I think this is a good point. My daughter recently went to a class that interested her, and found that the TA would be a guy she was already friends with. She ultimately decided not to take the class because she felt that there would be too much awkwardness.
I think the increasing numbers of professional women in public life ARE changing behavior. More open and frank education about sexual relations and training in how to recognize an abusive relationship are also changing behaviors.
In the old days, no one would blink an eye. Now, it’s starting to come out. When it does, it’s damaging to the institutions, in part because so many educated women no longer believe that it’s “boys will be boys.” It’s an abuse of power and position.
Search for “ceos dismissed for sexual harassment” – you’ll find many recent examples of men falling from great heights.
I happen to believe that all humans, even ceos and star researchers, are capable of learning from example, and of resisting temptation when it’s in their own best interest. (By the way, this isn’t a male/female issue. It’s a superior/underling issue. The genders could easily be reversed.)
I just visited ratemyprofessor to see if there were any comments about this guy.
Ironically, one of the four things profs can be rated on is “hotness.” Uh huh. 8-|
While accusations do not necessarily mean guilt, a hiring committee doing its due diligence on an applicant may want to at least investigate such accusations from a risk management standpoint.
And yet some of us work at institutions where HR hath decreed that things like, say, the results of Google searches may not be used in discussions of applicants.
And, of course, none of us here would ever, ever check Google about any of our applicants. 
But quite seriously, it does provide a disincentive for such due diligence—faculty searches are expensive and insanely time-consuming on both the applicant and the search committee side, and I’ve seen HR pull the plug on a number of searches at places I’ve worked, even late in the process, where they believed some t hadn’t been crossed or i dotted quite properly enough.
The professor’s own admission of having a sexual relationship with one of his subordinates at UNC should have been evidence enough for the U of C hiring committee. If he said he had a relationship with a grad student in an entirely different field, that’s one thing, but one of his own lab students? My D is a PhD student who depends upon her mentor/adviser for many things. The power differential is huge. For this guy to engage in a relationship with someone whom he supervises is completely unprofessional and unacceptable. It doesn’t matter one iota from a hiring perspective whether or not the grad student was consenting. It’s completely inappropriate behavior on the part of the professor.
The issue isn’t consent in that sort of case—if the allegations are true, the problem is the unequal power relationship.
^^^That’s absurd. The professor has power over a grad student whom he is advising. He or she is not a colleague.
from the comments it looks like some of us have never a grad student. or never a student that had to put their career in the hands of a dissertation committee chair-- the power difference is unlike other situations, even a boss/employee relationship
Regarding the advisor/mentor and advisee relationship in a PhD program:
http://academicladder.com/dissertation-advisor-horror-stories
And on and on…hundreds and hundreds of hits on the concept of “power differential between advisers and PhD students.”
To say that because a student is not an undergrad makes her a “colleague” on equal footing is to completely ignore the reality of a PhD candidate’s position in the hierarchy of a department.
As to the specific professor being discussed in the OP, this is the stated policy at UNC-CH:
It doesn’t matter if posters on this thread “don’t have a problem with” an adviser having a sexual relationship with one of his grad students. This professor violated the policy of his university.
Also note that at UNC-CH, grad students are held to the same standard with regard to their behavior with undergrad students whom they teach or supervise:
I’m guessing that similar policies have been in place at every university this guy has worked at.
Here is UNC-CH’s written rationale for their policy, and it specifically addresses consent on the part of the student:
So after all that, yeah—UNC-CH was IMO negligent in not making this known when he moved. Doing something that’s unethical but technically within policy, that’s one thing, but behaving in a way that’s also explicitly against policy? Future employers deserve to know that.
Of course we don’t know exactly what was said and done earlier in his career, but someone could have done this guy a huge favor by taking him aside early on and telling him in no uncertain terms that his hitting on students was completely unacceptable, and that he would–and moreover should–lose his academic career over it if he persisted.
Maybe that would have convinced him that he needed to find other outlets for his social/sexual needs.
Or maybe he is just such a narcissist that he was told this and discarded it in the belief that the rules applied to others, not to him.
What a waste of ability, training, and resources put into him.
@Todd87, you are absolutely, positively, simply wrong. There is no “national” age of consent law, and no national law which states people cannot be fired for having sexual relationships with their professional subordinates. So university policy does not “supercede” national law.
There are so many things wrong with your post that I’m starting to think you are either just trying to stir the pot or are being purposely obtuse.
Read over the UNC policy rationale for why relationships between advisers and grad students are not allowed. If you don’t “get that,” then I really think you are just being contrary for your own amusement.
And this is not a matter of opinion. The policy is in place and is certainly legal.
Unfortunately, it appears they didn’t enforce it well and failed to warn the next university. Who did the same, and this guy was able to develop his skills as a predator quite well.
Haha, that’s funny.
Yes, university professors do view doctoral students differently from undergraduate and master’s students, but it’s not quite “colleague on an equal level as me”. It’s probably more akin to the manager-subordinate position, although that’s not quite right, either. Your manager doesn’t usually have such unilateral power over your life the way a PhD advisor does…and I’m not really exaggerating.
If you’ve ever been a PhD student, you know how much your advisor controls not only your experience in the program but also your academic career thereafter. Particularly in the sciences, he is often the one who is funding you directly: not “he hired me so the university could pay me” but quite literally “the grant that he wrote is directly paying my salary and he has almost complete control over who he puts in that research assistant slot.” He influences the projects you get to work on in the lab. His network is potentially the source of your early-career posters, talks, and symposia at conferences. He uses his institutional power to network for you within and without the department, introducing you to crucial people at the right time. He may use his connections to get you a postdoc or a job after graduate school - or at least assist in the process by making a phone call. (I got my postdoc in large part because my advisor was well-known, and known well and respected by the people at my postdoc department. They assumed I did good work because I worked with him.) And he has an enormous amount of power over whether and when you graduate by virtue of approving your dissertation work. In many cases, the only one who sees any early drafts of your dissertation is your advisor. He has veto power over sections and chapters. If he doesn’t sign the approval forms, you don’t graduate.
