In Australia, the rules around academics sleeping with their students can be complicated. But is it ethical?
- Written by Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media and Journalism, University of Notre Dame Australia
In Sweet Nothings, author Madison Griffiths investigates the uncomfortable complexities of “problematic sex” between academics and students on Australian university campuses.
The term “problematic sex” – often used by Gen Z and younger millennial feminists – refers to sexual relationships that, while technically “consensual”, are nonetheless harmful for other reasons, most often due to significant disparities of power.
Review: Sweet Nothings: Power, lust and learning – Madison Griffiths (Ultimo)
Griffiths’ book tells the stories of four women now in their 30s and 40s, all of whom entered into a sexual relationship with an academic at the university where they studied while in their early 20s. Griffiths explores how these experiences left three of them psychologically damaged or, in Griffiths’ words, feeling “angry”, “bitter”, “betrayed”, and “small and expendable”.
Griffiths was also once in a relationship with a man who had been her university tutor. As she writes in an author’s note:
In my late teens, I was once a man’s student.
In my early twenties, his lover. In my early thirties, a thorn in his side. I had discovered, over the span of a decade, that there had been others he had loved, or at least held: a small handful of students-turned-lovers.
The memory prompted her to post an appeal on Instagram for people to come forward who had once been in a relationship with their “teacher, tutor, professor or student”. She received hundreds of responses, ultimately meeting with her four interviewees.
“It started to appear obvious to me that sex between university students and their superior felt contaminated by larger, more damning forces,” she writes.
Appearing trusting and professional
Sweet Nothings focuses on Rose, Blaine, Cara and Elsie and their relationships with four men. The identities of all individuals – both protagonists and antagonists – are masked, although the action mostly unfolds against a recognisable Melbourne landscape.
Rose’s story revolves around Samuel, a sessional lecturer who has pursued at least three sexual relationships with female undergraduates he teaches across different institutions.
Blaine’s story revolves around her sexual encounters with Greg, an older, married professor who has spent much of the past three decades engaging in sexual relationships with his female students. Often these liaisons occur in the back rooms and side corridors of the campus where he teaches. At one point, he accepts an appointment as mid-candidature assessor for Blaine’s PhD. He “minced her thesis to bits” – in order, Griffiths suggests, “to divert attention from the two of them” and appear “trusting, professional in front of his colleagues”.
Elsie enters into a sexual relationship with her middle-aged doctoral supervisor Harrison, in the aftermath of his marital separation. “I need to know,” she says when she confronts him with the “wrongness” of their relationship, years later. “When did you realise you were using me?”
The fourth story centres on Ivan, who has a chaste but intense relationship with Cara. “Nothing happened,” Cara insists. “You see, it was all very gentle, which is why I can’t understand you wanting to speak to me.”
In some ways, Cara is a foil for the other women in the book, although Griffiths also paints Ivan as emotionally creepy.
Griffiths spoke to male professors and tutors who had slept with a student. But to protect her four subjects’ anonymity, she did not speak to the men they were involved with.
Obscure language – and lots of arguments
Despite serial inquiries into sexual harms on campus, “consensual” sexual relationships between academics and students remain an ethically grey area in Australia: the rules that govern them vary between institutions. There are few conclusive prohibitions, and most of those that do exist refer specifically to relationships of a supervisory nature.
Goodreads
Garner’s book, while beautifully crafted, has not dated well. “Why are they so angry?” Garner asked. “Why did they go to the police?” “What else was there in this story, beyond accusations of nerdish passes at a party?”
In seeking out her answers, Garner failed to grasp the seriousness of sexual harassment and misunderstood the nature of structural and institutional power. She blamed the victims, casting them as “destructive, priggish and unforgiving”, positioning them as siding with a repressive police power.
Griffiths, in her own book, constantly worries what Garner will think of her – that she is puritanical, “making a fuss over not much” or that she is, in an adaptation of Garner’s phrase, “policing the eros and all of its mystique and shimmer with dogged scorn”.
As a middle-aged female professor, I do not experience such qualms.
