gay for teacher

fathers and sons and lovers and groomers

If you read my essays on Julia Kristeva and Larry Kramer, you’ll have noticed they’re a lot about fathers and sons, the transmission of heritage, and trying to take up ambiguous legacies. This is surely in part because while I was working on them, I’ve been dealing with my father’s being diagnosed with stage-4 cancer, and with my PhD advisor’s retirement—both of which make me think about my own mortality and aging (ew), but also, with pain and gratitude, about what I’ve been given and what I thus have to give.

This got me to look back on a couple of essays on mentoring that I for the Chronicle of Higher Education in the summer of 2022. I had forgotten they were very personal in a way I don’t usually think of my writing as being. Re-reading them after my advisor’s retirement party the other day—where I had to hear much questioning from people I hadn’t seen in years about why I don’t have an academic job—is bittersweet, but I feel proud of them. And they’re both very much about being gay, and how it’s through that identity that I think about my being a student and teacher, itself a ‘queer’ (non-biological) way of begetting and being begotten. I suppose I was already beginning to move to the kind of identitarian-but-liberal thinking I’ve been trying out more recently. Anyway, I’m copying and pasting them in order below…

I.

Politics is about children — about the world into which they will be born, about what they will be taught, and about what they will learn to desire. As Lee Edelman argued in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), there is no politics without fantasies about “our children’s future.” We seem to believe, intensely if inarticulately, that our having a good life in the present depends on assuming that perspectives like ours will be shared by the people of the future, who will be, at least spiritually, our heirs. Political activity, therefore, aims at producing such people, at reproducing ourselves. And we want perhaps not so much that the inhabitants of the future will believe what we believe as that they will want what we want. We want them to inherit our desire.

But we also like to imagine children as “innocent” (a century after Freud!). That is, we like to imagine them as without desire — and we speak as if it were important to keep them that way. We wish to preserve children from outside interference (or at least from anyone else’s interference), from being contaminated by the desires of others. Political discourse, in general and with special urgency recently, turns on our contradictory desires about children. Between our desire to populate the future with people like us, and our desire to guard children from the forces that would accomplish this reproduction — between treating children’s minds as the stakes and sites of politics, or as secret gardens sheltered from politics — our discourse wildly and stupidly swings.

This paradox is, of late, especially visible in national debates over education, from disputes over elementary- and secondary-school curricula to the hypervigilant scrutiny of college classrooms. What do liberal educators really want? What desires are they — are we — trying to elicit from students?

The recent salience of the terms “grooming” and “groomer” on the American right bears witness to the contradiction between these two positions. The concepts entered the discursive mainstream after the passage several weeks ago of the Parental Rights in Education (the “Don’t Say Gay”) bill in Florida, which limited elementary- and secondary-school teachers’ ability to discuss topics related to LGBTQ issues, on the grounds that such discussion violates parents’ rights over their children. Many conservative pundits — particularly younger, more online types who revel in stoking the culture wars — defended the bill and similar measures in other states by charging that opponents wanted to “groom” children.

By “grooming” conservatives usually do not mean literal sexual molestation — but rather hope to cast in its lurid glow the shaping of students’ ideas about sexuality and gender, and thus their desires and identities. This guidance, conservatives imply, is akin to the worst sex crimes, except when performed by parents. The American Conservative, for example, has run several articles defending the Florida bill and attacking “groomers.” In its pages Adam Ellwanger, a professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, argues that educators who teach students that, for example, masturbation is normal, or homosexuality legitimate, will alienate children from conservative parents. The latter, he suggests, should be able to control their children’s “sexual ethic,” sexual knowledge, and — by implication — sexual desire.

Emile Doak, who claims that gay rights are inseparable from pedophilia (we “can’t separate a movement built on the transgression of the male-female distinction with one that transgresses the adult-child one”), likewise condemns sex education as “sexualizing” students — communicating information to the ignorant and eliciting desire in the innocent seem to him indistinguishable. The American Conservative’s associate editor, Declan Leary, similarly warns that critics of the Florida “anti-grooming” bill are out to erase the lines “between family and state, between man and woman, and (God help us) between child and adult.” Children must be protected from adults (except their parents), Leary argues, and parents from the state.

But Leary and the right more generally are unable to leave children or parents alone. In a notorious article published last year, Leary defended the system of Canadian residential schools, a vast, long-running project in which the Canadian government, working with Protestant and Catholic churches, forced First Nations children to attend boarding schools far from their families, with the explicit aim of undermining Native cultures. The appalling conditions at these schools are testified by mass graves. But Leary claimed that bringing these “pagans” into the “Church of Christ” was “worth it” (italics his!), despite “the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families.”

