I didn’t get a chance to post about the interesting case of Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, whose work on Jews has been linked to hate groups. (Here’s Inside Higher Ed on the story; here’s the Times — both stories are from about two weeks ago.)
I’ve defended the rights of avowed (or at least apparent) Nazis to teach, so I certainly have no problem with MacDonald remaining in the classroom. He’s no Nazi, but his work is problematic. He told the Times:
In general, Judaism is considered a complex and successful survival mechanism, and at times they’ve been victimized for it. I do think there is a biological element at work here that’s existed throughout the centuries.
Jews, who have typically been in the minority in countries around the world, are compelled by an evolutionary strategy that makes them push for liberal policies, like immigration and diversity, with the intent of weakening the power of the majority that rules them.
I like the Long Beach State response. They aren’t taking Prof. MacDonald’s classes away from him, but they have issued a series of public statements separating themselves from his work. More importantly, at least some of his colleagues have apparently expressed a willingness to confront MacDonald (civilly, of course). Tenure ought to protect those who teach unpopular ideas from losing their jobs, but tenure is no shield from vigorous criticism. If MacDonald were in my department, I would have no trouble pushing him to clarify his views. Our jobs are sacrosanct, but with that ironclad security comes a duty to engage in some intense intellectual tussles.
But I’m reminded by the MacDonald case that I never posted about one of his colleagues at Long Beach State, the now-retired sociologist Barry Dank. While a great many folks are rightly troubled by the implicit anti-Semitism in MacDonald’s work, too few bothered to challenge Dank, who in the 1990s and into the first half of this decade was the leading proponent of faculty-student romantic relationships.
Sometime in the early 1990s, Dank (already a senior faculty member) became deeply troubled by the growing number of policies designed to protect students from lecherous professors. While he seemed to reluctantly support bans on outright, unwelcome harassment, Dank became academia’s most public and vociferous defender of the right of professors to date their current students, as long as the relationshiip was with a legal, consenting adult.
He founded the Foundation for Advancement of Sexual Equity (the website is now gone), and put up the still-extant Academic Sexual Correctness site, still hosted on a Cal State Long Beach server. The first article on the ASC site is Dank’s piece that ran in the Electonic Journal of Human Sexuality: Banning Sexual Asymmetry on Campus. It’s a hoot to read, as Dank goes so far as to compare bans on teacher-student dating to pre-Loving anti-miscegenation statutes:
The closest analogy we can draw is the traditional opposition to inter-racial relationships, particularly black-white relationships, with their stereotypes of innocent white females and predatory sexually obsessed black males. Bans on inter-racial relationships were, as we well know, designed to maintain rigid systems of racial stratification.
It gets better. Dank reveals the his true colors as a misogynist by suggesting that those who propose bans on faculty-student sex are mostly older women worried about being unable to compete with “hot coeds”:
Some other motives suggest themselves from the new Puritans loud insistence that their only interest is protecting innocent female students. We cannot help wonder if some of them might be really interested in protecting themselves from competition from younger women or affirming their power over younger women.
Dank’s article was co-authored with the late College of Charleston anthropologist Klaus de Albuquerque (a great name, btw).
Unlike his colleague MacDonald, who has — rightly or wrongly — been vilified for his stance, Dank was never the subject of angry editorials. It’s hard to see how his positions are any less offensive, or potentially threatening to students involved. Of course, Dank is retired now, though Long Beach still hosts his site, which hasn’t been updated for years. (If you read through the rest of the articles, you get more of the same stuff — and you get a link to the National Coalition of Free Men, suggesting, unsurprisingly, that Dank has strong MRA ties.)
By the time I discovered Dank’s work, I was already well into my own process of making amends for the brief period early in my career where I had had a series of consensual romantic relationships with my students. When I was chairing the academic senate’s ad hoc committee to write a policy banning consensual sexual relationships several years ago, I wrote to Dank but received no reply. I wrote to take particular issue with his suggestion that these policies were being pushed by aging (female) feminists eager to control their male colleagues and protect themselves from competition from younger women. I wrote to him as a man who had come to realize that he had crossed an ethical line. I wrote to him as a man who had never been held accountable by the college (or anyone else) for these inappropriate relationships, but who nonetheless had come to believe that faculty-student sex was always and in every instance a gross betrayal of professional and moral responsibility. By this point, I had already “outed” myself to the president of the college, the campus newspaper, the VP for human resources and my colleagues. I had, where possible, made sincere and heartfelt amends to the women who had been in my classes as well as in my bed. Chairing the committee to write this policy was President Kossler’s idea, as he (a former Catholic priest) thought it would be an excellent way to demonstrate contrition and take positive action.
