by Yale University just released a new mandate governing morality and values on campus between a horny faculty and a titillated undergraduate student body.
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Yale University adopted a policy banning sexual relationships between faculty and undergraduates.
Previously, the Ivy League university had prohibited such relationships only when the faculty member taught or supervised the student or expected to do so. The previous policy still applies to graduate students.
The updated policy bars faculty from having sexual relationships with any undergraduate student.
This new Yale ban on certain campus sex is so ferociously silly that, at first, I thought it was an April Fool’s Joke.
The fact that this new policy had to be put into effect tells us several ugly truths about life on the Yale campus:
1. There is so much sex going on between the faculty and undergraduates that this policy had to be announced and enforced.
2. Graduate Students appear to be exempt from this new mandate and can still freely have as much sex with the faculty as they wish as long as there isn’t any teaching or supervision happening.
3. What about intra-faculty sex? Is that still allowed, because we know that higher humping is happening the world over on every university campus.
We understand there is a powerful, embedded, sexual dynamic between teachers and students that is understood, but mostly unspoken and, we hope, rarely acted upon — but we also know there are always bad agents in the air and without a strict set of behavioral rules to guide them, they will give in to the will of the body over the logic of the mind.
There’s no getting around the fact that effective learning is intensive and passionate and highly fulfilling for both student and teacher — but when universities like Yale have to make new rules to govern the uninhibited urge — we begin to lose our higher calling.
We need to be looking more at the cause of the desire and not punish the underpinning yearning because the body cannot control what the mind wants and the hard evidence of that unholy fact is found in the new Yale No Sex Please, covenant.
If you’ve been teaching for a long time, you can make a list of student/teacher relationships that were open secrets on campus and known in the department. Some were flings. Others became everlasting love affairs. Where would David Milch be today if he hadn’t met his wife at Yale when he was teaching a course and she was his student? Sometimes the result of the ethereal temptation can outweigh any man-made paper mandate.
That probably is why it is not forbidden for graduate students and faculty. It makes more sense for faculty since there are no grades on the line. It is sad that we have gotten to the point that this has to be regulated.
The problem, Gordon, is this sort of thing cannot ever be regulated. There can be mandates passed and handbooks published, but the problem will not go away or even be curtailed in any sensible way. Sure, there might be more punishments, but the behavior will not be inhibited.