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[…] staff are in a position of authority over students and their relationship is not an equal one. […] Such power imbalance rests on the fact that members of staff award grades, set examination papers, write references, grant or deny extensions for pieces of work, sit on examination boards, etc. The power gap is increased by the lecturer’s greater academic knowledge, experience of the institution and status within it. This reduces the student’s freedom of choice in the relationship. […] Investigations into consensual relationships indicate that, in the main, they involve male staff and younger female students. The fact that sexual exploitation of students is a gender issue needs to be accepted and confronted. […]. Staff are strongly advised not to enter into a

sexual/romantic relationship with any student they are responsible for teaching, supervising or assessing.

This extract can be read as drawing on harassment knowledge in its framing of F-S relationships in a number of ways. Below, I explore how it works to secure certain truth claims, considering how these map on to Brewis’s (2001) theorization of harassment knowledge.

A number of techniques are deployed in Extract 1 to establish the claim that staff and students are not, and cannot be, equal partners in a relationship, and thus to imply that they can only engage in ‘bad sex’. The excerpt begins by declaring the existence of organizational status differentials, articulated as staff having ‘authority over’students. It is unclear at this stage whether‘staff’includes administrative staff, or only academics. This assumption of status differentials might simply be left as self-evident, as it is in some university policy statements, a point to which I return later. However, the UCU’s statement goes on to substantiate its claim by providing as evidence a list of activities performed by staff. These include setting assignments, assessing and moderating work, and providing references. Responsibility for tasks associated with ‘teaching, supervising and assessing’ is thus articulated as generating a ‘power imbalance’ which works in staff’s - and it now becomes increasingly clear that this means academicstaff - favour, and places limits on students’ ability to choose relationships ‘freely’.

The text thus works against alternative readings of the ‘power imbalance’between staff and students, in which the list of responsibilities staff have for students might render them servile by framing them as the providers of educational services. This latter interpretation might indicate a consumer discourse which, as du Gay & Salaman (1992) note, position the customer as sovereign. However, this is not the image being conveyed

here. Rather, staff are constructed as possessing knowledge, authority, and responsibilities which students lack.

Moreover, the excerpt’s mobilization of an evidential modality to index asymmetries seems partial; what of students’ responsibilities? Nothing is said of the power that Taylor (2011) suggests students can effect through the provision of module feedback, appeals against grades, and so on. Thus notions that power relations might be unstable and open are written out of the extract.

The ‘power gap’ identified is not solely attributed to the academic’s elevated institutional status and responsibility, but is expressed a result of his or her knowledge and experience of the organization. Again, contingencies such as how this applies to newly appointed staff, and to postgraduate students, who may have greater institutional experience, and in some circumstances perhaps even knowledge, are swept aside. The ‘issue’ of the ‘sexual exploitation of students’is thus presented as ‘fact’.

This ‘fact’ leads us to the second claim; that sexual exploitation ‘is a gender issue’, involving male staff and ‘younger female students’. Again, this claim is substantiated by referring to ‘evidence’; ‘investigations’ are enigmatically alluded to. Although we are told nothing about the specific nature or findings of these investigations, the reference lends the statement a facticity that is difficult to challenge, unless one is aware of alternative investigations, with different findings. Readers are thus given little choice other than to ‘confront’and ‘accept’the claims made.

However, and as demonstrated in Chapter 2, alternative findings, for example those concerning the harassment of female lecturers by male students (e.g. Grauerholz, 1989), as well as highly publicised cases of same-sex harassment (Gallop, 1997), would have been in circulation at the time this policy statement was written. These have since been added to by research on the sexual harassment of male academics (Scarduzio & Geist-

Martin, 2008, 2010). That such evidence is overlooked by the UCU is unsurprising, given the dearth of academic interest in the study of F-S relationships, particularly in the UK. However, the existence of alternative studies and cases does pose some problems for the UCU’s rendering of truth claims, which appear to have been gerrymandered (Potter, 1996) in order to omit contrary evidence.

The authoritative stance assumed by the document, reinforced by its evidence-driven and declarative tone, creates fertile conditions for the UCU to administer ‘advice’ to academic staff. These appear on the final page of the document, and in the last two lines of the extract provided here; ‘Staff are strongly advised not to enter into a sexual/romantic relationship with any student they are responsible for teaching, supervising or assessing’.

It is important to note that this statement is not expressed as a straightforward interdiction. However, I would suggest that this is not the same language of ‘advice’ as that discussed later in Part IV of the thesis, where I examine the mobilization of advice and guidance in more detail. There, texts assume a less directive and more hortative modality. Here, the word ‘strongly’, and the taking up of a position against rather than for a certain mode of behaviour are conspicuous; to ‘strongly advise not to’ is to anticipate compliance with a negative sanction. In this respect the policy statement can be read as assuming at least an inhortative modality,and at most adopting a prohibitive stance, effectively proscribing F-S relationships, albeit under the guise of ‘advice’. Thus the UCU policy statement draws upon Brewis’ (2001) conception of harassment knowledge in two ways. First, it renders harassment, and F-S relationships as a case thereof, as an issue involving power inequalities. This reifies power and relegates consensual relationships into the category of ‘bad sex’. Second, it sets sexual exploitation up as a ‘gender issue’. In so doing it ignores same-sex harassment, and

instances in which women or ‘low status’ males (Grauerholz, 1989) are the instigators of harassment, thus reinforcing sex-role stereotypes in which men are active and women passive.

These claims assume a doubly sovereign form; the academic is deemed ‘sovereign’ over the student, but the UCU, and hence the academy, on whose behalf it acts through the provision of model statements, rules over the academic. Consequently, the document’s mobilization of harassment knowledge can be read as repudiating faculty-student sex, even if this is veiled in a gossamer of ‘advice’ rather than the more explicit, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’ (Foucault, 2009: 46), which Foucault maintains typifies juridico- legal language.

Having examined how harassment knowledge functions within the UCU policy I now move on to examine a second extract of data. I suggest that this both re-works and, to some extent, shifts the status of harassment knowledge in its articulation of F-S relationships. Extract 2, which is taken from the personal relationships policy8in place at LMH, has been selected because it represents a deviant case; it is the only policy I found which expressly forbids F-S relationships. I am interested here in how it reconfigures power relations in its discussion of ‘professional relationships’, a theme explored more fully in Chapter 11.

Extract 2:Code of Conduct on Professional Relationships, Lady Margaret Hall