…Possibly, “it begins” where whites point out the obvious & defend themselves & ideas? [according to You*].

Try again.

…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]?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.