OF RECORD: Policy on Consensual Sexual Relations Between Faculty and Students	Print Issue
October 9, 2012, Volume 59, No. 07

The relationship between teacher and student is central to the academic mission of the University. No non-academic or personal ties should be allowed to interfere with the integrity of the teacher-student relationship. Consensual sexual relations between teacher and student can adversely affect the academic enterprise, distorting judgments or appearing to do so in the minds of others, and providing incentives or disincentives for student-faculty contact that are equally inappropriate.

For these reasons, any sexual relations between a teacher and a student during the period of the teacher-student relationship are prohibited. The prohibition extends to sexual relations between a graduate or professional student and an undergraduate when the graduate or professional student has some supervisory academic responsibility for the undergraduate, to sexual relations between department chairs and students in that department, and to sexual relations between graduate group chairs and students in that graduate group. In addition, it includes sexual relations between academic advisors, program directors, and all others who have supervisory academic responsibility for a student, and that student. Teachers and academic supervisors who are sexually involved with students must decline to participate in any evaluative or supervisory academic activity with respect to those students.

The Provost, Deans, Department Chairs and other administrators should respond to reports of prohibited sexual relations that are brought to them by inquiring further and, if such reports appear to be accurate, initiating appropriate disciplinary action or remedial measures against the teacher or supervisor involved.

This policy supplements the University’s policy on Sexual Harassment. In addition, although this policy prohibits consensual sexual relations only between a teacher-supervisor and that individual’s student, the University strongly discourages any sexual relations between members of the faculty (or administration) and undergraduates.

Related: Sexual Violence Policy; Sexual Harassment Policy