Leary is not alone on the right in jettisoning appeals to parental rights whenever those rights seem to encumber daydreams of wielding the state to crush families and impose on children the one true faith. In 2018, First Things, which has descended over the last few years from an ecumenical journal of Christian thought to an ongoing apologia for clerico-fascism, published an essay defending the role of the Catholic Church in the 19th-century Mortara Affair, in which a Jewish boy was kidnapped by the pontifical government to be raised as a Catholic after the child had been secretly baptized by a Christian woman employed by his parents.

Such hypocrisy from conservatives is contemptible. It is also symptomatic of larger contradictions. The American right, increasingly, is torn in its culture-war polemics between appeals to liberal principles to resist the growing hegemony of the “woke” left and illiberal dreams of annihilating its enemies. In their more lucid moments, right-wingers invoke the innocence of children and the preservation of the family to insist that there should be limits to the use of state power, in schools and elsewhere, to advance particular and controversial worldviews. And here they make a fair point, if on the false premises that parents have a natural monopoly over the shaping of their children’s beliefs and desires. Teaching elementary-school children about gender and sexuality, as well as race, religion, and other sensitive topics, can risk eroding, if not the rights of parents over their children (a concept that makes the latter sound like a form of property), then the spirit of tolerance for alternative worldviews on which a pluralistic society like ours depends.

No form of education leaves children alone. We are all grooming them, enlisting them in our projects for making the future.

There is, of course, always some point of view being privileged in teaching, and to avoid teaching such subjects is itself a lesson to students. But caution should be taken to make curricula inclusive not only of diverse sexualities but of the range of thinking about sexuality in our society. Indeed, a truly liberal sexual education would aim to allow students not to feel “valid” about their sexuality, gender, etc., or merely to possess objective information about the facts of sex, but to articulate their own views on such matters, in consciousness of there being a number of alternatives. This aim, however, is not neutral: It is the expression of a liberal worldview that holds up as the best form of life — and the best kind of sexuality — one pursued in a spirit of critical self-reflection.

And so many of us are torn: We want the future to have a certain kind of person in it, someone we can recognize as our heir — and we want young people to be protected from the pressures that desires like ours bring to bear on them. These contradictions are not only features of our national political discourse, but the stuff of our everyday life as educators. We are all, in various ways, groomers.

I was awakened to this a few years ago, when one of my colleagues at the University of Chicago — and one of the few followers of Leo Strauss on campus under the age of 75 — confided excitedly to me that, after a little guidance, one of his students (a sophomore in his “great books”-style core class) had become an atheist. This appeared to my colleague as joyful news since, from his Straussian perspective, rejecting religion is a necessary condition for undertaking what is called the “philosophical life.” Apparently a pursuit of open-ended questioning, at least according to the thinkers in my colleague’s coterie, such an intellectual trajectory seems in fact disturbingly predictable, finding in a small canon of classic texts and their interpreters the established questions — and, barely concealed under “esoteric” mummery, their established answers.

I didn’t tell my colleague that what he had done constituted “grooming” — the word was not yet so insistently pressed to the forefront of our consciousness as it has been in recent weeks — but I felt the sort of revulsion that usually accompanies the use of the word as an accusation. My colleague didn’t tell me under what circumstances exactly he had led his student toward his own view of religion. But the very fact of his taking an intense, personal interest in the topic struck me as perverse and perverting, a violation of what I had thought was a general, if unspoken, professional commitment to clear the path for students’ questions, rather than divert them into our answers. A process of personal development that should have unfolded in the obscurity of this boy’s private thought had been wrenched into a preconceived shape by a powerful older person —- and not in the public visibility of classroom discussion but in the pseudo-intimacy of a relationship my colleague imagined as one of mentoring. The student had been prevented from making up his own mind about one of life’s most important problems free from the pressure of knowing what a trusted and respected teacher thought — and wanted him to think.

For some time after, I held my disgust as a kind of touchstone against which to measure my own and others’ teaching. I thought about colleagues, of a far more numerous human type than the Straussians, who spoke with missionary enthusiasm about their efforts to reach apparently backward and recalcitrant “straight white frat boys,” “econ bros,” and other demographic groups taken to need special effort to bring into the progressive fold. One professor, who had once been a Teach for America volunteer and brought that same civilizing mission to her college classroom, recounted over the course of a quarter her efforts to bring to heel a boy she suspected of being conservative. She was less successful than my Straussian colleague; the latter offered select students the narcissistic pleasure of being worthy of admission into a philosophical “elite,” while the former, in a school-marmish fashion, held all her students to one code of political-ethical propriety. Neither appealed to me. Having grown up in a Southern Baptist megachurch, I’d had too much of youth pastors to become one myself.

