I am talking with a former professor of mine. She is telling me that she believes that part of our job as teachers of undergraduates is to help our students, as she puts it, “instrumentalize” the things they learn from us–instrumentalize them, she means, for the sake of social change. I’m skeptical. What do academics know about instrumentalizing anything? More to the point, what business do we have telling students what they ought to do with what we teach them? “Fine,” I say at last (this is some years ago), “as long as you would be okay with one of your students instrumentalizing what they learn from you to try to overturn Roe v. Wade.” She is stunned. The possibility has clearly never crossed her mind–the possibility, that is, that students might have goals that conflict with hers. That they possess an otherness that we as educators must respect.
William Deresiewicz, “Respect, or The Missing Relation,” Liberties, Fall 2024, 158.
We live in an age where everyone, it seems, wants to be everyone else’s life-coach.