As the blogosphere massages the ethical ins (scroll down) and outs of professor-student sex (a discussion most recently inspired by Laura Kipnis' Slate piece), I thought I'd point to an under-linked Boston Globe piece on an unresolved date rape case at Harvard:

After winter break, when students at Harvard's Graduate School of Education returned to their dormitories, she walked to his floor and said hello. She entered his room, they kissed, and for a brief moment, Giorgi Zedginidze, a 34-year-old visiting student from Eastern Europe, considered himself a lucky man. Four hours later, he felt like his life was unraveling.

That night, Zedginidze was arrested on charges of sexual assault. He was handcuffed, strip-searched, and jailed. Nearly two years later, he was acquitted at trial, yet Harvard refuses to readmit him and has resisted scheduling a tribunal to consider it. In the school's eyes, Zedginidze said, his status is limited to one word: rapist.

"It has been a nightmare," said Zedginidze, from the Republic of Georgia. "They think I am guilty no matter what."

A Middlesex jury acquitted Zedginidze of all six counts of sexual battery, but he cannot finish his degree until the graduate school's Committee on Rights and Responsibilities clears him. The committee, however, has shown no inclination to schedule a hearing on the matter.

Zedginidze has been unable to get a hearing date from Harvard. If a hearing does take place, he has no right to a lawyer, to face his accuser, or to cross-examine witnesses.

Whatever Harvard does, there is little reason to expect Massachusetts schools to change, since the state's Supreme Judicial Court signed off on a similar system at Brandeis University in 2000. Some observers say the lack of due process is part of a nationwide pendulum swing against the rights of students accused of disciplinary violations after failures to protect students from date rape.

I raise the issue of date rape and campus sexual misconduct policies because the questions of faculty-student relationships being debated on other blogs cannot be separated from them. The power imbalance between a professor and a student is very real and very abusable, as Kipnis, Invisible Adjunct, and others note. What should also be noted, though, is that the flow of power--and of abuse--in such liaisons does not all run one way. If a professor can easily take advantage of a starry-eyed student who thinks one-sided intellectual adulation is mutual love, a conniving, resentful, or simply confused student can just as easily destroy a career by redescribing consensual sex as rape. Francine Prose plays out the full horror of that scenario in her novel Blue Angel.

On today's hyper-vigilant, due process-challenged campuses, careers and futures can be ruined at will by false and malicious charges of rape and sexual assault. It doesn't make sense to debate whether professors should be punished for "hooking up" (Kipnis' phrase) with students without considering the larger context of a campus culture that makes hooking up with anyone a profoundly fraught and dangerous activity.

Thanks to Fred R. for the link to the Globe article.

UPDATE: I try to keep the blockquotes as short as possible when readers can link to the full article. But in this case, I probably should have quoted even more than I did. From a reader who read the whole thing:

I'm surprised you didn't highlight the real travesty of the Zedgindze article. As the article discussed, the day after his arrest and while he was still sitting in jail, he was visited by a Harvard representative who gave him the "withdraw or be expelled" ultimatum (which from the timeline in the article, it appears that Mr. Zedgindze did so while still in jail).

So, imagine that: you've just been arrested for attempted rape, you don't know if you're going to be able to get bail money (it's not even clear if he had been arraigned yet), you know that you're innocent but you're still sitting there behind bars, and then someone who you think is there to help instead threatens you! It's unconscionable that Harvard's response when there had only been an accusation (and, I would wager there hadn't even been a probable cause hearing by that point) was to not temporarily suspend Mr. Zedgindze from the school until the matter was resolved (and even that would seem distasteful), but to sever him from the university! And, I'm sure the university knew that once Mr. Zedgindze was no longer a student, he would eventually have to leave the country (as he did). So, in effect, Harvard not only expelled him, but guaranteed that he would be deported.

If I were a parent with children at that school right now, I'd be a little worried for them if they got in trouble. And if I had a kid considering going there, I'd encourage them to look elsewhere (even if Yale).

UPDATE UPDATE: Maurice Black writes to note that the Crimson has more.