Besides, if a college teacher is looking for a pedagogical challenge, it’s not very interesting to get students to come around to one’s own point of view. Students often want to be “groomed,” to have a teacher give some direction to anxious intellectual and ethical searching. In the privacy of office hours, they have solicited me to solve personal dilemmas. “How can I be an ally to people of color?” an earnest Asian American woman asked me after we’d read Frantz Fanon. “Should I go to grad school or become a consultant?” an immigrant from Eastern Europe asked, as if these were obviously the two choices available. In the last week alone, I met with two former students at their request about what, after the pretexts of our conversations quickly faded, was revealed to be their desire — in friction with their parents’ more conventional and remunerative desires for them — to become writers.

I refuse to answer those questions. As in class discussion, I redirect the conversation to what they think, what they want. Whether in my office or the classroom, the point of our speaking together is not for me to articulate, or embody, some model of correct opinion to be replicated in the student’s consciousness, but to demonstrate my desire for the student to bring into language and put into practice her own ideas. Which is a kind of answer — not only to the question of writing (to which it is, of course, a “yes”) but to the real questions pulsing behind all the others, “What should I want? What do you want of me?”

My ostensible disavowal of power, or of having any agenda of my own, has as precise an effect of “grooming” as anything I might tell students they must believe (indeed, it may be more effective for not taking the form of an injunction). When I call on a student and ask him what he thinks about the text, I pretend to think that he is already thinking something, that he has some private opinion inside him, and that I am interested in bringing it out. None of this is quite true. He probably wasn’t thinking anything in particular, and whatever he was thinking is likely to be not at all “his own” thought but something half-understood and secondhand. Nor am I in fact interested in “what he has to say,” that is, in its content — if I were interested in that sense, then I would be concerned with whether his opinions were correct (factually, politically) or not, and concerned to align his views with what I consider to be the truth. Instead, I perform interest in the student giving me more of his thoughts, more thoughtfully. I respond, “But what about … ?” “What do you mean by … ?” Or simply, “Tell me more!” I am not drawing out of him and hammering into shape an existing individual view, but I am seducing him into my desire that he have his own thoughts.

In an essay called “To the Seminar,” Roland Barthes put such desire at the center of a form of teaching that does not impart content or model a practice, but that rather resembles the way a mother teaches her child to walk. She stands in front of him, desiring his progress, beckoning him with love, and the child moves toward her. In a homelier version of the move from the bodily to the intellectual described in Plato’s Symposium, almost in a reversal, moving here from the purity of infantile love to the practical problem of bipedal motion, the mother incites the child’s desire for her and recircuits that desire toward the child’s flourishing.

When I read that essay 15 years ago, in a college seminar on literary theory, the relatively young new professor teaching the course was the fleeting, unattainable object of a crush. I desperately, flailingly wanted to impress him by appearing as brilliant as possible, an experience that, at the time, seemed to confirm Barthes’ point about the way students, desiring to impress their teachers, learn, in spite of themselves, to stand on their own feet. It is only now, as I’ve begun work on a book on Barthes, that I learned he wrote this essay while teaching a class that included a graduate student, Roland Havas, with whom he was already falling so achingly in love that he came, a few years later, to write Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse as a testament and something of a cure. The Platonic sublimation fails or, rather, succeeds (Barthes did write a book, I did learn literary theory) as a self-fulfilling lie that covers up the falsity of its foundations.

This is how liberal education works, to the extent that it does. No form of education — no form of politics — leaves children alone. We are all grooming them, enlisting them in our projects for making the future. We say that we wish other adults would leave them alone, but we mean that we wish we could be left alone with them, to shape them and the future to our will. What can possibly legitimate this — or what could distinguish liberal education from all other pedagogies, authoritarian power-fantasies of parental, ecclesiastical, or governmental omnipotence? Only that there is a way of desiring the desire of others that frees them, in the end, from even our desire.

II.

Last year my employer, the University of Chicago, announced in its weekly newsletter that it was celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Office of LGBTQ Student Life mentorship program. The story focused on the program’s founder, Kathy Forde, tracing her biography from her self-discovery as a young lesbian in the 80s. As a gay staff member myself, it was difficult not to appreciate Forde’s courage in being “out” from the beginning of her career, or her efforts leading to the university’s extension of health benefits to same-sex partners in 1992. It seemed churlish to say (my boyfriend, in fact, told me it was churlish to say) that the news release made me uncomfortable, casting queer staff as potential agents of the transmission not of knowledge but of values, in a tone weirdly familiar from the evangelical subculture I had grown up in, and from which I had escaped, I thought, to academia. If words like “queer” were swapped out with “Christian,” it could have been an item from the bulletin of my childhood megachurch.

