What happens when students and teachers become too friendly with one another?
In college we all knew the professors who “hit on” their students. And we all knew the women who would make a deal as to which one would be the first to seduce a certain professor. Grad school was hot-bed of sexual activity with students and professors closer in age. But today the social networking technology of Facebook and MySpace is creating a new world of student-teacher seductions and it is hitting the high schools.
According to an article by Mallory Simon yesterday and posted on CNN.com, the rising number of inappropriate relationships between student and teachers in Missouri is resulting in a “crackdown of social networking sites.”
Simon tells us that “Jim Keith, an education lawyer who represents several school boards in Missouri, has been giving talks to teachers in which he explains that most of the inappropriate student-teacher relationships start out on a friendship level… ‘As an educator, there is a line of demarcation between you and your student,’ Keith said. ‘It’s a line that you cannot come close to, let alone step over. You’ve got to establish it from Day One…'” Student-Teachers CNN.com
In Manipulation and Sex Cheating in Academia, I quoted a female faculty member who thinks student and professor relationships are based on manipulation and blamed the professors for crossing the relationship line thereby creating an ethical “boundry violation.”
A male faculty member had a different perspective: “In the workforce people work in parallel with each other despite the hierarchy of doctor and nurse, director and secretary, lawyer and assistant.
“Whereas in academia we might be more vulnerable to manipulation than other professions because instead of really interacting, we are there teaching and students are drawing in not just the knowledge we are trying to share, but our style as well.”
He added: “I confess to thinking about crossing the line every once in a while. But my wife would tar and feather me and plunk me in the middle of the old campus.” Manipulating and Sex Cheating.
Copyright 2008 Rita Watson