I came across Dank’s work as I was researching policies that other campuses had devised. I was tempted to dismiss him as a crank, but knowing that at the time he was still an active faculty member, I wanted to push for some dialogue. He never replied to my overtures, and I dropped the issue. But if he were still teachin’ at Long Beach, I’d ask my friends at Inside Higher Ed to consider running a story on him and his views. If Kevin MacDonald’s bizarre take on Jewishness is fair game for public debate, which it rightly is, so too are the views of faculty like Dank who defend their right to bed their students.
Your posts continue to amaze me with their bullshit-free thoughtfulness. Having been born and raised in Germany and been through the German educational system, I have serious issues with some of the anti-Semitic ideas and expressions protected under the First Amendment in this country. While I agree with the policy of academic freedom of expression (but find myself a strict opponent to the tenure system), I do find UCLB’s response problematic; it raises the (Butlerian) question, “Where does hate speech begin?”, and under what circumstances it is tolerable within an educational (as opposed to academic) context. One would hope that, as soon as anyone could construe his writings as exhortations to violent acts, the chancellor will take more decisive action.
Thanks for quoting the Dank pieces–they gave me a good laugh!
Just to clarify: when you speak of professors sleeping with students, I assume from the context you mean students in their own classes, or over whom they have supervisory or grading responsibilities. I don’t get a sense about how far you extend that, whether it covers everyone in the department, or further. I assume you do not mean that nobody working as a professor may sleep with anyone enrolled anywhere as a student. I just wonder where you put the boundaries.
John, I meant — and Dank meant - students enrolled in one’s classes at the time of the sexual relationship.
I just wish there was a reliable way for students to find out things like this about professors before they take their classes. Whether or not tenure should protect the jobs of some professers, I certainly would not want to take a class taught by an anti-semite, or by someone who thinks that coming on to his students is okay.
Labyrus, that was the original hope for the Ratemyprofessors site, and it may yet prove worthy. But for now, these sorts of revelations will get filtered through gossip if at all…
Heh. Sounds like Dank is one of those guys who were enthralled with the Good Olde Dayes, when banging your female students was an expected perk of the job, and is fumbling around with a “rights” argument he thinks will get him back his bennies.
MacDonald is making it quite clear at what intellectual level his other scholarship functions.
I am a professor, clergywoman, and survivor of repeatedly reported, unpunished, and unrepented abuse from my undergraduate adviser, also a Protestant pastor, at a Catholic university. It was one of the defining, utterly traumatic and profoundly damaging moments (years) of my life, and I am only now finding some serious freedom from its effects after twenty years of hard spiritual and psychological work. I don’t know your backstory, but am deeply moved and impressed to hear you take responsibility for your behavior, that you confessed and made amends and continue to speak against such exploitation and ethical violations. Thank you.
I also have some concerns about your attitude on these issues, from what I read in this post and from a couple of other posts I have read on the student “crush” issue. I will try to share them respectfully and charitably, so please bear with me. And please take them as seriously as you can, because I speak with the voice of bitter experience and grave trauma imposed by someone who did the same things that you did (except with a lesser degree of sexual contact, assuming that your behavior included intercourse).
1. You call the sexual relations with your students consensual, I am assuming to distinguish them from outright forcible rape or gross harassment and pressure of the “A for a lay” variety. However, there is no such thing as a consensual relationship when the power imbalance in the relationship is so great. This is the precise reason why such relations are a gross ethical violation and constitute a form of sexual abuse, even if the student apparently consents or even initiates the behavior. I thought that I gave consent too, and no adult–priest or professor–that I consulted for seven years told me otherwise. I was mired in shame and disgrace which still seriously affects my sexual functioning in a happy and holy long term marriage. He is still deluding himself that his behavior was minimal–the last time we had contact, about seven years ago, referring to it as “the inappropriate aspects of our relationship.” If you were the professor and they were students, the relationship was not consensual, just as it would not be if you were the parent and they were the child. Please do not use the term consensual in this context, as it minimizes the offense and places unjust shame and guilt upon the victims. In a culture which does not understand these issues at all (witness Monica Lewinsky, Clarence Thomas, etc. etc.) and where professorial abuse is rampant while popular culture still gives the myth of sexy coeds coming after professors this language is irresponsible and misleading.