My point is not that the contemporary university is becoming, in the guise of a progressive secular morality organized around care for and affirmation of “identities,” its own sort of church. But the university’s occasionally churchy tone does reveal the common participation of ecclesiastical, pedagogical, and other American institutions in a new way of managing the self. “Mentorship,” following “leadership,” “values,” “mission,” and other such terms suggesting an affective, ethical supplement to institutions otherwise lacking human warmth, became an important concept in academic and corporate circles in the 1990s. Since then it has only increased in significance. It is now an object of considerable scholarly investigation, both from researchers who, imagining that “mentorship” is desirable and quantifiable, seek to refine techniques for increasing it, and from others of a more Foucauldian bent who wonder what kinds of “governmentality” are being exercised, and to what ends, through “mentoring.”

Queer mentees participating in the University of Chicago’s program are imagined, at least in its own discourse, as engaged in a process of supervised self-construction — a process at once utterly intimate and folded unproblematically into the university’s institutional workings and academic agendas. Chicago’s program, which matches queer university employees with students seeking “mentorship,” operates similarly to nearly 175 (counted in a recent report) other such LGBT+ mentorship programs at universities across the country — and countless more programs organized on the basis of sex, race, etc. At Chicago, “mentorship” is defined according to the program’s website as providing “support” to students as they learn how to articulate themselves publicly as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc. and “connecting” them to “community” sites and resources off-campus.

“Coming out” is presented here as a difficult self-questioning, which can be steered toward its correct conclusion by an authoritatively deputized adult imagined as a bridge both to the student’s queer future and to a community. The vision of gay life awaiting students beyond the university is a sanitized one; the website specifies that “LGBT establishments” consist of “coffee shops, LGBTQ centers … comedy nights, educational talks [and] LGBTQ media awards.” No bars, no clubs. One would never suspect from the program’s literature that the identities with which this sort of mentoring is concerned have anything to do with sex.

It may be that I lack what are described as the qualities of “Queer Mentors” (capital M), who are said to be “mature, caring, responsible, and altruistic.” Or it may be that, in an age when intimate relations between faculty members and students, and among students themselves, are increasingly policed by university administrators, the idea of identifying with students, in a manner formalized by and visible to my employer, on the basis of our shared sexual desire (however silenced in the university’s official narrative), seems like inviting trouble.

Beyond the academy, in all domains of white-collar employment, employees are at once warned against the dangers of unsanctioned intimacy with one another and solicited to blur the boundaries of the personal and professional by bringing their “whole selves to work.” In a cogent analysis of how universities and corporations use “mentorship” to shape employees, Catherine Manathunga has noted that mentoring allows institutions to frame as a “collegial and equal relationship” a “pedagogy” by which designated agents inculcate “desired subjectivities” in mentees. The latter are charged, on the one hand, to be self-directed and success-oriented, but also to demonstrate their receptivity to guidance that goes beyond the professional toward a form of “acculturation.”

In programs targeted to marginalized groups, mentors acculturate mentees to see themselves as able to reconcile their “identities” (female, gay, Black, etc.) with norms of academic and professional success — which assumes, of course, that taking up one’s Blackness, gayness, womanhood, etc., will not interfere with one’s ability to internalize and maintain expectations about oneself as a “professional,” “competent,” autonomous, and ambitious neoliberal subject. In the academic literature on LGBT mentoring programs, students from the targeted demographic groups are imagined, on the one hand, as exposed to “risk” that will interfere with their success unless remedied through special interventions, but also as bearers of higher degrees of traits associated with success such as “resiliency.” Potential mentees are both specially disadvantaged and specially capacitated by their experiences as minorities (a combination of traits that might suggest they are, all things considered, normal). After passing through such programs, students who see, and have learned to speak of themselves, as members of historically oppressed groups in the rhetoric appropriate for upper-class cultural contexts, will indeed likely have increased their value in the eyes of potential employers looking both to increase their companies’ “diversity” and to assure that “diverse” new employees can adhere to their corporate culture and performance standards.

In this respect, demographically-specific mentorship programs are an instance of a broader cultural pedagogy, one that solicits our future elites to see themselves both as bearers of group-based oppressions and as achievers who demonstrate their merit not least in their ability to narrate how they have overcome the identity-based injustice. I have described this newly hegemonic self-understanding elsewhere as the basis of “woke meritocracy,” in which students use the language of group identity not to resist the atomizing competitions of the contemporary academy and post-college professional life, but to demonstrate their good standing within it and to sharpen their edge against rivals.

