Sex between professors and students and the utopia of egalitarian erotica

Another scandal of sexual harassment in the academic community is shaking the Czech Republic. The epicenter this time is the Faculty of Science at Charles University and its publicly known professor of philosophy and natural sciences Stanislav Komárek. He was already dismissed from this faculty at the beginning of 2025 for reasons detailed in the article in Deník N. The level of sexualized harassment and coercion towards younger colleagues is quite intense, even by Czech standards. According to testimonies, the professor's practices included grooming (gradually gaining the victim's trust through care and affection so that they are defenseless against sexual abuse) and sexual pressure under the influence of drugs. Due to suspicion of criminal acts, the case has been taken up by the Czech Police.

This is not the first nor the last case. In recent years, the Czech Republic has dealt with sexual assault of a student by a docent of political science at the Faculty of Social Studies and systematic harassment of female students at the Department of Physical Education at Masaryk University in Brno. At the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University, two educators were accused of long-term sexual coercion of students and the head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the same university was dismissed for the same reason. In Slovakia, a case of aggressive sexualized bullying from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava was publicized. These cases are characterized by typical patterns of behavior – teachers use inappropriate sexualized language in the workplace, verbally and physically harass students, encourage or even force them into intimate meetings, offering benefits or physically attacking them during outings, parties, and other events. In the case of Stanislav Komárek, according to his own statement, it was a “specific form of care,” which included offers of therapeutic sessions to male colleagues, involving drug use, watching porn, and sexual intercourse.

These cases led the mentioned universities to categorically reject these practices and to quickly adopt measures that have long existed in the USA, Great Britain, Germany, and other countries, such as the office of the ombudsman, ethical codes, disciplinary rules, and support centers. However, on social media, a cultural war is ongoing about sexual harassment, from which it is clear that there still exists an army of anti-wokists willing to fight fiercely for traditional erotic order and toxic freedom to seek sexual partners at work and to flood public and work environments with sexualized language. Arguments of freedom and consensual behavior of responsible adults, sexual freedom, or the right to privacy are used as weapons. Sexual harassment in academic settings is, for many reasons, highly unethical, in certain forms criminal, hurtful, and toxic. Here are the arguments why.

Power, power, power

Work environments are hierarchical places, and people in leadership positions have power. This banal fact has specific manifestations in the university environment. Professors often exercise their institutionalized power individually and based on subjective evaluative judgments – they test, grade, write assessments of final theses, reviews of scholarly texts, decide on awarding academic titles, scarce grant funds, promotions. They decide who will survive in the highly precarious and competitive academic environment, where there is fierce competition for limited resources. They have a decisive influence on the career paths of doctoral students and young scientists. Their not entirely effective institutional power is reinforced by charisma, social prestige, and public recognition, which add a dimension of authority to their power. The risk of arbitrary exercise of power—such as giving a bad grade, an unfair evaluation, a delayed recommendation letter—is present at every step.

If a professor seeks an intimate relationship with a junior person, they abuse their power. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they simply misuse their authority. They enter into a relationship in a position of strength that limits the subordinate's free choice and ability to resist pressure. Even a rather old-fashioned model, significantly more banal than the domestic drug-pornographic sessions in the very publicized case, where a charismatic professor invites a student to dinner instead of a seminar paper or grant project discussion, and instead of professional comments, talks about marriage problems, weakness for beautiful women, compliments her on her nice dress, and then invites her for a drink at her place, is a game in a field of force. It involves potential benefits, privileges, preferential treatment, or denial of legitimate merits. Rejection is punished by arbitrary exercise of power, such as failing an exam or giving a poor review.

