CA Love

CA Love

The romantic frustrations

of undergraduate teachers

Some Harvard extracurriculars create potentially uncomfortable power dynamics. Take, for example, the famous First-Year Outdoor Program rule “No hop on FOP” or the prefect-prefectee hookup ban. Given the presence of undergrad teaching fellows in departments like math, things would seem to get a little more complicated in the academic arena. What if that guy or girl you hooked up with last spring turns out to be your teacher this fall?

“There is not a lot of romance in the math department,” says Jim A. Fowler ’03, who has been a course assistant (CA) for Math 23, 25, 126 and 272. One possible explanation for this lack of love, Fowler speculates, is the gender disparity in the department means male-female friendships are rare, and students don’t want to ruin those that do exist by dating.

Fowler says that before he started CAing, the only guidance, academic or otherwise, that he received was when math department heads “explicitly told me not to sleep with my students.” Anthony Varilly ’03, a CA for Math 113, got the same spiel. “There is very little CA training in the math department. But it was made very clear to us that relationships with students are strictly forbidden,” he says. Last semester Varilly was assigned to CA his roommate. He asked Preceptor in Mathematics John D. Boller, who is in charge of upper-level CAs, if this was kosher. Boller’s only response: “Are you dating your roommate?”

The combination of gender disparities, a dysfunctional undergraduate relationship scene in certain departments and the paranoia associated with the enforcement of a no-relationship mandate all seem to eliminate the underlying sexual tensions among undergraduate teachers and students.

Fowler does recall a CA supposedly kissing one of his students. More memorable to Fowler than the violation of a strictly enforced academic rule, however, was his amusement and amazement that the math CA was kissing anyone in the first place.