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It is a fine line

Verity Coyle, president of the student union at the University of Lincoln and Humberside, where Griffiths used to teach, confirms that the lecturer is a “glamorized” figure, almost guru-like in his appeal to female students. By comparison, their male peers seem immature and inexperienced. Any kind of sexual approach made by the tutor is unlikely to be rejected, she says.

For the tutor, it is flattering to be feted by his young female students. But Coyle believes it is up to him to resist. “The responsibility should always be with the lecturer to draw the line,” she says. He is, after all, in the position of authority. But she hopes cases such as that of Griffiths and recent allegations at Edinburgh University, where a reader in social anthropology has been charged with sexual harassment of female students, will not discourage tutors from holding one-to-one tutorials.

In 1995, Pam Carter and Tony Jeffs of the University of Northumbria published a study entitled A Very Private Affair - Sexual Exploitation in Higher Education. Several years spent interviewing university officials and students revealed a profile of the “serial exploiter” - a heterosexual male tutor, frequently lecturing in arts subjects, who makes inappropriate passes at his female students.

The most concerning outcome of the report was that such incidents are likely to be brushed deftly under the carpet. University authorities do not wish to receive the adverse publicity a sexual harassment case might bring, nor do they wish to lose an eminent academic from their staff.