Thursday, November 12, 1998
After office hours
COLUMN: Are student-TA relationships fact or fiction?
During my initial training as a teaching assistant (TA) I was
given some warning concerning possible relations with students. A
professor informed me, along with a large group of my peers, that
because I possessed knowledge which students lacked, there would
inevitably be some students who found said knowledge (and the TA
who had it) sexy. I managed to dismiss this silly thought with a
chuckle.
Now I am in my seventh quarter as a TA, and I can reassess that
warning in light of experience. Now it earns a rather solid
guffaw.
How do my students see me? I am a slightly disheveled figure,
surrounded by a cloud of chalk dust, struggling in vain to explain
the chain rule, eigenvectors or something else of limited interest.
I wonder if anything could be less sexy.
I think it is more likely that the attraction would run in the
opposite direction. Graduate students in my department are, for a
variety of reasons, not my type. Graduate students in other
departments are, for a variety of reasons, distant. I lack the
interest and opportunities to meet many people without UCLA
connections. I would think that I am fairly typical of grad
students in these regards.
So undergraduates have a lot of appeal, and it just so happens
that many of the undergrads I meet are my students. Over the last
two years I have had several students I found cute, cool, pretty,
intriguing or just plain hot.
I have acted on these attractions only a couple of times, and
then only when the object of my attraction was no longer my
student. Still, I have not been completely unaware of the
possibilities while the quarter was still in session.
But let me return to my TA training. I was informed of the
university’s sexual harassment policy. I was warned that students
might find me sexy but that the feeling should not be mutual. I
expected a clear-cut ban on relationships with students, but none
was offered. I was merely given a strong warning against such
cases, which is quite different from prohibition.
The training put an idea in my head and then proceeded to teach
me that the idea was a bad one, but was not necessarily against the
rules. I feel as though I was teased.
It is not my intention to start sounding gung-ho about the
notion of TAs sleeping with their students. Any kind of romantic or
lustful relationship (or even friendship, for that matter) when
grades hang in the balance is unethical. This should be enough to
rule out such relations for TAs in certain departments. For some,
though, the situation is different.
My role as a TA is more as the student’s helper than as the
student’s evaluator. I provide numerical grading only for a small
portion of the student’s work, and I am never responsible for
letter grades. Such a situation may seem dangerously close to the
unethical, but it is not quite.
It is, in theory, possible for there to be a relationship
between a TA and a student in which grades do not get in the way.
Such a relationship would be atypical; it would be kept secret,
there would always be some fear of getting caught, and there would
be a difference in age and status. There is something attractive in
all of this  to me, anyway, but I am probably not the best
judge of such things. Do relationships like this actually
exist?
Accounts of affairs between students and their TAs, ethical or
otherwise, seem confined to anecdote. Not too long ago I heard of a
possibly apocryphal story that supposedly took place at a UC
campus.
A female student approached a male TA, appearing to demonstrate
passions for both her teacher and the subject. The two wound up
coupled, but once the student realized she was getting an A and the
TA’s favors were no longer needed, she somehow lost one of those
passions. My sexual harassment training seemed full of stories of
the same ilk, most of which were not even purportedly based in
reality.
The anecdotes we hear all seem to be about something going
wrong: the student uses the TA to get a good grade or the TA uses
the student to get a good bedfellow. We never hear stories in which
neither party winds up abused. Is this because such stories are
kept quiet, or is this because there is no such story to be
told?
One might wish to think that these things do not happen, that
apart from some unpleasant cases of harassment, students and TAs
keep their interactions quite professional. If such relationships
were purely fictional, though, would we hear about them as much as
we do? One is unlikely to admit to such an affair, but some of the
examples that are discussed seem to make sense only when the
possibility of an actual affair is recognized. I have heard of a
cute and flirtatious male TA whose sections were full of seemingly
receptive students. I have heard colleagues celebrate the presence
of attractive students in their sections and bemoan the lack
thereof. Why would any of this matter if closer relations were off
limits? Based on these trends, it seems the line separating the
professional and the personal must be crossed, but how often?
To answer this we should consider where the TA-student affair
(even one unaffected by grades) lies on the moral map. Even if one
takes a relatively liberal view on matters of lust, the issue is a
bit complicated. It is more than a simple affair, but it is nothing
like incest. It is at the boundary between the licit and the
illicit; it is, depending upon one’s view, either an outer extreme
of acceptable behavior or something wrong but easily
forgivable.
I cannot help but think that it has something in common with a
"menage a trois".
I realize that this analogy is sudden, but it may be useful. The
differences between the two are obvious enough: the TA-student
affair is not what one would call "kinky," and unlike the
threesome, it is not a staple of pornography (and I would
know).
The "menage a trois" is, however, at an ethical boundary between
the acceptable and the unacceptable. Also, it seems to be
associated with numerous, usually fabricated stories of something
going wrong; either one member is excluded or all the relationships
fall apart. Its similarities to a TA-student relationship in these
ways may be more important.
Do threesomes happen in real life? Yes, they happen enough for
people to be aware of them and for people to incorporate them into
occasional fantasy. They are not, however, frequent events, and
there is a large discrepancy between the number who have considered
them and the number who have participated in them.
This is probably how it is with TA-student affairs. They are
rare and fraught with difficulties, but they are interesting enough
and frequent enough to keep people interested.
So there it is. This subject of training workshops and idle
conversation is not too significant; the mere fact that I chose it
as a column topic should indicate that it is not a big issue. That
sort of relationship hardly happens. People really should stop
talking about it so much.
It is, however, too intriguing.Patrick Friel
Friel is a graduate student in mathematics. He welcomes comments
at [email protected].
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