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> So do the adult thing: quit your job, then continue the relationship. True love should be stronger than the benefits of a tenured position. Don't screw it up for all the other poor students whom the gods did not make to be your soulmate.

Fellow academic here. I'm shocked a member of faculty would suggest that is a realistic option. You of all people know how difficult it is to find a tenure-track position. Yet you are suggesting voluntary career suicide for a consensual relationship between two adults? This is both unrealistic and complete overkill.

You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion. I think anyone who is unable to do so not only is a poor faculty member, they would be a poor spouse and a terrible scientist.

That is to say nothing of the edge case we are discussing. Unless students/faculty are gotten much more frisky, this is a negligable fraction of the interactions between students and faculty, and is lost in the noise of much more pressing academic grievances, such a treating grad students like human beings, or giving increased consideration to the role of teaching in promotion, instead of the pure emphasis on research at tier-1 institutions.

I would think that, regardless if the professor is capable of separating their feelings, it's always going to look like favoritism.

Then I guess we should ban being human. Even the most egalitarian people are not free from biases, nor they have consistent and stable mood. And even if a perfect egalitarian demigod were to be making decisions, someone would still find something to misinterpret in his/her actions in order to build an outrage-inducing story.

Reducing negative effects of human nature is hard as it is, but it becomes pretty much impossible when there are people with malicious intentions looking for you to do a single wrong step.

> Fellow academic here. I'm shocked a member of faculty would suggest that is a realistic option. You of all people know how difficult it is to find a tenure-track position. Yet you are suggesting voluntary career suicide for a consensual relationship between two adults? This is both unrealistic and complete overkill.

Fellow human being here...I'm shocked you think that true love is so easy to find :). I was being half-facetious...but yes, if you do happen to find your one-and-only, you should do the mature thing and pursue the relationship in a way that doesn't damage the academic potential of all the other students. Or at least wait until the student has graduated.

> You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion.

Sorry but this is a serious LOL to me. At many medical schools, staff doctors are forbidden to take even a $50 dinner from a pharmaceutical company. Much of that policy is grounded in the desire to avoid the appearance of impropriety...but you have to think of it from the perspective of the pharma company. They have up-to-the-day data on prescribing habits of doctors. They have the analytics that show that even casual visits by an attractive/charismatic pharma salesperson has a direct impact on the doctor's prescribing habits. I doubt that the pharma companies have data on what happens if such visits turn into sexual relationships, but I'm going to guess that the correlation only gets stronger.

So let's assume that grading policy is more objective, more sanctified than the process of objectively prescribing life-saving drugs...even if that were the case, the problem is not just about meting out grades, but priorities. You must have experienced the phenomenon in which students who take the time to go to office hours often do better than students who don't...because they've spent hours picking your brain about the right way to think about things. Well, when you've chosen a student (or even several) to have intimate relationships...the hours that you have to freely conduct your duties with non-significant-others is reduced. Maybe you're objective enough to give your lover a B instead of bumping him/her up to an A...but are you really going to ignore them when they ask for help on their papers and homework?

And again, the problem is not just the practical reduction in time that you have to carry out your duties, or the impact on your objectivity...the problem is also the appearance of impropriety. Maybe you are the stone-cold objective professor who manages to keep love and work completely separate (keep in mind that now we're really in fantasy land at this point)...but your students do not have a window to your soul. Their guess is that you are in the 99% of human beings that can't be objective in that situation, and their trust in the academic process is going to be somewhat jaded. And a university does not benefit from a reputation of faculty who freely pursue relationships with students; you can imagine that many parents do not see such relationships as a bonding between consenting, free-willed adults.

It doesn't really matter if YOU THINK you can keep the feelings separate. What matters is that it damages the trust and confidence that students and everyone to whom their credentials are shown have in your judgement. It's a choice between career suicide because you choose to pursue a certain relationship instead, or career suicide because your integrity is in question.

I think danso's response is a good one, but I wanted to add to a response to: "You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion."

Absolutely I believe that. Humans are host to a smorgasbord of cognitive biases and capable of the most astounding of rationalizations. The rules should acknowledge this.

Rent-seeking behavior is just about innate to any system of social interaction. If you know someone, then it's quite likely that you can use said someone's influence for personal benefits.

Not that it cannot be regulated. However, any attempt to do so that falls under the naive but popular category of "BAN IT" creates negative blowback in the form of what the author of this piece elucidated, while the complexity space and sum of possibilities to give one's self an unfair edge remains high.