2. Limiting the power imbalance that makes a relationship inappropriate to students presently in your courses is far too minimal. Arguably, any student at your institution, especially in your department, and above all one that you have taught, especially if there is a serious age difference, is off limits until graduation. Once you have taught a student and may teach them again, especially if you may ever serve as a recommender, that power imbalance is still firmly in place and prevents free consent. (Especially in the case of professors who become personally involved in students’ lives and deep issues, significantly self reveal in class and office hours, etc.) This is analogous to the case of a psychologist becoming enamored of a patient, knowing it would be unethical to pursue a romantic relationship, therefore ending the therapeutic relationship and then immediately proceeding to courtship and sexual relationship. The power imbalance remains and there must be a major “decent interval”–sometimes given as six months–of no contact whatsoever for the romantic relationship to have any chance of being ethical. You may have already read Peter Rutter’s *Sex in the Forbidden Zone* but it is a very illuminating study of these dynamics.
Thank you for considering my concerns and reflecting more deeply on this issue, which I know you care about passionately as someone dedicated to the well being of the teenagers and young adults you serve.
Mother Laura, I use the term consensual because that’s the legalese universally used in these circumstances. I agree completely that a power differential may often vitiate or at least undermine consent, and I further agree that what is legal may not be ethical. Still, a policy must distinguish between those who are adults and those who are not; my students are not my children and I don’t think of them as such — I do think about my youth group kids as “kids” (they are). Many feminist scholars (see Jane Gallop, etc) want to make sure that we protect young women from lecherous professors without infantilizing the students by comparing them to children.
It was a huge hurdle to get the college to ban relationships between profs and students enrolled in their classes; the academic senate overwhelmingly rejected a more sweeping proposal to encourage professors not to date their former students, or students who were enrolled anywhere on the campus.
Obviously there is a difference between a legal adult and a child, but it is not infantilizing to recognize 1) the very modest developmental difference between a seventeen year old in your youth group and an eighteen year old in your college classroom and 2) the vast power differential between anyone in a teaching, counseling, pastoring situation and the vulnerable person they serve, who may be the same age or even older. This is why it is utterly unethical for clergypeople and therapists to have sexual relationships with those in fiduciary relationships with them, even if they are adults, and the guidelines against these are not infantilizing. The the same goes for professors–especially when the students are very young adults. It is a gross understatement to say that “a power differential may often vitiate or at least undermine consent”; it is guaranteed to do so, and the greater the power differential, the more guaranteed it is to make actual free consent impossible.
Legalese is a poor substitute for accurate language that adequately conveys the ethical and Christian values at stake here. And the minimal willingness of a faculty to fully self-regulate against their own traditional abuses of power is a poor substitute for a thorough and clear condemnation of behavior that may be legal, and even permitted by policy, but is clearly damaging to students, most of whom are women.
Mother Laura, I have never attempted to defend or minimize my very poor, reckless, and fundamentally exploitative behavior. I will say that I was in my twenties having inappropriate and unethical relationships with women who were essentially my peers, which I do think is qualitatively different from the damage I would do if I (at about 40) were to now have an affair with a gal young enough to be my daughter. I am convinced that the wider the age gap — and the younger the student — the greater the damage.
And again, I use “legalese” because I was charged with writing a legal policy for the college, which is not interested in Christian values. I am interested in those values here. On this blog, I name what I did “immoral”; in hte policy we describe it as “ill-advised.” That’s what comes of making compromises, which sometimes have to be made. I’d be delighted to see the professoriate gradually adopt the same rules that the therapeutic profession uses, but this is all about incremental change.
Thank you for the clarification, and for taking fuller responsibility for your behavior than I had seen in this post (I have not seen the earlier ones, and didn’t know how to rapidly search for them in archives).
