CUNY Proposes To Ban Professor-Student Sexual Relationships

CUNY, the city’s largest university, has proposed banning professor-student hanky-panky with a stricter sexual-harassment policy, a memo from Chancellor Matthew Goldstein said last week. But some students say that it will do little to stop after-school rendezvous. The new policy would forbid profs to have intimate relationships with “students for whom they have professional responsibility.” The current policy “strongly discourages” them. The zero-tolerance trend began in the mid-1990s, when the US Supreme Court ruled that schools are financially liable for sexual harassment. Read more at:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/not_for_teachers_TzHelPnVec5SLQmfbuyWNJ

Comments

[Hester Prynne]

Policing consensual relationships between adults, especially when or if out of the same classroom, is a form of sexual harassment by people looking for an excuse to punish other people's sexuality. If there is indeed evidence or assertions of coercion, abuse, or non-consensual pressure, then of course investigation should follow, but these are still free adults, not children. What's next- jailing secretaries for dating an executive or nurses for dating a doctor at ER? This policy is puritanical sexual harassment and another example of how and why the feminist movement has badgered itself with a scarlet letter among people who don't believe in nosing around other people's personal lives or controlling how people socialize. It does, however, help the chancellor and the male faculty trusties look very proper and pc- puritanically correct- to the women advocating this petty prudishness. If someone says there's abuse, then stop it and act on it immediately, but if the people involved don't have a problem with it, then it's certainly not the trustees', the chancellor's or especially Professor Karen Kaplowitz' business as they are the ones harassing other people's private lives and depriving them of their freedom to be with whomever they desire and their right to their bodies, emotions, and relationships. CUNY is doing this for fear of any potential lawsuits in case of any accusations and findings of harassment by a student, but CUNY's overreach into the bedroom will come to bite it in the foot when a student who chooses to be with a professor/tutor/office supervisor/security guard, whatever will instead sue CUNY for repressing and denying her freedom to choose to be with whomever she wants. Infantalizing women is not, as some of the original feminists proved, never a good idea and petty repression of this type ends up turning everyone into a potential informer bent on witch-hunts, paranoia, and vindictive picky-petty insecurities. Puritans are never pathetic, ridiculous, and absurd to themselves as they see themselves as so pristine and above such human"failings", especially when the choir around them sings and marches along in tune. Harassment is wrong. no matter who's doing it and no matter with what pretext. Freedom: it's still a right.