EVANSVILLE, Ill. – A Northwestern professor wants to convince the public that there’s no problem with professors dating students, and she penned an editorial lamenting new policies prohibiting the practice.

Laura Kipnis authored an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she delves into her inappropriate relationships as both a student and a professor, and defends the her actions against “The Great Prohibition” sweeping through colleges across the country.

“When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum,” she wrote. “Admittedly, I went to an art school, and mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum after the sexual revolution and before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims—back when sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience.”

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Oregon Public Broadcasting, which interviewed Kipnis on her perspective, reports an increasing number of universities are implementing policies to keep professors from taking advantage of undergraduates, including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, The College of William and Mary, the University of Connecticut and Northwestern University.

“The new codes sweeping American campuses aren’t just a striking abridgment of everyone’s freedom, they’re also intellectually embarrassing,” Kipnis argued. “Sexual paranoia reigns; students are trauma cases waiting to happen. If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method. And in that sense, we’re all the victims.”

The professor attempted to draw parallels between sex policies in academia and common practice in other professions like publishing. She argues other industries where people in power hold sway over lower employees or writers don’t employ the same no-fraternization rules.

In essence, Kipnis believes that by protecting students from the unwanted advances of their professors turns them into sissies, and leaving the gray area gray – and permitting sexual relationships between teachers and students – will only benefit them after they graduate.

“ … (W)hat do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life? What becomes of students so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life?” she questioned.

“I can’t help asking, because there’s a distressing little fact about the discomfort of vulnerability, which is that it’s pretty much a daily experience in the world, and every sentient being has to learn how to somehow negotiate the consequences and fallout, or go through life flummoxed at every turn.”

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She argues that the new policies treat college-aged students like innocent children they are not.

From the Chronicle:

Societies keep reformulating the kinds of cautionary stories they tell about intergenerational erotics and the catastrophes that result, starting with Oedipus. The details vary; so do the kinds of catastrophes prophesied—once it was plagues and crop failure, these days it’s psychological trauma. Even over the past half-century, the story keeps getting reconfigured. In the preceding era, the Freudian version reigned: Children universally desire their parents, such desires meet up with social prohibitions—the incest taboo—and become repressed. Neurosis ensues.

These days the desire persists, but what’s shifted is the direction of the arrows. Now it’s parents—or their surrogates, teachers—who do all the desiring; children are conveniently returned to innocence. So long to childhood sexuality, the most irksome part of the Freudian story. So too with the new campus dating codes, which also excise student desire from the story, extending the presumption of the innocent child well into his or her collegiate career. Except that students aren’t children.

OPB reports Kipnis’ essay didn’t sit well with Northwestern students who have been accosted by their professors.

“Her essay was met with outrage by some students, two of whom filed a Title IX suit against her, claiming Kipnis was retaliating against students at her school who had filed a complaint against a professor,” the news site reports.

“They also said she created a “chilling effect” on students’ ability to report sexual misconduct. The suits were eventually investigated and dismissed, and she responded with a second Chronicle of Higher Education article, responding to her critics and outlining what happened after the suits were filed.”

Kipnis spoke with OPB after the fact, and doubled down on her view that the ban on student-teacher relationships is really misplaced, but acknowledged that the times are quite different now than in her college days.

“I did think the outright ban went too far, although I guess I have been thinking about it in retrospect,” she said. “One of the things I have been thinking about … has to do with the changes in the time of I grew up and now.

“I think there’s just much more of a sense of endangerment and imperilment hanging over sexual relations,” she said.

Kipnis seems to resent the implication that professors might use their position of authority over students to get in their pants.

“This idea that predators are everywhere and that professors are all would-be predators if there weren’t these codes,” she said. “So even the way the codes are written … this idea that there are these innocent victims and then these predatory professors. There is something, just if you read these codes, is narratives that seem surprising and objectionable to me.”