U. of Michigan Just Expanded Its Ban on Student-Instructor Romance. Here’s Why.

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The three-campus University of Michigan system wants to remove any possible confusion from its policy on romantic relationships between faculty members and students.

As the #MeToo era concentrates public attention on gender-based power dynamics, many colleges have been revising their policies. But few, if any, have built out their prohibitions with as much specificity as Michigan, which last week announced its first revision since 2004.

The new policy bars professors from having romantic relationships with any undergraduate student or any graduate student who is, or who might “reasonably be expected” to someday be, under the supervision of the faculty member. Notably, the policy defines its terms — covering all types of “learners” and “leaders” — and stresses that postdoctoral fellows, teaching undergraduates, and nondegree students, among others, are all subject to its rules. What’s more, relationships banned in most cases by the policy do not require physical contact and can “exist on the basis of a single interaction.”

All of that makes for a comparatively long set of rules. At almost 5,000 words, Michigan’s new policy is three times the length of Ohio State University’s, four times that of Duke University’s, and five times that of the University of California at Berkeley’s.

The working group that designed Michigan’s policy started with a broad discussion of the issue, but its mission became clear once members sat down, said Susan A. Gelman, a professor of psychology and linguistics who led the group.

The new policy was part of a rollout of several universitywide commitments to combating sexual misconduct, including mandatory training for faculty and staff members on reducing misconduct, a campaign on how to report incidents, and the start of a third campus-climate survey. If the group wanted to avoid confusion and prevent the exploitation of students, Gelman said, it wasn’t going to fit into a 300-word policy.

Closing Loopholes

The policy’s specificity was borne out of a desire to close loopholes. “In theory,” Gelman said, “simple rules can seem clear-cut, but when you actually see what’s happening on the ground, it gets important to be more specific.”

The group’s members had experience in handling sexual misconduct, and although #MeToo was never explicitly mentioned, Gelman said recent Title IX cases and sexual-harassment incidents were considered. In addition to their own experience, the members drew on more than 40 policies at peer universities and came up with a list of eight values at the center of the new policy.

The group also considered hypothetical situations. For instance, Gelman said, imagine a scenario in which a professor waits for final grades to go out before dating a student in his or her class. Such “what if” situations led to a more-airtight policy.

Michigan’s new policy echoes recent rules changes at Duke University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Pennsylvania, and goes to great lengths — literally and figuratively — to avoid confusion or mishap. While Michigan tightened the reins, Columbia University stuck to regulations, dating to 2015, that prohibit very straightforward conflicts of interest in a class but allow dating and sexual relationships if the student and the instructor don’t share the same classroom.

When crafting universitywide policies, it’s important to strive for clarity, said Scott Schneider, a lawyer specializing in Title IX issues at the firm Husch Blackwell, in Austin, Tex. Short policies, although clear, may lack the nuance needed for complicated situations, he said. Longer policies, by contrast, can create more confusion than clarity.

“Higher-education institutions, for a variety of reasons including the governance models, are complicated places,” Schneider said, “and sometimes we want to flesh out all of the nuances there.”

Broad, short prohibitions on student-faculty relationships have become more common, he said. Failed attempts to deter inappropriate relationships have led universities like Michigan to consider more robust policies.

Follow Lily Jackson on Twitter at @lilygjack, or email her at lily.jackson@chronicle.com.