Of course, it is possible that not only observers of these stories but also their actors find this an exciting erotic game. Yes, it can have a quite mild, civilized course and ending—no physical violence, but an intense erotic experience of soft dominance and submission. However, it remains an unequal game because the junior person cannot fully freely decide whether to accept the offer of an affair. Anyone talking about the freedom and consent of responsible adults in this context is operating from a primitive understanding of freedom as an illusory choice under coercive conditions of a power hierarchy and real threats of negative consequences. True freedom cannot be claimed if unwanted harassment is explicitly based on the principle of “something for something”—when a superior links compliance with sexual proposals to employment conditions, such as extending a contract, granting a scholarship, or giving a good evaluation. This so-called quid pro quo sexual harassment clearly deprives the victim of the possibility of dissent and turns the professional relationship into a coercive transaction. It is not only deeply unethical but, in most countries, violates civil or labor law and anti-discrimination laws. Both Czech and Slovak law prohibit it through anti-discrimination legislation and the labor code. Both regulations define it as an impermissible form of discrimination in the workplace. If a superior demands sexual conduct and exploits dependence, distress, or the victim’s position, it becomes a criminal offense of sexual coercion, rape, or harassment under criminal law.

Who wants a professional professor?

The inadmissibility of sexual harassment in the hierarchical academic environment is perhaps better revealed in the context of the demand for professional integrity, that is, the requirement to adhere to the mission and ethical principles of performing a certain job or role. It is perhaps worth recalling what belongs to the work and professional role of a professor: educating, mediating knowledge, testing, evaluating, providing feedback, mentoring, producing knowledge, publishing. It is probably unnecessary to list everything to make it clear that seeking a sexual partner among subordinates and students is not part of the job description of a university teacher. Neither does seemingly innocent flirting, let alone predatory practices such as finding a vulnerable victim among junior colleagues, offering emotional support, creating an illusion of affection and help, obtaining confidential information, luring her into a trap in one’s apartment, drugging, watching porn, and forcing sex.

Professional integrity requires senior academics not to mix the roles of lover and educator. It also requires that they perform their work fairly, impartially, and objectively within set factual criteria. The maximum effort to eliminate bias and preferential treatment is a fundamental moral requirement in a precarious academic environment. If a professor sleeps with a student they are supposed to grade, evaluate, supervise, and recommend, it is impossible to maintain impartiality. Intimate relationships are inherently personal, emotional, biased, and preferential, and they completely undermine impartiality and objectivity in decision-making. The risk of favoritism, preferential treatment, revenge, retaliation, and other arbitrary, non-objective, and personally motivated treatment of subordinates creates an insurmountable conflict between private interests and professional responsibility.

Do we agree with the fighters for the freedom of professors and students to have romantic affairs that a professor-lover is completely outside their professional role and responsibility? Maybe yes. The problem is rather that, in the Czech context, professional integrity unfortunately has almost no cultural value. Of course, there are exceptions or “islands of positive deviation,” as one of my good academic colleagues calls them. The effort to build a correct and professional workplace based on impersonal, collegial relationships still faces Czech culture’s resistance to informal communication, cynical humor, aversion to everything formal and correct, and a strong preference for personal authenticity over role-playing. Informal communication and not playing impersonal professional roles have enormous cultural value for Czechs and are essentially conditions for people to even do something together.

Toxicity, trauma, and demeritocracy

Another argument against sexual harassment concerns meritocracy. According to the liberal meritocratic principle, social status and success should be determined by merits derived from talent and hard work, not by capital, which a person did not earn—such as inherited wealth or connections of parents. In the academic environment, there is a strong meritocratic ethos. Tested knowledge and achievements—such as titles, publications, citation indices, scholarships, awards, obtained grants—are based on demonstrably proven merits that should determine access to positions and professional success. Sexualization of the academic environment introduces arbitrary or non-merit-based personal attributes, such as attractiveness, sympathy, beauty, or submissiveness. These are qualities that cannot legitimately be understood as talents that a person has the right to maximize and capitalize on. They are non-merit-based advantages, whose unequal distribution needs to be neutralized. If sexual attraction is regarded as a merit that can be legitimately used in public and professional environments, it creates an unfair environment of privileges and discrimination based on undeserved attributes—what is called demeritocracy.

