#timesupacademia - anyone been watching this unfold on twitter?

[ReappearingWoman]

Vonny Leclerc has been asking for DMs on 1 academic who has been identified via some vague details & since she started her post, she's uncovered

"So far, serious sexual misconduct at: Oxford, Cambridge, Portsmouth, Swansea, Warwick, Edinburgh, Bangor, Newscastle, Canterbury, Brighton, Herriot Watt, Winchester, Northumbria, Leeds, Liverpool, Reading, York, Exeter, Lancaster. Many multiple offenders"

Looks like a reckoning is about to explode on this.

Watching with interest too. It's about time some things were openly challenged - the majority of academics at my university are men and almost all the senior teams. Some of them have been allowed to get away with stuff they never would have in private companies.

I find this research completely unsurprising. Sexual abuse has been going on at universities for a long time. Everyone knows about it and nobody does anything.

Absolutely. People know that Hollywood, Churches and other institutions are is bad for sweeping things under the carpet. Well add British academia to the list. I hope this breaks big time.

I think it's really great that harassment and violence against women in universities is getting looked at more closely. At the same time, I don't think that we should necessarily move to ban all relationships between staff and students.

My reasons for this are personal.When I was 22 I met a great, clever, funny and kind man at an academic conference - he assumed I was a PhD student, I assumed he was a PhD student too. Actually, he had only recently got his first lectureship (late 20s) and I was in my final year of undergrad. When we worked this out it was like, oh...Do we continue this or not? In other words, we had an open conversation about whether it would be too problematic, on both sides, to continue to see each other. We both wanted to continue as we really liked each other.

He never taught me, we declared it to the HoD so that he never marked my work or was even present at exam boards where my work was discussed.

We dated for a while and broke up because he was more of a homebody and I wanted to be off exploring the world. At no point did I feel there was an unhealthy power differential - if anything he was a bit too shy and reticent for me. But he was (and is) a really lovely person - a lifelong friend, who danced at my wedding, and who I still meet for coffee now and then, even though it's over 20 years since we dated.

So not every staff member who has a relationship is predatory, and not every student who has a relationship is being preyed upon. I think that's what makes it so hard to deal with cases where that IS happening.

Basing policy on your personal experience is not a good idea. In any case, I’m more concerned with relationships between teachers and students which are so clearly open to abuse.

I think that's fair 20. I can't imagine hitting on one of the students I teach (also a lecturer). To me that's really crossing a line. I just wanted to add my experience as some of the tweets I have read suggested that it's always an abuse of power - and it's not.

Yes, I agree that it is not always an abuse of power. It's often messy though. I've personally been disadvantaged by having a much needed teaching gig taken away at the last minute to be replaced by the PhD student the subject coordinator was shagging. I've also seen what happens when the shagging stops - often students are then victimised or teaching or research lifelines turned off or other staff also dropping them like hotcakes. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am not comfortable with an all out banning.

Didn't mean to be harsh, but do think there's a huge difference between student/tutor relationships and others. In general though, as an academic myself, I would NEVER entertain the idea of getting into a relationship with any undergrads, and especially not in my own university.