Harvard University has banned “sexual or romantic relationships” between professors and undergraduate students, Bloomberg News reports. The university’s previous policy only discouraged relationships between professors and the students they teach. The new policy covers the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s main undergraduate-teaching body.
With the move Harvard joins a growing number of institutions to ban relationships outright. But many stop short of that step. Last week Arizona State University broadened its ban on professors’ dating students they oversee to include any students they can “reasonably be expected” to oversee. The American Association of University Professors does not recommend a ban on relationships between students and faculty members.
“Undergraduates come to college to learn from us,” Alison Johnson, a Harvard history professor who led the group that wrote the new policy, told Bloomberg. “We’re not here to have sexual or romantic relationships with them.”
Clarification (2/5/2015, 6:13 p.m.): This post has been updated to clarify that the new policy covers Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
