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HONOLULU (AP) — Right now, there's no policy that bans University of Hawaii professors from dating their students.
In recent years, there's been a national trend among universities, including Harvard, Yale and Arizona State University, to ban professors from dating their students. Many universities have made new policies as they've been urged to boost efforts to prevent sexual assault and rape on campus.
Hawaii lawmakers are pushing a bill to ban romantic relationships between University of Hawaii professors and students. The bill would also make rules to prevent sexual assault on campus, for example, by educating professors and students on sexual assault and domestic violence.
The University of Hawaii system has 10 campuses statewide that enroll 57,000 students. It came under fire two years ago when it was among dozens of schools nationwide that the U.S. Department of Education started investigating because of the way it handled sexual assault allegations.
Right now, the University of Hawaii says it's planning to implement a new policy to prohibit faculty and students from dating. Most of the faculty and staff are unionized, so the university is in the midst of discussing the policy with unions, said Dan Meisenzahl, a spokesman for the university.
Last year, the university adopted interim rules to crack down on sexual assault, but the rules don't explicitly address consensual relationships between students and professors. Previously, university policy discouraged faculty and students from dating, but didn't prohibit it.
"It's a problem that we've known about for decades," said Meda Chesney-Lind, a women's study professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "The problem with the policy is that says, 'it's not a good idea.' It may sound strong, but you can drive a truck through that loophole."
Chesney-Lind, who sat on a committee to draft new rules for consensual relationships, said romantic relationships between students are professors do happen, and they're a "big problem" at the flagship Manoa campus.
"It just creates and odd environment that certainly isn't conducive towards the learning environment," she said, adding that student-professor relationships may start out consensually, but can lead to sexual harassment when students feel pressured to keep grades up.
Women's groups supported the bill, but the University of Hawaii opposed it. They said there's a task force currently working to crack down on sexual harassment and assault, but its final review won't be done until 2017.
In the past, many U.S. colleges didn't have formal policies addressing romantic relationships between faculty and students. Yet in recent years, many schools have made new policies ranging from banning all romantic relationships between students and faculty to prohibiting them only when a professor might be grading a student.
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