Consensual Relationship Policies

After three years of study and debate, my own Pasadena City College is on the verge of adopting a consensual relationships policy for the first time. In the meantime, the University of California has put a moderately restrictive (and commonsensical) policy into place. As the chair of the PCC Faculty Senate's ad-hoc committee on consensual relationships, allow me to present the wording of our brand-spanking new code:

A consensual relationship, for purposes of this policy, is defined as one in which two individuals are involved by mutual consent in a romantic, physically intimate, and/or sexual relationship. A consensual relationship that might be appropriate in other circumstances is inappropriate when it occurs between members of the College community if one individual has power or authority over the other.

Accordingly, relationships of the following nature are strictly prohibited:
a. Between an academic manager and any student within the area with whom the manager is required to interact in an official capacity.
b. Between an instructor, coach, counselor, or individual in any other position of instructive, evaluative, or advisory authority over students and any student for whom the instructor, coach, counselor, or individual has direct instructive, evaluative, or advisory authority.
c. Between a direct supervisor and a student.

Exceptions to the above restrictions may be approved by the College President in extraordinary circumstances.

I know, all the Cliopatriarchs are dying to know why we give our college president the authority to suspend the rules. Let me make clear that at California community colleges, college presidents have infinitely more power than they do in four-year universities. Even the power, apparently, to transform the unethical into the acceptable by executive fiat.