Healthy Boundaries at Bishop’s University by Dr. Rebecca Harries, Dr. Catherine Tracy and Eliza McKnight

Bishop’s University rightly prides itself on providing a personal and interactive educational experience for undergraduate students. Our students are not just numbers to us, nor are we unapproachable to them, and this may be why we rank so highly in student satisfaction polls. On the other hand, close student-professor interactions pose specific challenges to maintaining good professional boundaries with students. We found that the concept of “multiple relationships” (a term used primarily in the Social Sciences) provided a helpful framework for negotiating some of the pitfalls that can arise when we find ourselves involved in interactions and relationships with students that are parallel to, or even conflict with, the primary academic relationships. We thus created a collaborative, cooperative, and (we think) playful approach to the complexities of professor-student boundaries.

What inspired our project?

Catherine: When Rebecca Harries and I volunteered to help draft the new sexual assault policy, everyone on the committee agreed that the power imbalance between professor and student makes intimate relationships highly problematic, but there was disagreement as to the efficacy of any policy in preventing them. How would such a policy be enforced? What sort of penalty could legitimately be applied? How would the current protections in place (professors aren’t allowed to grade the work of a student with whom they’re in an intimate relationship) be enforced if all professor-student sexual relationships become illicit? Rebecca and I agreed that we didn’t see the benefit of a policy that is ineffective at preventing harm. What we need is a cultural change, and we decided the best way to bring this about was to open up a dialogue amongst faculty about the broader issue of maintaining professional boundaries in a small community where professors and students frequently find themselves interacting in non-academic situations.

Eliza: I first heard about Rebecca and Catherine’s work on healthy boundaries from a Faculty Council agenda. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the meeting so I pressed a colleague who was there for details. I was immediately interested because as a former BU student, townie, and librarian I have had many multiple relationships with members of the Bishop’s community. While most have been pleasant and positive, some have left me wondering what I could have done differently to avoid some unpleasantness or awkwardness. I began to see the value in starting a dialogue at Bishop’s about these relationships and so I contacted Rebecca and Catherine to see if I could help in any way.

Rebecca: When I started teaching, there were no resources or structured community discussion. As Catherine wrote, while working on the policy, it seemed as if approaching this topic only happened in extremes: either as official discourse focused on prohibitions and discipline, or as water-cooler gossip. There seemed to be a real need for a middle approach: an intelligent, helpful, structured discussion aimed at best practices. While ‘thou shalt not’s’ are important, so too are the questions of “If not that, then what?” Often boundaries are transgressed in the university setting not from predatory motives, but from a desire to help, to befriend, or to educate. In some of the literature connected with multiple relationships in therapeutic settings the writers refer to a ‘slippery slope’, a series of seemingly harmless transgressions that can compromise the primary relationship. We all believed that most faculty members are well intentioned, but that sometimes these intentions can go badly wrong.

What were the highlights of the workshop?

Catherine: The workshop was a great success, largely because the people who attended were truly interested in sharing their own experiences and in learning from their colleagues. We wanted to avoid any hint that we were lecturing, so we built the workshop as a group collaboration, and our audience rose to the challenge. We created scenarios where a fictional professor or a fictional student (or both) steps over an important professional boundary without necessarily realizing that they were doing so. Each scenario had the potential to go horribly wrong, but our audience members interjected suggestions to guide the professor safely through the quagmire of multiple relationships so that the professional boundary was maintained even while a non-academic relationship of some kind (relating to friendship, employment, community, etc.) was negotiated. We deliberately chose scenarios that were not black- and-white, where the fictional professor was acting with good intentions, but nevertheless potentially getting involved in a harmful relationship with the student. We asked our audience members to think about the risks and benefits of the professor getting involved in a secondary relationship with the student, and to think about what the most likely outcome might be.

Why we chose role-playing as an approach:

Rebecca: I think none of us were interested in lecturing to our colleagues or setting ourselves up as an authority. We were all genuinely eager to hear from other professors and librarians and to explore these challenging situations together. My background as a theatre director, and an intensive workshop with Augusto Boal, suggested a possible method: Forum theatre, developed as part of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, theatre as a rehearsal for social change.  This theatre breaks down the division between spectators and actors by turning all participants into ‘spect- actors’. This kind of collaboration is close to what happens with actors in rehearsal. When directing a play, I would never start a rehearsal with a long speech telling people what the play meant and who their characters were. Similarly, in Boal’s Forum theatre authority is de-centred, giving participants the space to create answers collaboratively. Each participant has the opportunity to see their suggestions in action and these different possibilities are questioned, tested and discussed.

Forum theatre as a method has its own challenges depending on the group. Our colleagues are all experts in their fields and used to asking difficult questions and supplying answers, but role-playing is something many of them have not consciously done since childhood. This combined with the limited time frame (ideally a day, or at least a morning of theatre games, precedes Forum theatre) meant that participants would be acting- shy. Volunteer participants rose to the challenge magnificently, but we kept the focus on discussion and didn’t insist on 100% acting involvement, which would happen in a larger workshop. I agree with Catherine that the participants, who admittedly were self-selected as they were all interested in the issue, were fantastic. I found the range and variety of ‘right’ answers fascinating.

Moving forward, we are working on collaboration with Champlain College. As the CEGEP setting presents significant differences, this will challenge us to adapt the workshop and content to a specific situation. Looking ahead, there is a considerable need to be able to address more directly the diversity in our profession. This includes not only an awareness of the particularities of an institutional or program culture, but also of personal identity and teaching style. There is not just one way to enact the ethical professor.