Sexual assault is only one of the many kinds of sexual misbehavior that happens at universities. Even consensual relationships between students and professors are problematic. There are a lot of degrees of sexual misconduct between consensual relationships and physical assault to worry about.

Do people who lease out their homes on airbnb regularly assault the tenants? Do they regularly have consensual relationships with them? I'm aware they may be an issue, but it certainly hasn't been as much an issue that it made the headlines, the most common issue I read about is airbnb raising the ire of neighbors and local governments.

You're making the argument that there is something inherent in professors that makes it more likely they will engage in sexual relations with people, which is problematic and strange.

There is a risk that professors can be exposed to allegations of impropriety as a result of housing students. The university does not bear this risk for that. Nobody is justifying assault or improper relationships, but the point is that the universities solution to the housing problem in Santa Cruz has a number of complications that seem not to have been addressed.

Perhaps a better solution would be to reduce the student population and university size to what the local housing market and community could support, given opposition to construction of student housing. Obviously they’d need to eat humble pie for that to happen, which is why it’s not being discussed.

> You're making the argument that there is something inherent in professors that makes it more likely they will engage in sexual relations with people, which is problematic and strange.

We know for a fact that it happens, and there have been recent sex scandals at the UC Santa Cruz, the university mentioned in the article. This is not a weird or unsubstantiated concern. And I never said there was something inherent to professors that causes it.

The much broader and more general problem is anything that could stem from a lack of appropriate boundaries between faculty and students. Sexual assault is just a worst case scenario in that category of problems. You are of course correct that someone who would do such a thing shouldn’t be teaching, but it’s much more reliable and pragmatic to simply have reasonable rules and boundaries than it is to determine with 100% accuracy what people are capable of. Not just to prevent the possibility of sex scandals, but to prevent the entire category of problems from being more of an issue than it already is.

The problem with your argument is you're conflating sexual misbehaviour (what OP said) with sexual assault. These are two fundamentally different things. If you take the time to consider some hypotheticals of a situation where beautiful young people are shacking up with someone (a significant level of closeness) I think you can see the problem.

How many "beautiful young people" want to have sex with 50 year old professors? If you think I'm crass stating it like that, then why did you have to bring up "beautiful young people" as some argument?

I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.

> How many "beautiful young people" want to have sex with 50 year old professors? If you think I'm crass stating it like that, then why did you have to bring up "beautiful young people" as some argument?

Probably not that many (although it happens in grad school all the time), but let's invert the question: How many 50-year-old professors want to have sex with beautiful young people?

> I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.

But it's not a red herring. It's a very real concern, and we know it's real because sexual misbehavior already happens between students and professors, including at UCSC! Do you honestly believe that it would not increase in prevalence if students and professors started living together?

If only it were that easy to rid of predatory faculty members.