going with. The first thing I want to do is tell you how I got into this subject since I started out in Black History and then I moved to Women’s History, and I focused primarily on History of the United States, 19^th and 20^th Century. I have never done anything as current and as controversial as this subject. And this is how it happened.

When I came here, I was appointed to a presidentially-appointed committee with two other people. One was a colleague of mine in the history department, Cindy Aaron. And the other was a law school professor, Pam Carlin, who is no longer here. This project did not drive her out. But for a while we weren’t sure.

But in any case, the three of us were asked to take a look at the sexual harassment procedures and see if they needed updating. So we took a look at the sexual harassment procedures and we realized that they were fine. They were pretty current. There was no policy that addressed consensual relationships between faculty and students. And so in our absolute innocence, we sat down and wrote one. We didn’t do any survey of what was current in the country. There was no incident here that provoked it. We just sat down. And the three of us agreed entirely on what we should have in the school. So we wrote the proposal.

And this is what it said. I will tell you because it didn’t pass so there is no history of it anywhere except in some faculty senate notes. It dealt with…it was addressed to faculty. And it dealt with what was called…I forgot…sexual or amorous relationships. And there were four parts to it. And the first part said, to faculty, you may not have sexual or amorous relationships with graduate students in your department who are taking courses or over whom you have any supervisory responsibilities. So there was the issue. You can’t have responsibilities, supervisory responsibilities. The second part was addressed to TA’s. If you are having a relationship with a student, she-he, may not take your course while you are teaching it. And if you are teaching a class, you may not have any of these relationships while you are teaching that semester. The third part had to do with extracurricular activities involving coaches, music, drama, newspaper, that kind of thing and said you may not have…speaking to the faculty involved…you may not have these relationships with students who are currently involved in activities of which you are supervisor. And the last part, which turned out to be the most controversial was, all undergraduate students are off limits to all faculty.

And we thought it was fine. We thought it was sensible. And we marched into the faculty senate and before that meeting opened, we had an inkling because a very, very internationally known scholar who was about to retire said to me, I had to change my dissertation advisor three times because of overtures. And I said to her, you have never been identified with any feminist activities. You have a very internationally powerful record and you would be believed. Would you get up and say that in the course of this discussion? And she said, no. And I said, well can I quote you? And she said, no. And then we knew we were in some trouble. So we walked into the meeting and as it turned out, the department chair of History, Mann, got up holding this in his hand and he said, this proposal is so sensible, so necessary, so true that I cannot imagine any of my colleagues voting against it. And then they voted it down something like 63-4. I don’t know what it was.

It then got rewritten into a compromise that sustained the most important thing that we wanted embodied in this. And that is it went beyond the classroom, it went beyond a student in your class, and that we felt was a rather important issue for undergraduates who change majors, who take courses that they hadn’t planned to take.

And then giving you some notion of the life in Charlottesville, the Daily Progress ran a story on the faculty senate and the next day the Richmond Times Dispatch had an article on the faculty senate. And the day after that, Jonathan Yardley had an article in the Washington Post making reference to those of us who wrote this policy as femi-nazis. And then in the course of the next couple of months, I should say that Cindy Aaron was on leave. She had at that point lived in Richmond. And Pam Carlin had a year off at Stanford Law School. So I was the person whose name was in the Charlottesville phone book. And who was resident. So I got all the phone calls.

And then the guy from CNN came. And then somebody from the Times came. And the Times article was actually quite fair which is not usually true of the Times. But it was in this case. And he called me on the Sunday that it appeared. He told me it would probably appear sometime during the week. And he called me on that Sunday to say they must have had a weak newspaper…that day because they have run this article. He hung up and twenty minutes later I got a call from the Today Show asking me if I would appear the following morning in one of those little boxes on the screen. And I said yes. And within a week it was Larry King Live, and by the end of this fifteen minutes of fame, I was on Oprah. Which is actually one of the most interesting experiences.

