Teachers are often placed in a space of tension between responding to students as persons and responding to students through their institutionally-defined roles. Particularly with respect to eros, which has become increasingly the subject of strict institutional legislation and regulation, teachers have little recourse to a language of responsibility outside an institutional frame. By studying the significance of communicative ambiguity for responsibility, this paper explores what is ethically at stake for teachers in erotic forms of communication. Specifically, it is Levinas’s own ambiguous understanding of the ethical significance of eros, and what we have to learn from it, that offers a way of reading the place of eros in responsibility. I conclude my discussion with some thoughts on what a renewed understanding of responsibility might mean at the personal and institutional levels.