G.K. Chesterton said it best [1]:

   And then, last but the reverse of least, there plunged in
   all the people who think they can solve a problem they
   cannot understand by abolishing everything that has
   contributed to it. We all know these people. 

   If a barber has cut his customer's throat because
   the girl has changed her partner for a dance or donkey
   ride on Hampstead Heath, there are always people
   to protest against the mere institutions that led up to
   it.

   This would not have happened if barbers were abolished,
   or if cutlery were abolished, or if the objection felt
   by girls to imperfectly grown beards were abolished,
   or if the girls were abolished, or if heaths and open
   spaces were abolished, or if dancing were abolished, 
   or if donkeys were abolished.

   But donkeys, I fear, will never be abolished.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Flying_Inn/Chapter_IX

> In the rare chance that your true love coincidentally happens to be in a class you teach...OK, stranger things have happened in life. So do the adult thing: quit your job, then continue the relationship. True love should be stronger than the benefits of a tenured position. Don't screw it up for all the other poor students whom the gods did not make to be your soulmate.

It doesn't even need to be that extreme. I don't think a student and professor can't be on the same campus, the only thing that would need to happen is the student to drop the class.

That trivial, that simple, that easy. If you are screwing a college teacher, you can't be in that class. In the RARE case were the class is absolutely essential and only taught by a single person, then yeah, might need to quit for true love... or find a way to get that credit elsewhere.

The disadvantages of generic male (98% of my year) CS student at my uni back in 1999-2004 compared to even averagely-looking female student were real, apparent, and kind of accepted. Nobody was whining about it that those few girls had it easier on quite a few oral exams (written parts were logically more balanced). Girls dressed apropriately.

What was a bit more infuriating, that hardest ever topic was advanced electric circuit calculus, toughest course we ever had, solely because of professor (even though I studied purely software engineering, this couldn't be avoided). This course went far beyond what was taught on Math courses itself btw. He disliked women ("they shouldn't be in engineering"), he disliked people with hungarian-sounding names, he disliked people with long hairs, heck the list of types he disliked would be long. He was the greatest filter in out faculty (end of second or third year at uni), throwing people out of school completely for literally lacking a single point (ie circle) above one variable in exam (didn't matter that in next line it was there). Seen it first hand. Nobody liked him, he was perfect example of somebody knowledgable but in the same time somebody who shouldn't be a teacher, ever.

World isn't fair, never was, and never will be. Some things get sorted out, some new pop up as things change. So, who got killed?

You do know that in situations like this you can always balance the scales? There are many legal, although maybe immoral ways to f*ck over a profesor like this. Nobody is immune.

It's an incredible stretch to say that students who are voicing sensitivity about micro-aggressions and the slightest whiff of acknowledgement of sexuality are reacting out of concern for their grades.

The situation we see on campuses now is the result of the collision of gender feminism with the emotional state of young adults raised by helicopter parents.

Naw it's Gender Feminism + Standard American Moral Panic.

No need to plead that this generation is doing something every generation has done for different reasons.

That assumes that any professor/faculty who enters into a relationship with a student will automatically grant grading incentives or be less harsh in grading said student's work. I'd imagine most professors are more professional than that. That's guilty until proven innocent. If there's ever any suspicion of such malfeasance, one could raise the issue with the department who could offer to do an unbiased regrading of the student's work to determine if there was any favoritism and if so, take appropriate action.

Yes, I find it exceedingly likely that a faculty member in a relationship with a student with end up favoring them, in some manner, in class and with grades. It doesn't have to be conscious, we know people suffer many cognitive biases. The professional thing to do is to avoid being in such a situation that the cognitive biases can come into play.

Speaking as a former student. Your post is absurd.

EDIT: OP probably meant it academically. In which case the post is still absurd, but for different reason - the professor doesn't need to rate everyone else lower to rate one person higher, unless people are graded on a curve, but that's a problem with grading system and not a professor.

Not to mention if the women aren't involved with every professor simultaneously, only a few of them will get a benefit by having sex.

I think OP meant you'd be at a disadvantage academically, not romantically.

Yeah, the reasoning has gone a full Orwellian loop, from an excuse/discussion-terminator to something people take seriously.

Maybe a less drastic idea is to wait at least until they have no classes together. Surely true love can last longer than one semester.

The same thing happens at the workplace all the time and often ends badly. It's ill advised for anyone but it's not illegal.