But in the interim there were talk radio programs from stations I had never heard of. I got so blaze that I get a phone call in my office saying would you be available in another hour to talk on such and such. And I would say sure.

We hit a cultural nerve. We were astonished by the frenzy. And one of the things we did notice is that most of the TV and radio producers were women. And many of them had had experiences. It began to die down…it turned out that there were many schools that thought our original policy passed and they passed policies based on ours. And ours never passed. So we did have some ripple effect. But it was talked about a great deal for a couple of years. And then it died down.

And then it came up again last year with the article in GQ…Gentleman’s Quarterly…where some writing professor ostensibly telling the real scoop about his life in William and Mary…talked about all the women throwing themselves at him and all the fun affairs he had which his wife did not think was so appealing. And the President of William and Mary instituted a policy…investigation for a policy to establish something such as we almost had and have something like now.

And Yale also…for…I had said to the President who was actually quite sympathetic about this policy that if the school gets sued with out having a policy the school is culpable. If the school has a policy that a faculty member violates, then the person…the individual is culpable. And that is exactly what happened at Yale. And that is why Yale instituted a fairly stringent policy…they got sued.

So let me start…telling you what happened when we finally gave up the particular issue. Of the three of us, I was the one that was taken by this subject. I was in the middle of another book that was half done. And I dropped it and decided to pursue this. And I have examined what it was about the subject that was so appealing but part of it clearly…and it is personal and it is none of your business but, part of it was public. And that was we did hit a cultural nerve and I couldn’t understand exactly what it meant except that we now know a lot more about power and violation of trust in relationships of love and affection than we used to know. We know about children who are abused by fathers and stepfathers. We know about mothers who abuse their children. We know about priests who abuse their parishioners. And judges who abuse their clients. And presidents who do all kinds of naughty things. And we now know that love is only the beginning of a relationship. That there are violations of trust when people…and that these are as much a part of loving relationships unfortunately, frequently, as not.

And now let me make clear that I am talking not about sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is a federal violation and is unwanted sexual advances and it is a very complicated series of ideas. But that is basically what it is…it is coercion on some level.

1974 was the year the phrase sexual harassment appeared, apparently at Cornell University in the classroom of a particular professor of law. It became a part of legal code. The assumption was that if harassment is bad, and part of coercion, then consent is good. And it seemed reasonable on the surface that consenting relationships are basically nobody’s business as long as they are with adults. People of whatever age by the state law. And certainly college students would fit that.

And it took until somewhere in the early ‘80s when Harvard University and then the University of Iowa began to examine the notion of consent. Now the notion of consent has a whole present history in the medical field and the legal field. Informed consent is now a hotly debated subject in both law and medicine. For example, if a doctor does not give you sufficient information to make…to allow you to make a reasonable decision about some kind of practice that he wishes to engage in…or she…and you then go along with it because as a lay person you were not expected to understand the complexities of medicine, you then have not given what is called informed consent. And that then becomes an issue in medicine. And there have been a lot of philosophers and medical ethicists who have been dealing with notions of consent for several years now. And the same thing is happening in law.

Well in the early ‘80s, Harvard and the University of Iowa decided to look at the notion of informed consent among students. And they concluded that students cannot give informed consent either because of the power relationship in which they are engaged with their teacher. And they passed fairly stringent rules. Harvard’s rule was the most stringent of any that I have ever encountered. And they at some point in the ‘80s altered. But at the very beginning Harvard’s policy said, no professor anywhere in the entire university can have any sexual relationship with any student anywhere in the university. Which seems a bit much. But that is what they held for a few years.

I was the co-author of a policy at Colgate University which passed in 1983…no it was 1986. And I left not long after that. And the man who became dean was a conservative, decent chemist. And he got up at the beginning of each new faculty meeting where they had a meeting each year for new faculty. And he said, if you have sex with one of your students, you get fired. That was what the policy said. And it disappeared because who wants to get fired over something like that. It…what continued were the relationships…those kinds of relationships with the tenured faculty because they never did touch those.

