"You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens�leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two..."

"... and now they�re abusers of power avant la lettre. I suspect you can barely throw a stone on most campuses around the country without hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who knows what coercions they deployed back in the day to corral those students into submission; at least that�s the fear evinced by today�s new campus dating policies. And think how their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the offspring of such a coupling�does she look at her father a little differently now, I wonder. It�s been barely a year since the Great Prohibition took effect in my own workplace. Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another�verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring)."

So begins Laura Kipnis, in a piece titled "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe."

For the record, I do not think professors should have sexual relationships with students, and therefore I support that particular "Great Prohibition," but I think Kipnis's writing is interesting, and that paragraph hits on something that had been pretty obvious for a long time: It's hard to ban something that should be banned when to do so casts aspersions on the marriages of many prestigious professors.