EMILY REID/Arizona Daily Wildcat Employees and students who work together and have relationships ö romantic or not ö must notify their supervisors under a new university policy.

University employees looking for office romance with a subordinate or supervisor are going to have to watch their step under a new policy.

When one person is in a position of power over another, faculty-faculty relationships, faculty-student relationships and student-student relationships all may be monitored, according to the new "Policy for the Management of Personal Conflicts of Interest for the University of Arizona."

The policy is designed for employees to disclose relationships ÷ sexual or otherwise ÷ that could create a conflict of interest at the university, and will most likely be enacted as a permanent policy in the future, said UA attorney Vicki Gotkin, who designed the policy along with vice president for campus life Saundra Taylor.

For the policy to go into permanent effect, all campus constituencies involved would have to look at it, and then President Likins would have the final call, Gotkin said.

Likins sent the proposal to his cabinet in late July.

"It is a bad, bad policy to have these relationships going on," Gotkin said. "We don't want students to fear someone getting preferential treatment."

However, it is not a question of legality, said Jeanne Kleespie, the director of equal opportunity and affirmative action. Kleespie said the new policy was instead designed to get these relationships out in the open.

"It's not forbidding these relationships," said Kleespie, whose office handles any such complaints on the matter. "It's saying they need to be public so the power differential can be neutralized."

Relationships between faculty and students are prohibited when the professor has the student in a class, but not in some other instances.

Relationships between employees and students that do not have a "direct instructional, supervisory or evaluative responsibility with respect to the students are not per se prohibited," the memo states.

"There is nothing prohibiting a professor in the department of English from having a relationship with a student in the dance department, for example," Gotkin said. "We are not here to be the sex police."

The policy of disclosing relationships covers any employee who "supervises or evaluates the other employee," the memo states.

When two people live together, the same rules apply, whether the relationship is romantic or not.

In cases where the relationship is a conflict of interest and a power differential does exist, the supervisor or instructor is to tell their immediate supervisor so all conflicts of interest can be avoided.

"The supervisor can take disciplinary action," Gotkin said. "But it's not to be used as a sword by a third party."

Thus far, Kleespie has not had to handle too many cases regarding the policy, but she is happy about the regulations nonetheless.

"(These types of policies) are very common in universities across the country," she said.

"I think it is a very good idea."

Still, most of what Kleespie handles involves un-romantic discrimination, and students in her office rarely talk about sexual relationships, she said.

"Sometimes students voice their concerns over feeling uncomfortable over some kind of flirting from someone in power," she said.

The ideas contained in the policy were originally covered under the university's sexual harassment policy.

However, because these types of relationships were consensual, they were taken out of the sexual harassment section four or five years ago, Gitkin said.

To get something else in place that covered conflicts of interest, Taylor and Gotkin came up with the current interim policy.