So I know it can have an affect. And actually what we had hoped when we pursued this policy and with the compromise policy as well, was that the university would engage in a debate…students would begin to question why they shouldn’t have relationships with teachers. Teachers might understand why it was probably not a good idea to have a relationship with students.

And here is another illustration…right in the middle of that debate on the grounds here, a member of a department is a man I did not know, stopped me and said, I really wish we had that policy in affect last year. I got divorced and you know what it is like after you get a divorce. You screw around a lot. And the people nearest were the graduate students in my own department. And I had a whole bunch of relationships with them. I never thought about them, which of course was a key word…key sentence. He never thought about them. And then the policy came out and we were discussing it all around grounds. And he kept picking up things and he said, I never thought about those issues. If we had had such a policy and if it had been publicized, I would have gone to graduate students in another department. Which is actually a much better idea because graduate students are certainly adults. They have no interaction with faculty in other departments. There is really no reason why they can’t have relationships with each other. He got the point.

The break down on who is on what side is very interesting because it challenged the traditional breakdowns. Feminists split on the issue. Liberals split on the issue. Conservatives split on the issue. People didn’t have the traditional coalitions when they lined up and I have never quite figured out why although I have some ideas…generational questions are somewhat in there, but not entirely. And it is not a gender issue because there are lots of men who supported those regulations and a lot of women who didn’t. Although in general, the women more supported the regulations than men did. But it wasn’t clear cut enough to say it is a clear gender issue.

The argument against these relationships point essentially to the power relationship between faculty and student. And say that it is not possible for a student in a class…in a college to have…it is risky to have that kind of a relationship with a teacher. Now, let me also say that most teachers don’t have these relationships. A lot of them do. More of them do than I thought when I started to do this research. But most of them clearly don’t.

The more common relationship is between a male professor and a female student although the other way around also exists. And the same sex relationships also exist although clearly, numerically, predominantly it is a male professor and a female student. Age is up for grabs. The stereotype is of a middle aged married man and that is often true. It is also true of very young, unmarried men. But in any case, the argument for…against these relationships has primarily to do with the power relationship that is embedded in it. It also has to do with the reality that this is not a private relationship…it exists in a community and it affects the other people around those students and teachers.

Teaching is an act of risk taking. We try to teach our students that they should take risks at learning new things, challenging what we have always believed was true is risky and dangerous and frightening. And that the idea that you can mix this up with a sexual relationship is really, we feel…we felt…and I still do…is a violation of that kind of trust that a teacher should carry into the classroom or into relationship with students. Graduate students or undergraduate students.

The people who did not agree had also a strong case. In general the people who opposed any kind of relationships…any rules on relationships did not think they were a good idea. They just didn’t like the idea of regulations. They didn’t think the regulations work. And they didn’t think they were desirable. They see college students as of an age to be consenting. And that if college students get involved in a relationship that is an unsatisfactory one and they are hurt, that is the way life is, that is what you have to do when you grow up. And there is really no reason to try to protect and infantilize students. The notion of infantilization came up a good deal.

In the course of the years where I have been investigating…I now have hundreds of stories…hundreds of stories…and most of them are not from here. The work I did was not primarily at the University of Virginia for obvious reasons. I have traveled a good deal and heard and spoken to people in all varieties of different states. I have put my email out only in school. I don’t put it out on the web. But I have talked to people in colleges and universities and I say this is my email, this is my phone number, call me, email me. And lots, and lots, and lots of stories come from people that are heartbreaking really. Really heartbreaking.

There are also happy marriages, happy long term marriages…many of them…more than you would think. Because they are now long term that began in a student teacher relationship. There are many good relationships that end as many good relationships do that were between teacher and student. So there is no easy way to characterize them.

