This post got me thinking, not only about the peculiar politics and pitfalls of sexual consent between individuals whom have a power imbalance, but of the strange ways that age discrimination infuses every aspect of how we treat one another. Specifically, towards the end of the article the author states:

I wanted to explain that refraining from having sex with their students wasn’t the same as treating students as children.

Now that I am a professor, I confess that some of these arguments don’t grip me in the way they once did.

It is curious to me how this mechanism works - as a young person we see ourselves as perfectly capable, and we lack understanding as to why it is that our elders treat us as somehow naive, or unwise. Children who, as the author notes later, 'have been required to grow up too quickly' gain some unnameable quality sooner than those that exist within 'the peculiar liminal space' of students. Elders recognize this quality, or lack of it, and for every other effort to treat their students equally view them as deficient in this one peculiar aspect, and from that flows an ethic of care. This ethic colors their pedagogy and efforts to instruct those people.

But I wonder if this does not work in another way. That, to be a student, you must lack this particular quality - call it wisdom or maturity or world-weariness - elsewise you cannot be taken seriously as a penitent to the throne of education. If you possess the markers of that 'youth', you can be taught, and if not...

Don't get me wrong - there is plenty done towards the education of adults. Yet I wonder - have wondered, both as a child being educated by adults and unclear why they constrained me in certain ways, and as an adult being educated by adults and similarly unclear why they failed to constrain me in certain ways - if our own ability to teach has baked into it a requirement that the student lacks adult-ness.

I completed my undergraduate college degree after turning 30. It was a wild ride, to live in that liminal space by the grace of professors and peers who could not place exactly how old I was. There is likely a lot to be said towards the acts of chameleonation that I consciously and unconsciously partook in - in both directions. What I came away with was a sense that my apparent age acted upon the decisions made by those interacting with me.

So, in a real sense I'm biased. But I also feel like I could call the entire thing a patronizing sham - that teachers expect those they teach to be not just less formed than them, but less formed than them on every axis. And if you fail to adhere to that quality it is rare to find effective mentorship. "Refraining from x wasn't the same as treating the students as children" feels close to a much more dangerous truth, "Don't appear to treat students as children, despite the fact they are." And since they are, they cannot be students if they are not.

It is interesting that the author talks about the redirection of energy as being a necessary skill of pedagogy. It speaks to the need to teach our teachers how to teach. I'm not sure I've made the case here, or even laid out why it's a thing that I find unclarified in our culture - but I think we need to learn to teach not just what we consensually understand to be 'students', but teach even those who don't lack those markers that exclude them from that peculiar and liminal space. I think, with such skills understood, the question of the ethic of care becomes much less critical, because the assumption of relative powerlessness becomes proportionally baseless.

The author states:

I didn’t know, when I was in their place, how young I was, and how young I must have seemed even to those professors who were kind enough to treat me like the fully fledged intellectual I thought I was.

If there is a thing I would change it would be this: how young you seemed should be immaterial. The professor should not need to be kind enough to treat one like the fully fledged intellectual you think you are. Rather, they should be professional enough to treat you as a fully fledged intellectual. One they have agreed to teach a thing you don't know, regardless of what else you may or may not know, regardless of what other qualities you may or may not possess.