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In any relationship, be it friendship, sexual, business, or other, the potential for hurting the involved persons exists because of role conflicts, power imbalances, and a host of other reasons. Moreover, even in those cases where neither party feels particularly constrained or coerced, there are relationships that seem hurtful to the larger society in which they occur. The question we will examine is whether such problems exist in the case of friendships between professors and students.Relatively little attention has been paid to this relationship in the scholarly literature, although the ethical dimensions of sexual relationships between professors and students have been written about extensively. We write in order to examine where or whether the boundary lines are or could be drawn for appropriate faculty-student relationships. Teachers ourselves, we have often wondered about the extent to which we should engage those students who strike us as potential friends. At the outset, we reject the argument that professors are or should be "friends" with all their students. To us, this merely denotes having friendly behavior toward all students, if it means anything at all. Friendly behavior is not the same as friendship. Desirable though such an attitude may be, our focus in this paper is on the possibility of relationships that go beyond cordiality. Should we be friends with individual students, with all that such a relationship may entail?In the first part of this paper, we present three arguments against faculty-student friendships and show why these arguments are not successful. Furthermore, we contend that the failure of these arguments is due, in part, to their flawed conceptualization of friendship and so in the second part we present William Rawlins's (1992) theory of friendship, which we believe is more successful at capturing the realities of friendship in contemporary society.
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