ROMANCING THE STUDENT

By NANCY GIBBS

During the three months in 1993 when she was sleeping with her English professor, Lisa Topol lost 18 pounds. She lost interest in her classes at the University of Pennsylvania, lost her reputation as an honor student and wondered if she was losing her mind. If she tried to break up, she thought, he could ruin her academic career. Then she made some phone calls and learned a bit more about the professor she had come to view as a predator. In June she will tell her story in federal court, but even before a verdict is rendered, the case has prompted Penn to consider more stringent rules on student-teacher sex. Depending on the outcome of her trial, love life on campus may never be the same.

Lisa was a senior at the University of Pennsylvania when she found herself embroiled in an affair with a young English professor named Malcolm Woodfield. His tastes ran to whips and riding crops, she told Philadelphia magazine, and when she tried to get out of the relationship, the professor bullied her into continuing. She need not worry about flunking his course, she recalls his saying, because "your grade is not based on your work anyway."

In March 1993 Lisa finally told another English professor about the affair; encouraged by assistant ombudsman Gulbun O'Connor, Topol charged Woodfield with sexual harassment. A university ethics committee supported her allegation that Woodfield had abused his academic power. The embattled professor resigned last April, after admitting that he once slept with Topol and engaged in "unethical conduct," though he has denied the other details of their affair.

But Topol has since taken her case even further, in a gesture that is rattling the teeth of campus administrators everywhere. Topol had heard rumors that Woodfield had been in trouble before, and she began asking questions. Before coming to Penn, she learned, he had taught at Bates College in Maine, where some students had also accused him of harassment, but he was allowed to leave quietly in 1991, with the recommendations that helped him land the Penn job.

Topol has since filed civil suits not only against Woodfield and Penn but against Bates as well for failing to warn Penn of Woodfield's record. Having supported her before, Penn has reversed course: in a pretrial memorandum filed in February, Penn charges that the affair "grew out of her strong sexual attraction to and romantic feelings for Woodfield." Penn has asked for her diary to prove her consent; meanwhile, says Topol's lawyer, Alice Ballard, Bates is trying to get records from her psychotherapist.

In the midst of this furor, the Penn faculty executive committee has called for tougher rules against faculty-student romances; it wants to amend the policy that calls such relationships "unethical" so that it would prohibit professors from dating students under their supervision. For her part, Topol doubts this will do any good. "I can't imagine how any student would come forward after seeing what Penn has done to me," she says. "Penn's response has done nothing but make the wounds deeper and more painful."

Penn thus becomes the latest school to turn itself inside out over an issue that dates back to Abelard and Heloise. Through the years so many professors have romanced and often married their students that it seems a quaint, even hypocritical exercise to suddenly try to stop them. "If this policy were applied retroactively," remarks Penn history professor Alan Kors, who married one of his students 20 years ago, "I think a third of the faculty would have resigned."

It has been easy for some critics to cast efforts to legislate sexual mores on campus as the latest prudish gambit of a feminist police state. But the universities that have tackled this issue are actually engaged in a practical--rather than an ideological--enterprise: they are trying to prevent lawsuits. In fact, in this era of heightened sensitivity, the legal pressures are coming from all sides. Even as Penn wrestles with the Topol case, another Penn professor, economist David Cass, is charging that the university has sexually harassed him by asking him about his relationship with a former student and then denying him a post to head the department's graduate program. Last week Cass was busy circulating a petition to try to block the new rules. "I resent the fact that because I'm standing up for my privacy people are drawing an inference that I'm some kind of lecher who has had numerous affairs," he says.

Administrators respond that they are merely extending to the university the same strictures that apply in the workplace: when there is power involved, whether between boss and employee or teacher and student, a sexual relationship opens the door to extortion, exploitation and favoritism. Drawing the lines more boldly, they argue, will protect friendly faculty from oversensitive students, as well as vulnerable students from lascivious professors.

The potential for misunderstandings was amply illustrated this winter at Cornell, where the faculty ethics committee charged that Professor James Maas, a star of the psychology department, harassed four of his former students by hugging and kissing them, buying them expensive presents and making suggestive remarks. Maas calls his behavior affectionate and innocent, an effort to make Cornell a more "warm and caring place"; the angry students call it unwelcome and intimidating. Cornell, with no written policy on student-faculty romance, had a typically equivocal response: the popular professor was stripped of a $25,000 teaching award that he had received in 1993--honoring him for, among other things, creating an "atmosphere of intimacy" in his enormous lecture courses--and told to go and sin no more. Any more complaints, the committee said, and Maas would lose his job.

Harvard claims to have instituted the first restrictions on faculty-student relations in 1984, followed by the University of Iowa in 1986. But the most draconian proposal was debated at the University of Virginia two years ago, where the faculty considered a total ban on student-teacher liaisons, even if the individuals were from different departments. "The majority of the faculty agreed, but they weren't happy about more rules," says Richard Rorty, a Virginia philosophy professor. In the end Virginia fell into the mainstream and approved rules that simply "discourage" relationships in situations where there could be favoritism or the appearance of abuse.

According to a survey by Cynara Stites, a clinical social worker at the University of Connecticut, professors themselves admit the potential for exploitation in such romances: 9 out of 10 agreed that a student who breaks up with a professor risks "unfair reprisals." More than half the male faculty members agreed that a professor who sleeps with a student he supervises is taking advantage of her. "There's a real risk of her losing her entire academic career," explains Stites. "It undermines her self-confidence. She doesn't know whether [her success is] based on her lover or based on merit."

Moreover, the damage of such an affair can extend far beyond the people directly involved. Undoing it is "like unscrambling eggs," says Susan Mask, assistant to the president of the University of Iowa. "It creates serious problems for the faculty. It can fracture a department. The damage has to be weighed against the fun."

Yet many professors insist that even a limited ban can't work; others think it shouldn't be tried. Most college students, after all, are legal adults, capable of consent, and a university of all places should respect personal liberty. Professor bell hooks at City College in New York, who had affairs with professors while a student and once became the lover of a younger man after she had taught him, says, "No feminist thinks that banning abortions would keep women from having them. So why do we think that banning relationships between faculty and students will keep them from having them?"

Barry Dank, a sociologist at California State University at Long Beach who argues that such prohibitions "infantilize" students, has formed a loosely knit group of about 100 professors and students called Consenting Academics for Sexual Equity. He believes the spread of campus rules on romance will leave professors less accessible to students. "It's creating a paranoia that is really affecting whatever is left of an academic community," he says.

But Stites, for one, is confident that "once faculty members know where the line is, people can relax about normal mentoring, normal faculty-student relationships. If they do not know where the line is, they will not feel safe to do anything that might be misconstrued."

--Reported by Sharon E. Epperson/New York and Bonnie I. Rochman/ Richmond

With reporting by SHARON E. EPPERSON/NEW YORK AND BONNIE I. ROCHMAN/RICHMOND