The actions of the male academics in Sweet Nothings are abundantly clear. In many of these allegedly “consensual” sexual relationships, the men engage in emotional abuse of their student, including coercive, controlling and threatening behaviour. And though Griffiths’ deliberately dreamy writing style makes it difficult to determine exact events, the book describes at least one sexual assault.
In her book, students are warned by male academics not to use any official university channel to communicate with the perpetrator. Students are enjoined to secrecy and threatened with indeterminate consequences if they expose the perpetrator.
Students are incessantly lectured – politically, philosophically and artistically – that there is nothing “wrong” in the allegedly “consensual” relationship, in ways that constitute intellectual, moral and emotional abuse of the student.
And with respect to sexual assault, it is irrelevant whether or not a victim–survivor was previously in a “consensual” relationship with the perpetrator, or whether the perpetrator subsequently sends a text message to “apologise”, as one assailant does in Griffiths’ stories. Sexual assault is a criminal matter and ought to be named as such.
It is only later that the women in the stories develop the maturity to see the relationships for what they were. Once this is “seen”, they “cannot unsee” it.
Rose and Elsie lodge formal complaints. Rose tells Griffiths “how many forceful emails she has sent, how many department heads […] have come to know her by name”. She becomes “used to being ignored, so much so that it doesn’t ache any more”.
In the book, the men, ubiquitously, remain in their jobs, accruing long lists of “admirable achievements”, “prestigious awards” and “grants that cost the earth”.
Griffiths recounts both individual and institutional responses to the women’s complaints – including “we are all adults”, or he is just “a flirt” – wondering, “is it love we are protecting – or something else entirely”?
Changes overseas
In the past two decades, a handful of universities overseas have taken steps to prohibit sexual relationships between faculty and students. Yale University was among the first to ban sexual relationships between faculty and undergraduate students in 2010. Harvard University followed suit in 2015, adding stricter guidelines for graduates.
Durfee Hall at Yale University,
Photo by Plexi Images/GHI/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In the United States, these prohibitions are politically and philosophically justified under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which is designed to protect individuals from sex-based discrimination in educational settings that receive federal funding.
In the landmark 1977 case Alexander v Yale five female students took action against the university. They lost on facts but won on law, establishing the legal principle that a university’s failure to address on-campus sexual harassment by male faculty constituted a form of sex discrimination, because it disproportionately harmed young women.
In 2020, universities in the UK moved to regulate sexual relationships between academics and students, introducing policies underpinned by a different, narrower philosophical approach influenced by commercial workplace agreements. University College London was among the first to prohibit sexual relationships in which there is “a real or perceived conflict of interest”, which it defined as “close personal and intimate relationships between staff and students” where there is “direct supervision”.
Other institutions followed suit. Oxford University had previously insisted academics’ sexual lives were largely a private matter. In 2023, a new policy acknowledged a greater potential for “conflicts” to arise.
In Australia’s neoliberal university setting, education is mostly perceived as transactional, and the “conflicts of interest” approach often prevails.
This narrowly legalistic approach sidesteps the peculiarities of pedagogical relationships, ignores the nature of the university as a public institution dedicated to social uplift and advancement, and misunderstands the nature of harm. The institutional power held by academics extends far beyond the ability to mark, grade, pass or reject the student’s work.
Students arrive at university filled with dreams and aspirations, seeking mentors, even a hero, standing at the threshold of their imagined futures. This form of institutional power places a strain on concepts like “consent” and “conflict” that they cannot bear.
Pedagogical relationships
A university is not like any other workplace. Pedagogical relationships are qualitatively different to managerial relationships in a digital startup or clothing store.
As Griffiths writes, “a professor eager to hold his student may insist she is a free agent”. But “the classroom is not a place two people arrive at untethered”.
These relationships, she insists, are a “gendered phenomenon” – not freely chosen but shaped by broader social patterns of power and inequality tied to gender. Even the “arbitrary furniture” of the lecture theatre, or the “U-shaped configuration of a discussion group” reinforces ideas about who holds authority and who does not.
In this context, the professor who insists “he – and her – are adults”, misses the point. His real job, Griffiths insists, is “to teach, and only ever that” – not to reproduce the very gender inequalities that universities are meant to dismantle.
Authors: Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media and Journalism, University of Notre Dame Australia
Hashtag.net.au
