I thought dating my uni tutor made me special. For him, it was a pattern

In 2016, at the end of semester, I sent my university tutor a message on Facebook. Sporting a crush, I was eager to see if my feelings were reciprocated. He soon responded, agreed to meet up with me, and we quickly proceeded to date. At the time, it didn’t feel particularly sordid, given there were only a handful of years between us in age.

Two years into our relationship, a report examining staff sexual misconduct at UK universities was published, showing that of the 1839 students surveyed, about 80 per cent were uncomfortable with relationships between staff and students. Four months later, Universities Australia released a statement on the issue, declaring relationships between academic supervisors and students are never OK. Neither of us acknowledged the report during our relationship. By then, the dust felt as though it had settled, and I had made a concerted effort to avoid being his student again, namely by changing my major (a decision I later came to regret).

There is a power imbalance between academics and their students.Credit: Getty Images

It wasn’t until 2020 that University College London became one of the first universities in the world to introduce a formal ban on romantic and sexual relationships between staff and their students. Even today, there are no formal statewide or federal bans across Australian universities.

In the academic world, this is famously a grey area: somewhere between a conflict of interest and sexual harassment. While many universities require staff to declare any anticipated or existing close personal relationship with a current student, this implies that they’re not off limits. Such clear standards would have made for smoother sailing once I discovered my ex-partner had engaged in relationships with other women over the years who were, like me, once his students.

Dr Renee Hamilton, former policy director at Universities Australia, describes this as essentially a “no harm, no foul” approach that allows institutions wipe their hands clean of any mess that falls outside obvious violations such as assault of a student, or a sequence of tangibly coercive behaviours. While it’s likely this reluctance to get involved stems from institutions not wanting to meddle in the personal lives of adults, as Hamilton notes: “This perspective does not capture the inherent power imbalance [between staff and students]. A conflict of interest is one thing, but I believe somebody who is involved in a romantic relationship with their student is [engaging in] academic misconduct.”

It’s 30 years since the publication of Helen Garner’s controversial book, The First Stone – a scathing dissection of the sexual chokehold young female students seemingly have over male superiors – and tensions between staff and students endure. Garner’s interrogation of staff-student relationships was biting, particularly given her finger was levelled at young women, rather than the men attracted to them. Many people were – and remain – outraged by her views on the topic.

The overwhelming majority of staff-student relationships occur between male superiors and female students. This is something I discovered throughout my own research, as did Amia Srinivasan, a scholar and author of The Right to Sex. In one paper on the topic, she refers to consensual professor-student sex as a “patriarchal failure”, given the over-representation of female students and male superiors where there are clear divides in age, authority and life experience. And while institutions aren’t necessarily defending the right to such relationships any more, their commitment to ignoring their impact on female students remains.

When a young woman crosses over from being a student to an academic’s romantic partner, she is no longer safeguarded by the usual distance between teachers and students. If she’s “lucky”, their relationship might last, and prove that she was the one to change him; an exception to the rule. If unlucky, she will likely be a nameless blip in his career.

Classrooms are where cultural norms, including our assumptions surrounding gender, ought to be challenged. Instead, these norms are exacerbated when staff either turn a blind eye to, or participate in, these kinds of relationships.

This is an issue Professor Denise Cuthbert, an associate deputy vice chancellor at RMIT, has weathered firsthand. When arguing at a recent forum that universities should strengthen policies on staff-student relationships, she was met with palpable resistance. “People came up to me over the course of two days and said, ‘Of course, I don’t want to see students harmed, but you have to remember that many of the professors in my institution have married their students.’ People don’t have any problem in condemning particular instances of appalling conduct and calling it bad. But they have a lot of difficulty making the conceptual leap to say that this conduct is an expression of a highly gendered power dynamic across the whole sector. That’s a bridge too far.”

Though a ban would be unlikely to stop student/teacher relationships entirely, it would encourage an important cultural shift that would offer students a framework for making sense of these entanglements. I know this because such a change would have afforded me support and a reference point on how to make sense of my own situation when we eventually broke up, and I began to reflect on our inequity of power.

When my ex-partner found himself in a similar situation with another student after our break-up, I forgave him for descending into a routine cliche once more. But come the third student, it was impossible to ignore the sense of being replaceable, of being some kind of wide-eyed kink to him.

My university experience will always be signposted by this fraught relationship. This, I resent.

Many, like me, have endeavoured to report their experiences to authorities unwilling to listen. I’ve lost faith in the institutions to which I took my findings. And so, these professors remain untouchable, and their students are touched in ways impossible to rectify.

Madison Griffiths is a freelance writer and author. Her book, Sweet Nothings, which explores relationships between students and professors, will be published next month by Ultimo Press.

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