A sexualized workplace is not only non-meritocratic but outright toxic. It is hurtful to victims of unwanted and unsolicited harassment. Victims of all cases of sexualized abuse of power and pressure usually describe a range of dramatic psychological effects, such as trauma, stress disorder, depression, intense doubts, feelings of shame, guilt, and damaged self-esteem. These naturally impact work performance—reducing productivity, engagement, leading to excessive vigilance and distrust in work relationships—and thus limit the ability to cooperate. This has a cumulative effect on the entire environment. In legal-academic language shaped by feminists dealing with sexual harassment and equal conditions in the workplace, this is called a hostile environment—an unfriendly or toxic environment where repeated and normalized sexualization creates a stressful atmosphere of bullying, pressure, distrust, exclusion, and preferential treatment. It is an environment where one must constantly be on guard instead of focusing on doing good work. Professors should not establish such toxic environments; on the contrary, they are responsible for creating a work culture based on collegiality and equal respect. Their societal task is to produce knowledge, and their good work is important for society as a whole.

Reproduction of gender inequality and the domain of development and self-esteem

Famous American feminists dealing with sexual harassment have come up with additional compelling arguments against the toxic phenomenon of sexual harassment in the workplace. Catharine MacKinnon, one of the most influential American legal feminists known for her critique of patriarchal dominance and legal expertise on pornography, framed the problem of sexual harassment in her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979) uncompromisingly as an expression of patriarchy. According to her, sexuality is inextricably linked to power and dominance. In a society where men hold greater economic and political power, sexualized behavior towards women is a means of asserting dominance over them. A professor or employer who, instead of addressing work, shows sexual interest in a subordinate reduces her to a sexual object, subordinates her, and thereby hampers her chances of success and equal participation in the public space as a person with a professional identity. Sexual harassment of subordinates sustains and reproduces the order of unequal power distribution between women and men. MacKinnon also applied her theory of dominance to homosexual harassment, interpreting it as another version of reproducing power asymmetry and prevailing gender norms.

Another renowned American feminist, Drucilla Cornell, did not emphasize patriarchal sexual dominance in her critique of sexual harassment but defended the right of all persons to freely and non-coercively shape their personality and identity, both in the intimate and sexual sphere and in the public professional persona. In her book The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harassment (1995), she developed the concept of the “imaginary domain” as a space where individuals freely configure their self-conception, form their personality, and decide who they want to be. Freedom, safety, and absence of coercion are essential for this imaginary sphere. Sexual harassment is particularly harmful because it attacks this personal autonomy and destroys the psychological space for free identity formation by assigning roles and values of a sexual object. It undermines the fundamental conditions for free individualization, self-development, and self-esteem building primarily based on qualities other than physical attributes like long legs, big breasts, a nice butt, and long hair.

Utopian equality of eroticism

Sexual harassment in the academic environment is, for many reasons, highly unethical, toxic, hurtful, and in certain forms even criminal. It is a manifestation of abuse of power and authority, undermines professional integrity, erodes meritocratic principles, intoxicates the workplace where the primary focus is work, and reproduces gender inequalities. Furthermore, it deprives victims of the opportunity to develop their professional identity and build self-worth independent of sexuality and intimate relationships. Anyone committed to true freedom, dignity, and meritocracy must reject, condemn, and support the thorough eradication of such practices. The fight for the freedom of romantic affairs among colleagues at work is a backward cultural battle for unethical practices, for which there is truly no good argument. Efforts should be directed toward establishing equality, fairness, non-discrimination, and cultivating a public and shared space of coexistence and cooperation, which are supported by mechanisms other than erotic attraction. After all, even eroticism needs to be liberated from the chains of dominance, manipulation, submissiveness, violence, and should finally be envisioned under conditions of equality, symmetry, civility, and respect. Or not?

The author is a political scientist. She currently works at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. She specializes in research in the fields of international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text is part of the PERSPECTIVES project – a new brand for independent, constructive, and multiperspective journalism. The project is funded by the European Union. The expressed opinions and positions are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). The European Union or EACEA do not assume any responsibility for them.