This is the sort of thing most people probably assumed was frowned on long before now.

Susan Svrluga of the Washington Post reports.

Harvard formally bans sexual relationships between professors and undergrads

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences now formally bans sexual relationships between professors and undergraduate students.

That’s not because they think there’s all kinds of professor-student dating on campus: The professor who led the panel that wrote the policy said she has never heard of it happening, in years of studying and teaching at Harvard. The new policy is there just to clarify that it would not be okay.

“We’re using this opportunity to reaffirm our priorities as teachers,” said Alison Johnson, a Harvard history professor, “and to imagine what we’re seeing when we’re looking at these students, and what we’re not seeing. We’re not seeing potential romantic partners. We are seeing students.”

A small but growing number of colleges, including Yale and the University of Connecticut, now have written policies banning such relationships, Bloomberg reported.

The new policy comes at a time when sex and gender issues — all the ways that people define themselves, their sexuality, their relationships, and how they interact with one another — are relentlessly discussed on college campuses.

Billie Dziech, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who has studied and written about relationships between professors and students, said policies about such relationships are evolving.