There is certainly a greater power differential and abusivness to such sexual relations when the age difference is greater. However, I remain uncomfortable with your defining your students as “essentially your peers” because you were in your twenties. This sounds like minimizing to me. The younger the younger person is, the greater a few years’ difference can be ethically (which is why there is a legal cutoff even between older teenagers and younger ones). So if you were mid or late twenties and they were late teens or early twenties that is a significant difference IMHO. But even if you both happened to be, say, mid-twenties, there is still a major power differential between a professor who has authority in the situation where the two people interact, between someone with a PhD (or even ABD) in the subject and an undergrad, and above all between the person whose grades and recommendations can have a huge influence on the other person’s future. The two cannot be peers in any reasonable sense of the word, which is why such a situation is still abusive if it involves a thirty-five year old grad student and her forty-five year old professor.
Dear Hugo,
I do apologize for not responding to your
email or letter to me that was apparently written to me in the 1990s. I have no recollection of receiving said letter; I did try to respond to all inquiries which was no
easy task.
As you correctly noted I am formally retired
which was not due to any academic issues
which I was involved with but rather due to
medical issues. I would be open to any outstanding questions you may have relating to my work. As you correctly note, I had a focus
on consensual sexual relationships between
students and professors, but my interest in this area went beyond students and professors
and encompassed the area of same-sex relationships on which I wrote my dissertation and later on interracial relationships. I was
heavily villified and physically threatened in the 1970s when I wrote an article critical of
Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” movement
which gave me great preparation for the advocates who felt they were saving
our students by infantalizing them and taking their power away in the guise of protecting
them from so-called evil lecherous professors;
how easily people buy into cartoon imageries
so they can work their will on taking power away from others. It still amazes me that people such as yourself buy into such imageries
and can see no relevance of the interracial bans that were existent in this coluntry as part of the southern way of life. For your information I was raised in the south in the 1940s and educated myself as an adult on the southern ethos and history which in a nutshell
held that there could never be a consensual
relationship between a white woman and a black
male; it was always rape, and the most heinous
acts were rationalized by the black male-
white woman rape myth; Anita Bryant and her
cohorts engaged in almost an identical rationalization in their image of homosexual
predators seducing innocent children and
in the “present” case the protectors created
lecherous professors who were seducing/abusing
their students employing the myth that differential power precludes consent. What utter poppycock!
As for apologies to my former students, I have
nothing to apologize for. I never seduced or misinformed whether the other be a student or
a non-student. I was never sexually aggressive
with anyone. I had wonderful relationships with students and that continued with former students; I had wonderful relationships with parents of students I was close with.
Relationships are always a complex and varicolored thing. The woman I am married to
was a student in my class when I met her;
I dated her after the class was over. Then she wanted to take another class from me;
I told her that the decision was hers to make;
I would treat her as a student as I treated any
other student, and I did so. If I said she could not take my class then I would have been abusing my position. Of course, I never made
a public spectacle of my dating anyone. What I found most interesting in the case of my dating
Henrietta who later came to be my wife, none of
the academic women who knew her and knew me
objected to our relationship. Why? It was
quite apparent, she was older than myself,
a mature woman, who the academic feminists
could not bring themselves to infantilize
and take away her consent. If I had gone along with the academic meddlers, and never dated students, I would have never dated
Henrietta and I would probably be dead now.
She saved my life and ultimately given my survival, I saved hers.
Enough said.
Barry M. Dank
(Note this is not for publication on the web, but as noted I am open to any questions you may have.)
Well, it was apparently automatically published!
You say, “If MacDonald were in my department, I would have no trouble pushing him to clarify his views.”….[???]
…um, have at it, but Macdonald seems to do NOTHING BUT clarify his views. You don’t clarify your own view of what MacDonald should be pressed into clarifying, so the only one guilty of muddled presentation is…you. If you mean by “pushing him to clarify his views”, “find something incriminating that he hasn’t said yet”, then you are engaging in a fishing expedition to discredit him. Have you even bothered to email MacDonald, or better yet bother to visit him at his office or after one of his classes, question in hand[whatever that still unclarified question is]?
My duty, Bill, is to confront my colleagues — not everyone else’s. I thought Ward Churchill and Jacques Pluss could stand with some confronting too — which they got, from those within their institution. If I were to track down every professor at another school whose views I find odd, I’d have no time for anything else.
Charlotte writes:
It raises the (Butlerian) question, “Where does hate speech begin”?
…Possibly, “it begins” where whites point out the obvious & defend themselves & ideas? [according to You*].
Try again.