Is there any problem with students seeing faculty naked in university gym?

Question

This is a strange one. I have been going to the gym 2-3 times per week for stress management. Before summer, our university made some nice offer for staff to register to the on-campus gym. So, I switched. Compared to my previous gym, I pay less money, it's more modern, and it's more convenient.

Over summer, everything was fine. I usually go at 07:30 and it's quiet. Now that the students are back, I realised that many of my graduate and undergraduate students go at the same time as well.

The showers are sex-segregated, but the problem is that the gym showers are open. Meaning that I'm bound to meet one of my students "butt-naked" in the shower. I've never been conscious about this before and I'm used to using shared showers since I was a kid (camping, sports, etc.). However, I've started thinking that meeting your PhD advisor or first year lecturer naked in the shower might lead to a slightly disturbed dynamics in the Professor-Student relationship.

Am I overthinking this? Should I just pretend I don't see anyone? I've thought of switching back to my old gym or go home to shower, but it would be very invconvenient.

Answer 1

I think that if this is a shared student/faculty gym with open showers, there’s an expectation of seeing some of your fellow university goers naked. I wouldn’t worry about it. Your students are adults and this is the norm at the gym.

Answer 2

You’re not overthinking, you’re just... thinking, and that’s perfectly reasonable. However, neither were the university authorities underthinking it when they decided to set up a gym that’s open to a mixed crowd of students and faculty. Nor were they underthinking things when they wrote the faculty code of conduct (or whatever the equivalent thing is called at your institution) and did not include a prohibition on faculty using a recreational facility used by students.

The reality is that there’s a false premise floating around — a pernicious belief about professors that pops up every now and then and seems hard to shake, even for people who are themselves professors — that professors are some kind of special breed of humans, or a caste of high priests that need to set themselves apart from the rest of society. We’ve seen this come up on this site in questions about professors swimming, using dating apps and doing other completely normal and mundane activities that no other person will ever think of asking for permission to go about doing.

Well, we need to be very clear about this. This belief is completely and utterly false. Professors are ordinary humans and when they are not at work they like to do the exact same activities as everyone else does. They go to the gym, they date, they swim, they eat the same food, shop for the same groceries, etc, and they have naked bodies just like everyone else does, which they sometimes expose in (gender-segregated) showers at local gyms just like everyone else does. Anybody who has a problem with their professor doing those things needs to simply get over it.

I do understand (from experience) that for a professor in a small town you don’t necessarily always want to have a chance of running into your students everywhere you go about your daily life outside of work. If you personally prefer to work out and shower at a gym where that’s not likely to happen, that’s perfectly reasonable and fine. The point is, you should choose which gym you go to based on your own personal preference and convenience, not because of second-guessing how your students might feel about seeing you, or because of feeling hamstrung by some perceived social taboo against professors mingling with the rest of society. If such a taboo ever really existed at all, it was in some long bygone era, and the perception that remains today is simply an anachronistic vestige of those days. We need to let this misguided notion die.

TL;DR: professors are people.

Answer 3

As a student, I would find it mildly uncomfortable to see a person in power over me naked, (especially if you have a different gender than me), more so if I didn't expect to see someone I know there (in big schools, I might expect to be completely anonymous). However, while this might be an embarrassing moment, I wouldn't (and no other serious person would) hold it against you that you use that gym. So, I would advise you to not overthink this and carry on as usual, but do not make the naked moment more awkward than necessary (i.e. don't start a conversation about research while naked).

Answer 4

Even though, as a graduate student myself, seeing one of my supervisors in the shower would be a little odd, one of the things about being a graduate student is that we are [generally] mature and intelligent. It may be awkward, but the awkwardness can be reduced in two ways.

1. What time you go: you already go quite early in the morning. The earlier the better, you are much less likely to see students the earlier you attend. Also think about what days of the week you go. On the other hand, you may want to avoid 'planning' like this because it makes too much of a meal of the situation. If that is the case:

2. How you handle it: when I was at school our showers were totally open and there was no hiding. The teachers used to shower with us regularly. Even though these days this may be looked on as a little odd, back then I thought little of it because they just didn't seem to care, and also, after sports where would they shower anyway? I would suggest that your students' state of mind in the situation will be largely down to your attitude. If you just get on with it and fearlessly shower like any other man would, then there will be much less awkwardness than if you skulked to the shower and looked embarrassed.

Lastly, the very fact that you're going to the gym at all will be met with an iota of extra respect from your students.

Answer 5

I agree with everyone that says you're overthinking it. The gyms at UT Austin have separate locker rooms for faculty (at least partly) for this reason. I'm surprised your school doesn't.

There are signs up in all the locker rooms that cellphones are prohibited, and yet, there is always someone with their cellphone out. There is potential that a disgruntled student might make a video of a professor showering and distribute it.

Additionally, professors might have some potentially physically embarrassing things (scars, adult diapers, hernia belts) which they would not want disclosed.

Answer 6

Definitely overthinking it I reckon. I think your anxiety over nudity is far more self-induced rather than of actual concern for students and colleagues. Being nude is not sexual despite the media sexualizing everything. Nudism is a good example of this. Nudity does not change dynamics of the relationship.

Sexual interest and sexualized behaviour is far more significant than nudity. I remember seeing a couple of studies where the impact of involuntary indicators of interest such as pupillary dilation, flush skin etc was more significant than the lipstick, short skirt, etc. I can't seem to find the studies now but the principal seem helpful.

Answer 7

I think this is pretty much down to the policy at each university. Similarily here in the U.K., even in secondary schools we have such policies. My advice would be to check on those.

Answer 8

If you're feeling uncomfortable/unsure enough about it that you have to ask, then yes, there is a problem. Not a problem that means that you shouldn't use them if you decide you want to, but a problem in that the facilities in the way they're offered create uncomfortable or outright unsafe situations for some students and faculty in a way that unfairly impacts their access. As I noted in comments on Dan Romik's answer, the university was

underthinking when they skimped a few dollars on partitions for the showers. Even if you're just thinking in monetary terms and not the wellbeing of your students and faculty using the gym, the lawsuit from a single bad incident will cost hundreds if not thousands of times as much as properly partitioning the showers would have.

Such incidents might include harassment in the showers themselves, photography and distribution or threat to distribute photos, harassment in the form of later making remarks/rumors about the size or shape of someone's genitals, discrimination complaints based on certain people (e.g. those with history of assault, or those attracted to same gender, or ...) feeling unsafe or unwelcome to make equal use of the facilities, etc. etc. etc.

At the very least, if you do choose to use such facilities, as a person in a position of power over some of the other students you might meet naked there, you need to be aware of these dynamics and ensure that you're not doing anything that could make them worse.

If it were me, I would complain to the appropriate administrator about these issues and decline to use the facilities unless/until partitioned or fully private shower spaces were available.

On a final note, I've seen a lot of sentiment in comments/answers that this is a matter of what's appropriate in local culture. That's bollocks. Yes, in some places there's a general awareness of all of the concerns I described above (and probably others I missed), along with efforts to mitigate them, and in other places people are expected to just "toughen up" or "deal with it". That doesn't mean both are equally valid. There is no cultural context in which nobody could possibly feel unsafe or uncomfortable in this situation (even if most people don't), so there's no cultural context in which it's just fine. There are just cultural contexts where the majority of people don't care that it's not fine for others.

Answer 9

If the gym showers have curtains (or doors) you can slide them to block the view while you are showering. In addition, outside the showers you can use the towel to cover your private parts to reduce the exposure.