Faculty members are prohibited from initiating or engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with graduate students following a vote at the April 1 faculty meeting. The new policy mirrors Princeton’s rules — enacted in 2016 — governing relationships between faculty and undergraduates. Previously, the policy banned relationships between faculty and grad students only in cases where the faculty member had advising, instructional, or supervisory responsibilities over the student.
Relationships that predate the new policy will not be prohibited but must be disclosed to the dean of the faculty and the parties’ respective department chairs, said Sanjeev Kulkarni, the dean of the faculty. Faculty who violate the policy will be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination. Graduate students will not face disciplinary action for violations.
“We see a number of problems in this area, and when problems arise, they are devastating,” Kulkarni said. “And not just to graduate students — they often have a significant impact on the faculty member. But more broadly than that, they often result in significant collateral damage not just within a department, but wider than that.”
The faculty also approved a policy that prohibits faculty members, researchers, graduate students, visiting students, and undergraduate course assistants from engaging in romantic or sexual behavior with any person subject to that individual’s academic supervision or evaluation.
Both of the new policies were overwhelmingly approved by the faculty, although each received a small number of “no” votes.
Faculty members who spoke during the meeting expressed support for the new prohibition, with some emphasizing how the broad scope of the new policy will better respond to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of academia, with professors working with grad students in other departments.
Abby Novick, a fourth-year psychology Ph.D. student, said she thinks the new policy will promote collaboration between students and faculty.
“Students should be treated by faculty as scholars, not as potential sexual partners,” said Novick, who is a member of the Faculty-Student Committee on Sexual Misconduct. “If a professor invites a student to a restaurant to talk about a project, there is now a clear expectation that this invitation is a professional one, not romantic. Previously, such situations could be quite ambiguous, causing some students to miss out on networking and career opportunities.”
“Graduate students are, above all, students,” said Mai Nguyen, a fifth-year psychology Ph.D. student. “And we are ... vulnerable students — our work, education, careers, and even personal well-being are unusually predicated on our faculty advisers, which makes romantic and sexual entanglements with faculty that much more fraught.”
Most of Princeton’s peer schools prohibit sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students whom they oversee. Kulkarni said the University believes it is the first among the Ivies to enact a blanket ban on romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students.
“We are proud that Princeton is taking the lead on this important issue,” he said.
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6 Responses
Norman Ravitch *62
5 Years AgoThou Shalt Not!
Forgive me, please! I was under the impression that everyone knew: 1) thou shalt not ... means it is certainly being done; and 2) thou shalt not ... has never worked.
Kevin T. Baine ’71
5 Years AgoProhibiting Romance
PAW reports that faculty members have voted overwhelmingly to prohibit members of their ranks from engaging in romantic relationships with graduate students, regardless of the circumstances (On the Campus, April 24). So a junior faculty member in the School of Engineering may not date a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in the English department — even though they have no academic contact and there is no potential for abuse of power.
This leads me to think that perhaps Princeton needs a law school after all — or some department that sees the importance of narrowly tailoring rules to perceived abuses when matters of personal liberty are at stake. Or perhaps those who seek to regulate love should simply reflect on the idea that romance is not all about looking for “potential sexual partners,” as one quoted proponent of this proposal seems to think, but rather, as a more perceptive observer of the human condition put it, finding that person who is “the last dream of my soul.”
Eric V. Denardo ’58
5 Years AgoProhibiting Romance
Hitting on a subordinate is unethical. It should never occur. It must be banned, and it is. The modern Princeton community consists of exceedingly talented, diverse, and attractive individuals. It abounds with opportunities to establish long-term partnerships. A categorical ban on relations between graduate students and faculty, as seems to have been voted on April 1, is rather like banishing springtime. And it invites mischief.
Bob Korn ’67
5 Years AgoNot a Step Forward
Back in the day, feminism was about liberating and empowering women and getting rid of sexist stereotypes. Now it seems to be about protecting women from sex. I don’t feel like this is progress.
David Gorchov ’80
5 Years AgoA Prejudicial Ban
I was disappointed to read that the Princeton faculty voted to prohibit faculty from initiating or engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with graduate students. Obviously, sexual harassment is serious and must be forbidden. But the new policy is so broad as to be prejudicial.
As a first-year faculty member at a Midwestern university, I became friends with a doctoral student in my department who was one year younger. I was not on her committee or the instructor in any of her classes. I asked her out (there was no policy forbidding that at the time). We dated, fell in love, married, pursued rewarding professional careers, and raised two kids who have grown into outstanding human beings. If my university had had a policy such as the one just passed by the Princeton faculty, none of this would have happened.
Smart policy targets the problem, rather than forbidding an entire class of human interaction. Like sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children by religious leaders is a serious problem, but our policy response is not to ban children from attending houses of worship. Collisions kill tens of thousands each year in the United States, but we set speed limits rather than banning driving.
To ban romance between faculty and grad students is prejudicial. I would like to continue to believe that the Princeton faculty generally stands against prejudice, and am distressed that the opposite occurred in this case.
Nicholas Kuhn ’76, assistant mathematics professor 1982-86
5 Years AgoCreeping (Creepy) Relationship Rules
As an academic with deep roots in Princeton, I find myself horrified at the heavy-handed new rules regarding romantic relationships among Princeton faculty and graduate students described in PAW (On the Campus, April 24): New relationships of this sort are banned, and existing ones must be disclosed to administrators.
Likely the image we are expected to have here is the predatory white-male academic superstar in his early 50s. This is a hoary stereotype, and to the extent that it holds true, there have always been plenty of rules in place to sanction unprofessional behavior.
But here is what comes to my mind. For four years in the mid-1980s, I was an assistant professor in Princeton's mathematics department. I was 27 years old, and there was a whole cohort of young math faculty in our late 20s. (The youngest assistant professor was 20.) We had hobbies not related to our academic lives – in my case, centered around the folk dance and music scene of central New Jersey. My circle of friends was wide, and certainly included graduate students from various departments of ages roughly mine. Now I happened to be already married, but had I not been, would a policy like that just enacted force me to badger new acquaintances about their employment: music teacher “good,” chemistry grad student “bad”?
Ironically, these rules will certainly hinder diversity initiatives. In mathematics, for example, a high percentage of women mathematicians have romantic attachments to men mathematicians, and many of these relationships started in a situation that would run afoul of these new Princeton faculty rules. For example, it is possible that this would apply to every woman who has been a full professor of mathematics at my excellent university. Though I can't be sure of this, because who in the world goes around investigating the private lives of their colleagues!
Here is another scenario one can envision: A new 29-year-old woman assistant professor who happens to be African American meets a nice young man of a similar age at one of the African American churches in town. Whoops, he is a graduate student in the religion department. Guess who will happily be taking a job somewhere else?
Rather than following the University’s lead, one imagines peer schools licking their chops as they ponder what faculty they can poach from Princeton: This is a time-honored response to hearing that a good university has done something dumb, as Princeton just has.