Paraphrased quote from the following essay: ‘One problem with treating (post teen) students as children, is that they become more childlike.’
http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351/
This essay may enrage some people, and be used by others as an excuse for terrible behavior. I take it as another data point, on a cultural metamorphosis I’ve been watching unfold for nearly 30 years.
This post will probably become a longer essay itself, as I gather material and consider it. But I wanted to get a link to this part up right away.
Count me as … I don’t think enraged qualifies, but maybe somewhere on the disgusted spectrum? I mean, students and teachers weren’t allowed to date when I went to college, and I graduated in ’01, so…how is this really news? And it’s super duper that she’s so self assured that she’s never experienced the horror of being unwillingly on the wrong side of a power dynamic. I just…wow. That’s me. Wow.
I graduated nearly two decades before that, Rebecca, and we sure as hell were not chasing the professors in college. Of course, by then, AIDS and other lovely things made ‘free love’ a dangerous game, but still. Teachers were off limits. When we mentored, our students were off limits. I’ve seen enough horrible messy love affairs at various workplaces to generally support ‘no workplace romances’ – or at least establish some ground rules.
I’ve been lucky, in that if I was ever near the wrong side of a power dynamic, I knew how to (usually nonviolently) shut it down or sideline it. I’ve known many people, women and men both, who were scarred by far more horrible situations.
My problem is one of scale. ‘Trigger warnings’ on films in college, or blanket statements intended to be emotional cotton wool, are (to me) not the same as what my elderly neighbor or my ex-military friend went through in the aftermath of traumatic attacks by people they trusted. Date-rape drugs slipped into one’s drink are horrible. I think they are far worse and far more blameless than willfully getting so wasted at a party you don’t know what happened later. The first is done to you. The second, you do to yourself. This does NOT absolve the scumbucket taking advantage, in either case.
As I told Lorna below, I’m conflicted by the breezy tone of the article, while I understand some of the author’s key points.
I have to get back to this essay later, to read the second half properly; I’ve skimmed the last half quickly because I have to finish preparing for this evening’s class with my graduate students. I might comment again after I’ve read it properly.
The thing that resonates most powerfully with my in Kipnis’ essay is about the infantilisation of large portions of our society. I’m all in favour of people treating each other with respect and consideration, but I can’t help getting nervous when rules and regulations remove our power to (1) make judgements for ourselves about the level of safety we wish to preserve, (2) write mistakes down to experience and learn from them without having to feel we ought to be traumatised, (3) fuck up through our own fault and acknowledge that it *was* our own fault – assuming that it was.
The trend has been around for a long time, and I reckon we have a long way to go before we’re done with forging codified behavior into figurative cast-iron chastity belts. Male-female/male-male/female-female relationships have acquired new levels of … well, I was going to say sensitivity, but it might be more accurate to say fear. Adult-child relations the same.
One of the things I worry about from time to time is, are we making the ‘cure’ – the guidelines and regulations and training and sanctions, which are intended to help – as threatening to the social fabric as the ‘disease’.
I’ll read this essay properly in its entirety when I can get back to it.
Lorna, thanks for elucidating my worry far better than I can, myself.
In the seventies and eighties, we kids were warned constantly about ‘stranger danger’. Now we have more objective data. We were allowed to pretty much run free through our small semi-rural town. Now, no sane parent would allow such benign neglect, for fear of both losing the child and having the authorities cite them for bad parenting.
We need our young people to learn the ability to fuck up, accept they’ve fucked up, and learn from it – without becoming paralyzed by trauma for the rest of their lives.
I’m working on finishing the article, but the tone strikes me as way too casual. Ms. Kipnis doesn’t seem to make much distinction between undergrad and grad students. There’s a big difference between an 18y.o. fresh out of high school and a 25 y.o. that’s gone through university and maybe a couple of years on the work force.
She seems to long for the good ole days where professors and students hooked up on the regular and it was no big thing. I think she might be looking back at that time with rose colored glasses.
Also, maybe hooking up with your professor isn’t a career damaging event if you’re a liberal arts major, but women in STEM fields have a hard enough time getting positions, grants, repspect, etc. An affair gone wrong with a engineering professor could have much more serious consequences than a broken heart.
This is getting long, but I agree we have coddled kids more in the past 30 years. I believe they should be allowed to fuck up and learn from their mistakes. I’m still not convinced they’re really missing out on all that much from bans on teacher/student romances.
The casual tone bothers me, too. I agree about the difference between undergrad and grad students – most of the grads were worlds ahead of the younger students.
Getting accused of disastrous teacher/student affairs in the arts can be damaging, too.
This whole article, on review, seems like yet another flippant, First-world take on a very real problem. The sort of thing that literary magazines seem to adore (and here I reveal my heartland, flyover-country roots).
You’re spot on with the flippancy. I finished the article and by the end, it seemed like Ms. Kipnis really longed for the good old days where professors could date a student…any student because….reasons. I never did see a good reason why prohibiting teacher/student relationships was a bad thing. Her essay seemed to kind of whine that she missed out on access to that hot, 20 y.o. booty like in the old days.
I’m glad her experiences with professors was positive, but that doesn’t mean the new rules are wrong. I’m betting she comes from a place of class and race privilege.
That said, the comments disturbed me a lot more than the article. Some of those commenters acted like it was their god given right to have romantic relationships with students and rules be damned. Seriously? Is the college scene that dire?
Oh, *that* must be it. I first attended a working-class vocational college. It’s a satellite of a major regional university now, but when I went the place had a mandate for life-skills training and job placement. In its arts programs, as well as the more-obvious vocational tracks.
So the professors we got were working stiffs, too, with no time for all that dating students nonsense.