But I still do think that the negative far outweighs the positive. Although it is clear that it is very difficult to make generalizations that can be embedded into a legal code. When we wrote this policy I think I would not have the same policy if I were re-writing it now. I would certainly…I would discourage it strongly. I would discuss it openly at first year advising. I think students ought to hear about it. I can start filling up the time with stories…but there was this student…and again, not from here, who had a relationship with a teacher in a science department. She was a liberal arts student and then she shifted to science. And he was the required course and she wouldn’t walk into the building. And lot’s of students who would say, I could never walk into that building again because I was afraid of running into him. I changed my major because I didn’t want to have to face him.

On the Oprah show, there was a woman there who was probably late forties and she had a daughter who was about to go to college and she called every single school to which the daughter had applied and said, do you have policy forbidding students…teachers and students having relations. And if the school said no, it got crossed off the list. And her story was she was a graduate student in the northern Virginia/DC area. And the teacher made an overture. It was not harassment…he made a perfectly fine legitimate overture. She turned him down. And then he began flowers and phone calls and telling her how much he really wanted to go out with her. And finally she was flattered which is another issue we should get into…how flattered students are. And she began a relationship with him. It lasted about three months. He dumped her and went on to the next one. She dropped out of graduate school. Married, had kids…had a couple of kids. Periodically called the school to see if he was still there. And he was still there and she wouldn’t go back. And I did say to her at that point, he may have…I can’t say it on TV, he may have done bad things to you once, but you are letting him do it for the rest of your life. She said, I can’t go back into that school. And that was the one place that had whatever it was she wanted.

At the faculty senate meeting, the second one with the compromise, a student spoke. And one of the things she said is we are not fools. We know the difference between a friendly teacher who cares about us and takes us to lunch or takes us for a walk, or chats with us in his office and somebody who is hitting on us. We can tell the difference. I think there are a lot of male teachers in particular since it is assumed to be overwhelmingly male…and I think that gets some of the women off the hook because nobody thinks about women as engaging in this kind of behavior, but they do…but I have had a lot of men say to me I can’t go to lunch with my students anymore. And I say, come on. Yes you can. There are very few students, there are very few people who can’t tell the difference between some improper behavior and a friendly person. And if you feel uncomfortable about it, leave the door open, invite somebody else along if it really bothers you.

And the other issue that has come up a lot is what about the students who make the overtures. I cannot tell you…I cannot tell you how many men have said to me, I didn’t initiate it, she came on to me. What am I supposed to do? To which I say, you say, no. That is what you say.

The thing that is so interesting about the subject is we don’t talk about it. There are very few professions that haven’t addressed it. The business world has rules. The corporate world has rules. The mental health professions have been debating this since Freud…what is the legitimacy of not just client therapist, but also therapy dealing with clients in a larger community…not again, not like a student teacher one. We don’t talk about it. Everybody talks about it but us.

And I have also played with that idea for a while which will be of very little interest to the students but may be of more interest to the teachers. We really think of ourselves as autonomous. We are in this university but we are very autonomous. We don’t owe anything to anybody. We can do what we want in and out of our classroom. And I think that kind of notion of autonomy is part of the attraction of the profession that we are in. It does get you…makes it more appealing to be here than in a law office. Or in an insurance company or in a newspaper working as a journalist. We have a great deal of freedom.

Now there are very smart, sophisticated, mature college students who can take care of themselves. They can say no to teachers and they can say yes to teachers if they want to. But I am talking about the ones who can’t. We have rules not for everybody. We have rules of all kinds for the vulnerable in the category we are talking about. And therefore we have yes, protection is certainly part of it. But we have a certain responsibility when we are teaching young people in a world in which sexualization and sexual activity is widespread. And I don’t have a problem with…I am not telling students they can’t have sex which is what they kept saying we were telling them. It is not about sex. It is about power. And the power goes beyond the classroom.