This is not a straightforward, equal collegial relationship. It’s not even really like being an employee because your manager usually doesn’t have that much unilateral power over your work, much less your career after you move on from the job. And academics do like to pretend that they are not hierarchical, but they totally are. Spend an extended period of time in any serious research department and you will clearly see the hierarchies.
A doctoral student who reports, or wants to report her advisor for misconduct - or refuses sexual advances from her advisor - might suddenly find her RA funding dry up. Suddenly there is no class that needs a TA - or at least needs her to TA. He may unnecessarily hold up her dissertation progress by being nitpicky, or changing his mind about the direction of the dissertation multiple times, or taking forever to give feedback. He may prevent her - overtly or covertly - from working on the most promising experiments and projects in the lab and shunt her to low-level work, crippling her ability to get publications. He’s not introducing her to his colleagues at conferences and networking on her behalf. Maybe he refuses to write recommendation letters for her, or worse, writes bad ones. Some veiled oblique references to her “difficult” personality may make it difficult for her to find postdoctoral positions and tenure-track jobs afterwards (because on a micro level people value relationships with powerful professors more than they value relationships with junior colleagues. and on a macro level, because no department wants to hire someone they perceive as being a potential troublemaker who will complain about silly things like sexism and misconduct rather than keeping quiet and publishing. Especially when you have 300 people to choose from).
And honestly, if he really wanted to, he could get her forced out of the PhD program altogether. Remember, by the time you’re writing the dissertation the only person who sees your stuff on a consistent basis is your advisor. Maybe his subjective evaluation of you takes a downturn, and suddenly he questions your ability to finish a dissertation and succeed as a scholar. He’s a star, so he’s got pull in the department. There are always going to be people who agree with him, and the ones who don’t may stay quiet.
Do professors do this stuff? YES THEY DO. There are professors who have done this kind of stonewalling petty crap for much less than being reported for sexual misconduct (because their student expresses interest in a non-academic career, or the student published a paper with someone they didn’t like, or the student likes teaching too much and maybe is thinking about pursuing a career at a TEACHING college for god’s sake).
It’s funny you bring up managers because most good companies do actually have policies that managers don’t date their subordinates. Even if everything goes well in the relationship, it creates the illusion, at least, of unfairness. How can you properly evaluate someone you are currently romantically involved with? If I could give my husband a raise every year and increase my household income, I totally would! I think my husband is one of the best people in the world, so my review of his work is going to be positive. Do you think I’m going to tell his employer about his flaws or weaknesses as an employee? Heck no! Unless I’m really MAD at him. And them maybe my review is colored by my emotional connection to him instead of a professional evaluation of his work.
And that’s in the best of worlds. In the worst case scenario, your advisor is delaying your graduation and poisoning your chances at getting an academic job in his network because you won’t have sex with him.
Also:
Students get stuck with advisors they don’t want all the time - because their own advisor died, retired, or moved to another university; or because the original person they wanted to work with refuses to work with them or runs out of money or they have a falling out. Or because Advisor #2 has more money and influence in the department and really wants the student to work with them specifically. I have a recent PhD and knew of several situations in which a student was working with someone they really didn’t want to work with, and they did not have the option to switch to another person unless they left the program entirely - and started over.
This is a misinterpretation of law. First of all, there’s no “national law” on age of consent. The age of consent varies from state to state.
Second of all, although the law specifies an age of consent after which the government cannot prosecute you, that law has nothing to do with whether individual employers and institutions can sanction or fire you. Your employer could fire you on Tuesday because they don’t like your shirt. Not because the shirt is offensive, just because they don’t like it. There’s nothing in the law preventing that - private employers have an enormous amount of power over who their employees and affiliates are (as it should be). Likewise, there is nothing legally preventing a department at a private university from firing or reprimanding or refusing to hire a professor who has a pattern of having sex with his PhD students, even if the relationships are all consenting and there’s nothing visibly untoward about them - and much less if there IS.
Now, there’s a difference with public universities because they are state agencies. They have more circumscribed limits on what they can fire you for (so while your private employer can fire you for espousing National Socialism if they want, your public university probably couldn’t). But state agencies can STILL fire you for many things that are not illegal - government and public agencies do that all the time. They can fire you for not doing your work, even though that’s not illegal, and they can fire you for the illusion of impropriety even if none actually occurred, because nobody wants that kind of press if they can avoid it.
Eloquently stated, as always, @juillet.
I agree. Over the years I have had many bosses who were more like colleagues. The advisor relationship even at a master’s level with my advisor was lot worse than a controlling parent. He could simply decide that any work I completed need to be started over after 3 months. He wanted control over many areas of my life that had nothing to do with school.
I have friends who started over a project 3 years into it at PhD level and others who were not allowed to be done no matter how much work they completed on their research because the advisor wanted more papers out of their work. I can only imagine what happens when sexual coersion can be a factor in this mix.
@Juillet is right. Undergraduates are more personally vulnerable, but professors actually have less control over their futures than they have over their PhD students. PhD students, in many cases, can’t transfer. They’d have to start their projects over from the beginning if they go to a new institution. They can not only be kicked out of their own program; advisors may be able to keep them out of all programs in their subfield.