commenting on the body, separate from the incident that prompted this. when i was in school:
the occasional professor would invite the class for drinks after a test.
a subset of students i TA’d would invite me for tea.
a subset of students would bake food and share it after exams.
no mention of relationships yet. but all these activities are exactly those avenues by which people learn about each other and by which they form bonds. the professors i bonded with were exactly those professors whose office hours i attended most. and vice versa for the students i bonded with attending more of my office hours.
student/teacher bonding means the student is more comfortable asking the teacher for help, means the teacher better understands how to frame things in a way the student will get. if you ran the study, you would surely find correlation between this and course scores. does that mean this style of bonding is unethical?
if you ran the study and found that informal socializing didn’t decrease any student’s learning outcome, but it did increase some outcomes non-uniformly, would that be unethical?
it seems to me that the vast majority of times where relationships cause power problems is when one of the members is in competition with another. the argument that the criteria for competition among employees in the workplace shouldn’t involve sex is largely an argument that people shouldn’t be coerced into participating in a competition they don’t want to be a part of. aiming for consensus w.r.t. which criteria you should apply such that all workers prefer to be in such competition is a somewhat limited prospect. maybe there’s some progress that can be made there, but i expect the bulk of progress will actually be in finding ways to not force everyone into the same competition. in the post-scarcity world where you don’t have to compete in the workplace to stay alive, this consent issue would largely disappear. until then, the best we can do is fragment the competitive pools: less hierarchical workplaces such that the effect of any one competition is radically reduced, and more employment choices so that those who want work and life to be separate can avoid entering into direct competition with those who want work and life to overlap.
commenting on the body, separate from the incident that prompted this. when i was in school:
the occasional professor would invite the class for drinks after a test.
a subset of students i TA’d would invite me for tea.
a subset of students would bake food and share it after exams.
no mention of relationships yet. but all these activities are exactly those avenues by which people learn about each other and by which they form bonds. the professors i bonded with were exactly those professors whose office hours i attended most. and vice versa for the students i bonded with attending more of my office hours.
student/teacher bonding means the student is more comfortable asking the teacher for help, means the teacher better understands how to frame things in a way the student will get. if you ran the study, you would surely find correlation between this and course scores. does that mean this style of bonding is unethical?
if you ran the study and found that informal socializing didn’t decrease any student’s learning outcome, but it did increase some outcomes non-uniformly, would that be unethical?
it seems to me that the vast majority of times where relationships cause power problems is when one of the members is in competition with another. the argument that the criteria for competition among employees in the workplace shouldn’t involve sex is largely an argument that people shouldn’t be coerced into participating in a competition they don’t want to be a part of. aiming for consensus w.r.t. which criteria you should apply such that all workers prefer to be in such competition is a somewhat limited prospect. maybe there’s some progress that can be made there, but i expect the bulk of progress will actually be in finding ways to not force everyone into the same competition. in the post-scarcity world where you don’t have to compete in the workplace to stay alive, this consent issue would largely disappear. until then, the best we can do is fragment the competitive pools: less hierarchical workplaces such that the effect of any one competition is radically reduced, and more employment choices so that those who want work and life to be separate can avoid entering into direct competition with those who want work and life to overlap.