Iâve been in academe for about a decade now, and the only professors Iâve known who have slept with or dated students were female.
Iâm sure plenty more shenanigans were happening out of public view. Absolutely. But I donât pry. I donât care, really. I trust my colleagues not to be rapists, and barring severe warning signs Iâd never take any interest in their sex lives, even if those sex lives involved relationships of a sort that Iâd personally never partake in.
But lately Iâve noticed a marked, very loud silence from these professors and instructors, the ones who dated students. See, thereâs a big kerfuffle going on about a female Northwestern professor, Laura Kipnis, who made the mistake of speaking honestly on the internet. She said that blanket bans on teacher-student relationships were dumb and infantilizing. In response, students and colleagues have called for her to be formally censured. And out of the several female professors Iâve known to have engaged in relationships with students, not a one has lent Kipnis a single word of support.
This isnât an issue of hypocrisy. This is a matter of real, palpable fear. Saying anything that goes against liberal orthodoxy is now grounds for a firinâ. Even if you make a reasonable and respectful case, if you so much as cause your liberal students a second of complication or doubt you face the risk of demonstrations, public call-outs, and severe professional consequences. My friends and colleagues might well agree that the student-teacher relationship ban is misguided, but theyâre not allowed to say as much in public.
C-can you guys see the problem, here?
Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.
The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slipânot even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imageryâand thatâs it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and thereâs a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.
Is this paranoid? Yes, of course. But paranoia isnât uncalled for within the current academic job climate. Jobs are really, really, really, really hard to get. And since no reasonable person wants to put their livelihood in danger, we reasonably do not take any risks vis-a-vis momentarily upsetting liberal students. And so we leave upsetting truths unspoken, uncomfortable texts unread.
There are literally dozens of articles and books I thought nothing of teaching, 5-6 years ago, that I wouldnât even reference in passing today. I just re-read a passage of Late Victorian Holocausts, an account of the British genocide against India, and, wow, today Iâd be scared if someone saw a copy of it in my office. Thereâs graphic pictures right on the cover, harsh rhetoric (âgenocideâ), historical accounts filled with racially insensitive epithets, and a profound, disquieting indictment of capitalism. No way in hell would I assign that today. Not even to grad students.
Hereâs how bad itâs gotten, for reals: last summer, I agonized over whether or not to include texts about climate change in my first-year comp course. They would have fit perfectly into the unit, which was about the selective production of ignorance and the manipulation of public discourse. But I decided against including them. They forced readers to come to uncomfortable conclusions. They indicted our consumption-based lifestyles. They called out liars for lying. Lots of uncomfortable stuff. All it would take was one bougie, liberal student to get offended by them, call them triggering, and then boom, thatâs it, thatâs the end of me.
So⊠yeah. This is what call out culture has begot. An academic climate where teachers are afraid to make students think, and where academics themselves are afraid to say a single word that bucks the status quo. Congrats, guys. Youâve won.
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