We must start with confessions. For the purposes of breadth and ambiguity I will use the American term “faculty”. When I was a student I spent a lot of time with faculty. I got drunk with such and was more formally wined and dined by them. I went on holiday with faculty (in the Alpine chalet used by three Oxford colleges). And, yes, I was seduced by faculty. When I was a young lecturer living on campus I played many sports with students, got drunk with students and made love with students. All of this seemed entirely normal on the campus of a new university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Actually, the one time I spent the night with three students it was a miserable affair because it was in a car I was increasingly regretting having purchased in freezing fog on the way back from a faraway football match. We got back in time for breakfast.

Questions arise. Do I consider myself to have been either harassed or harmed by any of my student experiences? The answer is no and whereas I fully concede that others might have felt differently. I know of no cases. Do I consider myself to have harmed or harassed students? I don’t know, of course, but as circumstantial evidence I would point out that in the world of the twenty-first century where tracing people and communicating with them is easier than it ever was I am in communication with a flat majority of those with whom I was intimate and they are all very friendly. That is even true, most days, of the lady I have been married to for forty eight years.

To many people, including me, all of this felt like both joy and an emancipation from the world our parents had lived in. There were dangers, of course, but they had sharply diminished. And, very obviously, not everybody gained from the new rules and certainly not to an equal degree. But my reality was of educational, emancipatory relationships with older people in the context of the university which had not been possible with schoolteachers or relatives. As a matter of historical interest I should point out that I was a minor throughout my time as an undergraduate and even for a short time as a graduate student whereas nearly all students now are legally adults.

But there is an alternative version of the reality of staff-student relations. It is to be found in the Office for Students’ Consultation on a new approach to regulating harassment and sexual misconduct in English higher education, published in February 2023. In considering “personal relationships” between staff and students the document lists three categories: “physical intimacy”. “romantic or emotional intimacy” and “financial dependence”. Part of this is about “relevant staff members” and the definition of relevance is “any member of staff . . . . who has direct or indirect responsibilities, or other direct professional responsibilities, for a student”. As with the idea of “romantic intimacy” I would be intrigued to know how long a debate you could have on the meanings of some of that. And I cannot pass over the word “professional” without comment. I always used to object when anyone referred to academic employees as “professionals” because university life lacks the defining criteria of professionalism: common norms and purposes, specific entry criteria etc. It is about vocation and community, gemeinschaft rather than gesellschaft. I taught and wrote with no qualification or training to do either.

When comparing my reality with that of the consultation document several important and difficult questions are unavoidable. The first is about scale: how does the size of the document’s reality compare to the size of mine, always bearing in mind the possibility that the cure can be worse than the disease? Burglary causes great misery and it could be much reduced by severe curfews, but no rational person would recommend this course of action. Rape is appalling and stalking (even more difficult to define) can also ruin lives, but in the course of half a century in universities – and for what it’s worth, which may be nothing – I knew of one case of each among people with whom I was acquainted. I also knew only one person I would consider to be a sexual predator though he was dealt with fairly effectively by the existing system. The consultation document quotes a number of statistics from an NUS survey on staff-student relations. For example 0.8% are said to have experienced “rape or sexual assault” and 41% “sexualised behaviour”. But I’m afraid those are statistics which tell us very little. Why not quote a figure for rape as such, especially as “sexual assault” is such a broad concept. In considering it I must recall instances of what would once have been called “horseplay” especially among American students I taught and often under the guise of a games such as touch football. And as for “sexualised behaviour”: would that include jokes? . . . compliments? If so I’m surprised that the figure of 41% is so low. And when the document claims, based on a different survey from 2020 that “full time students were more likely to have experienced sexual assault in the past year than any other group” I can express no surprise and cannot help recalling my wife’s category of “daft lads trying it on” which she regarded as a far less serious problem than male tutors and students not taking what women said seriously..

A ban on sexualised behaviour would be more or less a ban on life as we know it. (That is, my generation and most generations though not, perhaps, the Victorians with their stern love of respectability.) Meanings and messages are extraordinarily complicated and what is received is routinely different from what is sent. I found, for example, when teaching in an increasingly international university that most of the male English students were very sensitive particularly to female students from different cultures. Unfortunately this often meant never engaging with them in debate and even ignoring them completely. This was not necessarily what was wanted and I well remember a Japanese personal student wishing she could relate to anybody in the robust, informal way that she saw male and female English students treating each other. Could it be described as “sexualised” this way? I think it could if you had a mind to .

A serious problem if you are trying to define let alone regulate such concepts as “harassment” and “sexualised behaviour” is that two people can behave in the same way and it has different meanings for the recipient. My most vivid example is about academic staff, but in relation to secretaries rather than students. Professor A, long established in the department, could go into the office where the secretaries worked and address them by endearments such as “precious” and “petal” and they adored him. I even saw Professor A pat a feminist professor on the bottom and she giggled. Professor B, newly arrived, perhaps trying to fit in with what he saw as the informal mores of the department, behaved in a similar way, but only succeeded in eliciting comments along the lines of, “That guy gives me the creeps” and there was an attempt to have procedures taken against him. Professor A was – and was regarded as – “eccentric”, “lovable”, “avuncular” and highly amusing. When he died, far too young, former students recounted at his memorial event how he had variously shouted at them and cuddled them and they’d loved him for it.

The Consultation expresses a proper concern with the question of how regulations might affect free speech. One might add “normal” or “natural” speech for that matter. It isn’t very clear about the location of the tension, but I can furnish a fairly clear example. I gave a lecture on the idea of coercion which was illustrated by the history of the law of rape. I wrote it in consultation with a member of the law faculty and it concentrated on the Victorian period, which defined the offence as sex which occurs as the result of “force, fear or fraud”. It was a very good way, I thought, of illustrating the extreme difficulty, in some cases, of distinguishing between being “made” to do something and choosing to do it. After the lecture two female students came to me to complain; their objection was not to anything I’d said, but to “a man talking about rape”. I was impressed with the fact that they had come to me rather than reported me to some third party and agreed to canvass the other students (who didn’t see a problem). But it was a sign of changing times and expectations. School education has a stated aim of encouraging “resilience” in pupils. Perhaps it should try a little harder, because if the content of university courses does not offend, challenge or disconcert students then it can’t be doing very much.

So I think that attempts to regulate physical or emotional relations between staff and students in a university are conceptually weak and largely impractical. I also think that they commit an error of self fulfillment. If you insist on seeing anything as a problem it becomes one. Food and drink are problems for those who see them as such and so are “personal relationships”. The consultation document leans toward a requirement to register relationships rather than banning certain kinds, mainly physical. I dread to think what my register would have looked like as a young academic living on campus. In that context we should all remember that, in England at least, a principle of university life was the separation of teaching and examination so that the “power imbalances” which are thought to exist were not considered to be a problem. If contemporary universities went back to doing things properly many problems would diminish or disappear. We used to be all on the same side and we should be again.

Lincoln Allison May 2023

(An edited version of this article was published in Times Higher Education in August 2023. It proved controversial!)