One of the reasons that many professions established codes within the profession that have some degree of quasi-legal force is precisely that they were trying to distinguish “good” professionals from bad ones, essentially for market reasons–to promise people seeking out that kind of service that the vetted, authenticated professionals had been trained properly and followed a strong code of conduct.

“Don’t sleep with clients” was in those codes for many professions precisely because the professions recognized that clients were often in a state of precarious psychological dependence on professionals providing certain kinds of services, that the client was in peril or at risk, that they were vulnerable. If we understand sex, erotics and love in contractual terms, as “traditional consent” asks us to, then we also understand that one of the oldest principles of contract applies: a contract signed under duress is definitionally invalid.

So who are the “clients” of a professor, especially a notable scholar with a strong reputation in a particular field of study? I’d argue that those clients very much include graduate students in that field even if that professor doesn’t teach them directly. We in fact act as if that’s the case otherwise: faculty at research universities are often ask to mentor students that they are not directly responsible for grading; to assess and review and comment upon their work; to serve as discussants on panels; and so on. This is actually the idealized professional narrative that academic disciplines tell about themselves, that they are communities within which all accomplished scholars are in some sense responsible to and for all upcoming, aspirant scholars.

So: don’t sleep with your clients (including graduate students who connect with you precisely because they are strongly interested in your scholarly work) is in force. So the question is now how should professions monitor compliance with this code–a compliance which doesn’t breach the public and private at all, because it’s essentially something that operates entirely on the market side of our society. A commercial association doesn’t have to admit any business that wants to be admitted–the association can establish criteria for admission, enforce those criteria, and establish whatever procedures it likes for monitoring adherence. If I establish an association of Ethical Foie Gras Producers with other farmers that authenticates the product of all members as ethical, and we create a process for monitoring members and expelling them, no harms against civil liberties are being done. Even if there might be strong consequences to being kicked out if consumers come to trust that label. If the Ethical Foie Gras Producers are arbitrary and capricious in how they enforce the standard, sooner or later you’d hope that consumers would hear of that, and stop trusting the label, thus allowing members to drop out with impunity.

So professions similarly promise: if we’ve vetted this person, they’re a legit doctor or lawyer or academic. In many cases, governments get in on the action too, and require that vetting for professionals to operate legally because of the dangers involved from unvetted or untrained practice. That makes being kicked out of the profession something that has some degree of “civil liberties” implications, because government is involved somewhere in the mix. But if the primary mechanisms for supervision and enforcement are within the profession, it’s still fairly similar to the Ethical Foie Gras Association. A single hospital or the entire AMA could establish any procedure it likes for vetting accusations of sexual misconduct by a doctor. If those procedures were capricious, arbitrary, or unrealistic (say, if they established that all of humanity is a potential ‘patient’ and therefore that doctors should never sleep with anyone) then at some point doctors would stop tolerating those procedures and patients would stop respecting the profession’s attempts to force compliance. Hence the need for hearings, investigations, etc. at the level of a hospital (or the whole professional association): because due process of some kind is a functional, practical method to protect against being capricious or arbitrary. Not because professional governance must of necessity imitate the protections that citizens have against their governments.

So in this case? Why not have procedures that effectively “de-certify” a teacher or scholar, when the conduct of that teacher or scholar is sufficiently in contradiction to his or her professional obligations? In fact, we do have such procedures. Plagiarism generally is a civil rather than criminal matter, but academic professionals take accusations of plagiarism very seriously beyond what the law provides precisely because they strike to the heart of what we’ve professionally certified about a Ph.D-holding scholar. So why not do the same in the case of a scholar who habitually targets vulnerable graduate and undergraduate students in his field and tells them a variety of lies in order to get them into sexual relationships? Those individuals are “clients” in a very meaningful sense. Why not do that especially if the scholar in question strenuously argues in his own scholarship for a capacious definition of moral action that obligates us to treat our private, everyday lives as the source of suffering in the world and calls upon us to act differently in order to relieve suffering? That’s not just hypocrisy, it is a kind of misconduct that invalidates the scholar’s own work on some level, as surely as laboratory fraud would invalidate the work of many scientists.

And who should decide? Are there fixed, written rules about what is right and wrong (and if so, who formulates them), or does it depend on “our” moral attitudes? And who is the us, by the way? Is it “die gesunde Volksmeinung” (the healthy opinion of the people) as they used to say in Nazi Germany, a regime where formal, written procedures were often attacked? Do we all share the same point of view?

How is this person to be dismissed? Does he get a hearing? Before what body? How can he defend himself? Or does an accusation suffice?

You might want to think a little bit more about the implications of your proposal. By breaking down distinctions between public and private, between job-related and personal, you are attacking fundamental elements of concepts of civil liberties and civil rights.