Like speech, romance in the ivory tower is a fundamental right

By Paul Abramson

"I believe the best teaching is done in bed," Allen Ginsberg declared. "Are you serious?" asked the Washington Post reporter. "I'm totally serious," the renowned beat poet replied, adding: "It's healthy and appropriate for the student and teacher to have a love relationship whenever possible."

Rather than encouraging the kind of romance Ginsberg championed, universities have adopted a policy that prohibits romantic relationships between faculty and students. Professors who fail to abide by this policy face employment termination. The fundamental issue, I believe, is not whether campus romance should be encouraged or prohibited but whether the choice to engage in a campus romance should be protected or precluded. Meaning, simply, that who sleeps with whom on U.S. college campuses is secondary to the question of where the power to make the choice resides.

It is useful, I believe, to examine how the UCLA romance policy, which comes under the umbrella of the sexual harassment policy, came into existence. It started, lo and behold, with a case of sexual assault. The backstory, apparently, is that a prominent male professor at UC Berkeley got drunk and sexually assaulted a female student. The entire UC system thereafter moved to prohibit consensual sex and romance between faculty members and those students under their supervision.

Why did UC equate consensual romance between faculty and students with the crime of sexual assault? And why, even more curiously, is consensual romance now punished under the umbrella of sexual harassment?

There are, no doubt, problems with faculty-student romance. Two issues stand out as critical: the status imbalance and the potential for favoritism. Though these concerns are certainly valid, it seems equally reasonable to also ask whether it is legitimate to isolate and prohibit a special class of relationships instead of relying on alternative remedies such as conflict-of-interest strategies.

It is my position that the Ninth Amendment protects the "right to romance" (certainly among consenting adults, and in the absence of tangible harm). Romance is a quintessential right retained by the people. It is no less essential to our well-being and happiness, I assert, than freedom of speech. It is hard, in fact, to imagine liberty without either right. Furthermore, the right to choose a romantic partner is the prerequisite right to romance itself. Romantic choice is therefore the vehicle by which we exercise romantic freedom.

More importantly, I hold that our right to romance is a fundamental right of conscience. Though rarely recognized as such, the First Amendment, at least in spirit, is no less relevant to romance then it is to God.

Religion has been safeguarded and thereby protected by the freedom to make conscientious choices. That freedom, however, was never limited to religion alone but instead was extended to all matters of conscience, including, I now contend, romance in the ivory tower.

Abramson is professor of psychology and the author of the forthcoming MIT Press book "Romance in the Ivory Tower: The Rights and Liberty of Conscience."

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