Professor fights for right to sex with coeds //
EDUCATION: A Cal State Long Beach sociologist
establishes himself as a defender of such
relationships
DATE 06/26/94
NEWSPAPER THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION NEWS
EDITION MORNING
PAGE a01
STORY LENGTH 39 INCHES
HEADLINE Professor fights for right to sex with coeds //
EDUCATION: A Cal State Long Beach sociologist
establishes himself as a defender of such
relationships.
BYLINE/CREDIT DAN FROOMKIN: The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS LA:COLLEGES:POLICY:FACULTY:ORGANIZATIONS:STUDENTS:SEX
.
In these days of increased concern over sexual harassment, a
Cal State Long Beach sociologist has formed a nationwide group
dedicated to one simple principle: Professors have a right to have
sex with willing students.
Professor Barry Dank and his group are mobilizing against what
he calls a radical feminist campaign to ban sex between professors
and students.
"This is simply another attack against men, who they see as
being powerful," Dank said. "It's also an attack on young women,"
he said -- denying them the "freedom to decide what they want and
what they don't want."
Few universities nationwide -- and none of the public
universities in California -- currently place limits on consensual
professor-student liaisons.
But under pressure from feminists and others concerned about
sexual exploitation, many campuses are reexamining their
sexual-harassment policies.
And some are questioning whether intimate relationship between
professors and their students should be tolerated, given the
potential for conflicts of interest and coercion.
In a watershed decision at the University of Virginia last year,
administrators banned sexual relations between professors and
students under their supervision, after rejecting a blanket
proposal to ban all intimate relations between professors and
students.
But Dank and his group -- about 70 current and former professors
and students strategizing by E-mail on the Internet -- reject any
limits on sexual relations as long as both parties are consenting.
Dank's critics -- and there are many -- say he is trying to defend
the indefensible.
"It's sort of counterintuitive, frankly, to think that it is
acceptable to develop an intimate sexual relationship with one of
your students while you have the ability to affect their futures
and their lives," said Abby Leibman, director of the California
Women's Law Center, a feminist organization in Los Angeles.
"I'm somewhat taken aback by the fact that as we begin to raise
people's awareness of the fact that there has been terrible sexual
exploitation of women on college campuses, the response is that we
need to stop this radical feminist problem-making."
Professors have a great deal of power they can potentially use
to coerce their students -- for instance, by suggesting that a grade
or recommendation hinges on a student's going to bed with them.
But even though professor-student relationships are
"asymmetrical," Dank said, that does not mean that the student is
inevitably the victim of sexual harassment.
"To have sexual harassment, you need unwanted sexual attention,"
he said.
Dank, who is divorced, has taught at Long Beach since 1968 and
describes himself as "around 50." He said he is in a relationship
with a former student who is "around 30."
"And consequently," he said, "I feel very, very strongly about
the kind of rhetoric that is going around."
In Dank's view, the feminists are seeing the problem backward --
in reality, he said, some male professors are victims of sexual
pressure and harassment.
"What sort of men are young women attracted to? Men they see as
representing power," he said. So they come on to their professors,
he said. "It's very, very, very frequent."
And male professors who have relations with students are
harassed by women professors, he said. "You get unwanted
attention," he said. "They look at you very, very, very negatively."
Dank said that while his group opposes any bans on
relationships, it does not necesarily encourage relationships,
either -- particularly between a professor and a current student.
"It does create the potential of the appearance of impropriety,"
Dank said, adding that he is "not necessarily comfortable" with
that sort of involvement.
He said that although he met his girlfriend when she enrolled in
his class, they didn't start dating until afterward.
But rules and regulations are not the answer, he said.
"We think ethically engaged people should work these situations
out on their own," he said.
He also said a sense of ethics can be enough to prevent a
conflict of interest when a professor is dating a student. Ethical
professors will give the appropriate grade, even if it's a poor
one, he said.
Another reason to form the group, called Consenting Academics
for Sexual Equity, was to dispel the mythology "that the professor
is the predatory lecher," he said.
"We're presenting our humanity to the public."
But according to Bernice Sandler of the Center for Women-Policy
Studies in Washington, D.C., the mythology is not without its basis
in fact.
"There are men who take advantage of young students'
vulnerability," said Sandler, an expert on campus sexual harassment.
Though the relationships may technically be consensual, she
said, some professors engage in "serial consenting relationships,"
and the students later feel they were exploited.
Dank reacts angrily to the suggestion that young women can't
make up their own minds.
At heart, the movement to ban professor-student relations is
about "middle-aged women academics who feel threatened by younger
women," he said. "They threaten to take away their partners or
potential partners."
"Many of us are middle-aged," Sandler said. "But that's not what
we're worried about. What we're worried about is that we've seen
too many young students coming into our offices crying."
Martin Fiebert, a member of Dank's group and a fellow professor
at Cal State Long Beach, said he opposes relations between
professors and students they supervise, but joined the group
nonetheless because "it's a general issue of civil liberties."
Fiebert, a psychology professor, said the issue of sexual
harassment on campus would not have come up without the emergence
of feminist scholars, particularly in the women's-studies movement.
"I think it's positive, but I think in some ways it's gone too
far," he said.
The group, he said, is trying "to straighten out the leftward
drift of the university." And while it may be a bit extreme, it
fills an important role, he said.
"That's the way the dialectic works," he said. "A position is
established, it becomes kind of extreme, and another position is
established as a counterweight," he said.
"Over time, something evolves."