Consenting to Conflict

"We need to think about this in terms of harm and harm reduction."

–Tarana Burke, founder of the MeToo movement¹

We work in a longstanding feminist and majority white department with a history of feminist chairs; a strong profile in women's writing, feminist theory, and queer theory and writing; and a non-hierarchical ethos that regards students as junior colleagues.² Corrinne has been working in the department for fourteen years and Teresa for twenty-two; we are cisgender, heterosexual, white settlers from working-class backgrounds. We are both committed to feminist scholarship and pedagogy, and we have been grateful to the department for hiring us and supporting those commitments. The department also has a long history of consensual relationships between instructors and students, and our department is not unique in this. The prevalence of faculty-student relationships—and their potential for both happy unions and detrimental effects on individuals and the learning climate—is fairly well established.³ Although neither of us has direct experience with consensual instructor-student relations, we each have experience with a range of specific harms that sex and power create in learning environments, and we are both survivors of sexual abuse.⁴ We have had students disclose violence, assault, and harassment to us, disclosures that recount both individual harms and harm to the learning environment.⁵ One of us also has experience with being sexually harassed in the department, and we both have experienced retaliatory behavior when attempting to address the harm caused by harassment disclosed to us by students. Like many others who receive such disclosures, in our university and elsewhere, we found the institutional process for receiving and dealing with disclosures to be confusing, and we were troubled by the additional harm that a formal complaint and an investigation cause to students who have already been harmed.⁶

In 2017, our university adopted a new sexual violence policy, which defines sexual violence capaciously, is student-centered, is based in affirmative consent, and is designed to make disclosures and complaints less harmful to students.⁷ All units on campus were called upon to educate and organize themselves in order to act on their professional responsibilities regarding the new policy. We proposed the creation of an ad-hoc departmental committee tasked with responding to the policy, given the following: 1) we teach every student on campus through a required first-year course; 2) we often teach texts that represent sex and sexual violence; and 3) like any university department, we have had our own problems with sexual violence. Our department unanimously endorsed the creation of this committee.

Working on this committee was a positive experience—even a peak academic service experience—because it was collaborative, respectful, non-hierarchical, committed to doing difficult work, and most importantly driven by students.⁸ The committee discussed and undertook a number of initiatives, including education on sexual violence for faculty and students; an investigation of whether such education should be part of our first-year curriculum; workshops on how to receive disclosures; and focus groups on departmental climate. The issue that students felt most strongly about and that we spent the most time on was instructor-student relations. The university's new sexual violence policy permits consensual relations with the understanding that consent must be affirmative and ongoing and that consent cannot be "obtained through the abuse of a position of power, trust or authority."⁹ Consensual instructor-student relationships are governed by the university's Conflict of Interest (COI) policy, which is meant to manage and reduce the potential harm of the power imbalances inherent when an instructor, supervisor, committee member, or administrator is also a student's sexual partner.¹⁰ However, the university's COI policy only references consensual instructor-student relationships with the phrase "personal benefit," a vague catch-all that no one except those writing university policy understand to refer to instructor-student relationships.¹¹

The committee realized that allowing consensual relations without a clear COI policy to address them meant that a student's affirmative consent to a sexual relationship was made to bear the larger burdens of...