After months of discussion and debate, the Regents of the University of California have voted to ban dating between faculty and their students. UC administrators have been meaning to put together some kind of dating policy since the early 1980s, but nothing was actually drafted until last fall's scandal at Berkeley's Boalt law school. When Dean John Dwyer resigned after being accused of sexual harassment by former law student Jennifer Reisch, faculty, students, and administrators throughout the UC system began agitating for a policy forbidding faculty from becoming involved with students. They got their wish. From now on, faculty are forbidden to date students for whom they have academic responsibility or for whom they may someday be responsible. Faculty who run afoul of the decree will be disciplined. Disciplinary measures could run from anything to a letter of censure to dismissal.

Never mind that Reisch was not Dwyer's student, and that the two were never involved in a relationship. Theirs was a single drunken groping encounter, one that had a lot more to do with alcohol than a permissive sexual atmosphere on campus. The ideologues who think grown men and women are too dumb to make their own sexual decisions and too immature to take responsiblity for their mistakes, who want in particular to protect vulnerable women students from the big bad predatorial men professors who want to exploit them, have got their wish. The University of California now joins Yale, the University of Michigan, and the College of William and Mary in attempting to regulate the private behavior of consenting adults.

Two thirds of UC faculty voted in favor of the policy, despite an eery clause forbidding faculty from becoming involved with any student whose academic interests are close to their own. Though this is presumably because a sexual involvement in the present will complicate any advisory relationship that might arise in the future, this clause is effectively saying that any dating between any faculty member and any student anywhere in the school could conceivably be treated as a violation of the policy. Critics of the policy agree. "It is extremely unrealistic, and some people are going to become criminal who were living perfectly responsible lives," said Judith Butler, a prominent feminist theorist who teaches rhetoric and women's studies at Berkeley. "The fact that it offers no guidelines on recusal suggests that they want to bar all such relationships." Barry Dank, a Cal State Long Beach professor who is married to a former student, agrees: "It's an abuse of power by university administration. It is a form of big brotherism," he said. "Consensual relationships are no one's business but the parties involved in it."

In general, I think it's wise for faculty not to get involved with their students. It creates a conflict of interest; it is unfair to other students, who assume that the Chosen One is getting special treatment; and such relationships are rarely undertaken on equal grounds--often, the power differential between the student and the professor shapes the relationship in ways that are far from healthy for either one. This is particularly true when the student is much younger than the professor with whom he or she is involved.

At the same time, I object strongly to policies that seek to monitor and regulate the sexual activities of grown men and women. It's not just that this is infantilizing, intrusive, and insulting (at some schools, for example, faculty members are expected to report any involvements with any students, anywhere in the university, to their local dean: as if the private, consensual activities of grown adults is the administration's business, as if profs and students have such poor erotic judgment that their private lives simply must be policed). It's also that such a policy is going to be impossible to administer. Unless UC administrators are planning on implementing a massive system of surveillance, one that extends beyond the bounds of the campus to bedrooms, cars, restaurants, and hotels, it won't be possible to determine who is violating the policy and who is, say, just having coffee with a student or just cultivating a chaste and unimpeachable friendship. The policy will not catch faculty in illicit relations with students (not those who don't want to be caught, anyhow). But what it will certainly do is create an atmosphere of paranoia, one where the already overactive rumor mill goes into overdrive and begins to produce, through gossip, innuendo, and a newly prurient outlook, the sexually charged campus environment the policy ostensibly seeks to eliminate. A proposed parallel policy governing graduate student teachers will only heighten the tension and create additional administrative problems.