Have eyes for your foxy Italian Lit professor, the one who exclusively wears minidresses? Want to get in on the Harold Bloom action while you still can? Too bad. This fall, with help from the Women’s Center, the University changed the policy on “Teacher-Student Consensual Relations,” aka banging your professor. Before, the policy was that teachers could not engage in relations with students over whom they have a supervisory role, or over whom they might in the future have a supervisory role. But maybe the collective weight of literary works like Rumpus Rumpus and Disgrace scared the Dean’s Office off, because as of this fall, the following passage is now a part of the policy (emphasis added):

Undergraduate students are particularly vulnerable to the unequal institutional power inherent in the teacher-student relationship and the potential for coercion, because of their age and relative lack of maturity. Therefore, no teacher shall have a sexual or amorous relationship with any undergraduate student, regardless of whether the teacher currently exercises or expects to have any pedagogical or supervisory responsibilities over that student.

It’s kind of unclear to me what exactly ‘amorous’ means here—does intense discussion of Renaissance libertine  poetry count? Regardless, one thing is clear: there is to be no more boning of nubile sophomores by Sterling Professors. Other than that, Yale’s sexual harassment policy remains the same. The old policy is still included in the Instructor’s Handbook. Dean Miller could not be reached for comment.

NB: apparently, TAs are still fair game as long as you are not currently enrolled in their section!

UPDATE 4-6-10: This happened in the fall—as this post attests. But apparently it took the Yale Alumni Magazine reporting on it for the world to notice. The Huffington Post, Gawker, The New Haven Register and many others have now picked up the story. At least IvyGate remembers that we were here first! Thanks Dan.