Well, this is weird.

Since I don't know how long that link will live, here's a snap of the entire story:

(caveat: take what follows with a grain of salt. This is the gospel truth about a certain prestigious midwestern university's English Department, as revealed to me by a gossipy, disgruntled grad student in the program. I feel relatively sure that if you found that student, or a similar one, and pressured him or her for information, possibly with a few free drinks, you'd get this story confirmed).

At one point not too long ago, there were eleven people (grad students and faculty) involved in relationships with each other. It may not have been a great status quo, but it worked until one night when some member of the department sent out a drunken email to all grad students and profs listing those eleven names, but not naming the pairings. The situation demanded an official response (why, I don't know). Now, if a grad student and a professor in that department wish to sleep with each other, they have to tell the chair of their intent to do so.

Not all departments on campus have such rules. I've heard Anthropology has no restrictions, far more relationships, and manages them just fine.

(gossip over for the day. I still don't understand why my disgruntled grad student source of rumors, who had dreams of publishing a book of sarcastic caricatures of many of the department's best known professors present and past, kept asking me why I didn't plan to attend English grad school. Insufficiently neurotic?)

Reader Brett Bellmore weighs in on the subway/automobile divide:

I don't think it's so much a question of who you're compelled to associate with, as it is the simple issue of the extent to which you rely on government in your day to day life. Here out in the country, scarcely at all. Our water comes from wells, our sewage is dealt with by septic fields, trash collected by private companies, your neighbor plows the road, police are less of an issue because we're all armed to the teeth... We scarcely interact with government at all, except for schools and (infrequent) road maintainance. And we're aware that those services don't HAVE to be provided by government.

While the residents of our cities aren't quite that independent of government, it trends in the same direction.

On the other hand, you get into a city that's densely enough populated that a subway system isn't blatant insanity, and everybody is dependent on government almost moment to moment. They get to thinking that this is
some natural state of man, rather than a consequence of living in a highly artificial enviroment. It warps their thinking.

I defer to Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels on the matter of professor-student sex:

"I have something to make up to Miss Theotoky. I've wronged her, gravely."

"How?"

"Took advantage of her."

"Pinched some of her good work? That sounds like McVarish more than you, Clem."

"No, no; something even more personal. I--I've had carnal knowledge of her."

"Oh, for God's sake! You sound like the Old Testament. You mean you've screwed her?"

"That is a distasteful expression."

"I know, but how many tasteful expressions are there? I can't say you've lain with her; maybe you didn't. I can't say you've had her, because she is still clearly in full possession of herself. 'Had intercourse with her' sounds like a police-court-- or do they still say that 'intimacy occurred'? What really happened?"

"It was last April--"

"A month crammed with incident, apparently."

"Shut up and don't be facetious. Simon, can't you see how serious this is for me? I've behaved very wrongly. The relationship between master and pupil is a special one, a responsible one-- you could say, a sacred one."

Professor-student relationships are special indeed, and like any relationship which is deeply rooted in the power of one over another, they should skip the sex. Doctor-patient, adult-child, president-intern, and professor-student power structures should wave a red flag to potential sex partners as a classic bad idea, and I find no problem with private universities enforcing ethical codes prohibiting these types of relationships.

But, as you can see from the good confessor's response, it's an overstatement to say that this professor "took advantage of," or "had" this student as she "is in full possession of herself" as many people in sexual relationships that have a power component are. Yes, it is possible to have sex with a professor without being coerced and public universities should by no means ban consensual sex outright.

However, a professor or anyone on the power end of one of these relationships should be required to walk a thin line. Ethical codes of any university should have provisions that if there are complaints from lovers/harassees, the professor faces consequences. This would hopefully not interfere with those truly consensual instances (unless a jilted lover decides to seek revenge in a nasty way-- but even then, a professor should be aware of this possibility and swim at his own risk) and would serve to deter and punish those professors with more sordid, coercive agenda.

A group of students and I spoke about this with a professor once and he was of the opinion that undergrads are strictly off-limits and sex with grad students is more acceptable, but professor beware! Although the undergrad-grad line is a somewhat arbitrary distinction, it might be a good guideline for professors to follow if they just can't stay away from students (which is what I recommend).

In class, especially my first classes with a professor, I prefer him to call me Miss and I to call him Dr. I have no problem with friendship that develops between professors and students. Some of my greatest experiences in college were the results of friendships with professors. But move beyond friendship, and that's a recipe for disaster.

For organdie and seersucker are pretty thin materials, and the only person in the world I ever danced decently with was Anne Stanton and the nights were warm, and I wasn't so much taller than Anne that I could not inhale the full scent of her hair while our music-locked limbs paced out the pattern of our hypnosis and our breathing kept time together, till, after a while, I would pass from an acute awareness of body to a sense of being damned near disembodied, of floating as light as a feather or as light as a big empty-headed balloon held captive to the ground by a single thread, and waiting for a puff of breeze.

Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men