We are encouraged to think, by the proliferation of such programs, that being a high-performing academic and economic subject and identifying strongly with one’s gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., are not only perfectly compatible but mutually reinforcing. A line of anti-capitalist critique from the socialist left and heterodox right suggests that, in fact, such institutions encourage our thinking of ourselves primarily as bearers of these identities — as women, queer, racial minorities, etc. — in order to disrupt the possibility of our building solidarity with other people who share our material conditions but not our curated self-narratives. Insofar as an identity can be constructed and maintained only in opposition to others (a fact we tend to elide when celebrating the growing “visibility” and salience of increasingly numerous and complex identities), the proliferation of identities may offer evermore possibilities for conflict among smaller and smaller groups whose members find themselves unable to recognize common interests.

There are, however, important tensions in this fusion of individualist, success-oriented ambition and identitarian discourse. For some students, thinking about what it means to belong to a historically oppressed group will mean challenging, breaking with, or simply failing to live up to the standards and pace of academic achievement.

My closest friend in college had never thought with any particular intensity about being a woman until, as a sophomore, she took a class in 20th-century feminist art. Toward the end of the semester, as she began to consider what she might write for a final paper, she began to think and — bodily, wrenchingly — to feel the enormity of women’s massive, historical, ongoing suffering — rape, abuse, murder, exclusion, poverty, silencing. In a few weeks, in 15 pages, how was she supposed to master even her initial terror and stupor faced with the chasm that had suddenly opened out from under what had seemed to be the clichés of a too-familiar feminism? How can a woman love a man, given everything men have done and still do to women? How can she make her way in a culture that, for thousands of years, reduced real women to chattel and made imagined women the symbols of a femininity defined as the inferior derivative of maleness? The paper was a disaster, earning her a C in the course and sending her to therapy.

One response to such failures is to valorize them as a kind of resistance to dominant norms. This is what, for example, Jack Halberstam does in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), figuring queerness as a “failure” to conform to heterosexuality that opens up radical possibilities for alternative lives. The problem is that this is almost indistinguishable from the TED-talk ethic that celebrates entrepreneurial risk-taking as a kind of “failure” that is, in fact, able to “succeed” better than conventional success. On the contrary, anyone who begins to think about what it means to belong to a group, to have unchosen ties to other people, to have been oneself constituted by histories of violence, to bear and to bear witness to the weight of past and present injustice, should be expected to be shaken, unsteadied, and less able either to compete with her peers or, at some future date, to transmute the trauma that such thinking reveals and inflicts into an eventual narrative of triumph and insight. Thinking about the irreparable may undo us, irreparably.

Thinking of my friend (who did, in the end, devote her life to feminist art), I have often felt in my classroom how perverse it is to confront students with the fraught questions posed by the “great books” while assigning work to be graded. I find myself hoping both that they will recognize the urgent, intimate relevance of these texts to their own lives and at the same time acquire the skills of verbal self-expression to write technically correct papers about them. Perhaps this double injunction really commands students to learn how to feign encounters with ideas that might wreck them, temporarily or permanently, and wrest them away from their status as high-achievers. They would not want, surely, what happened to my friend to befall them, and I can hardly say that I myself want to send them to therapy. But, if that risk — the risk of a real failure that will not be recuperable in some future tale of overcoming hardship — is not present, then why are we reading these books?

It is precisely to resolve this dilemma that, along with other technologies of care such as “content warnings,” universities need mentorship programs to help vulnerable students learn how to lessen the risks of authentic thinking and keep their otherwise too-risky explorations of identities within the sure path of academic and professional ambition. Here mentorship would function as something similar to the therapy my friend sought — with the critical difference, as Manathunga notes, that it is an apparatus of power, not an independent relationship between two equal adults, and that it aims at a notion of flourishing not developed by the student herself but pre-figured on her behalf by an institution. Indeed, mentorship programs in higher education, particularly those aimed at groups such as sexual and racial minorities, provide an additional layer of surveillance by which universities can track students’ progress towards hegemonic standards of success.

In recent years, administrators I have talked with at the universities I am most familiar with (Northwestern University, where I received my Ph.D., and the University of Chicago, where I am a postdoctoral instructor) have told me that an assortment of stakeholders — including students, their parents, fellow administrators, and the media — are increasingly concerned about the university’s responsibility for student “wellness” and “mental health.” These are, they point out, to some extent euphemisms for fears about students dropping out, failing out — or even committing suicide. Mentors form an additional link in a chain of residence heads, academic advisers, instructors, and other mental-health monitors charged with reporting on students who seem “unwell.” Keeping students alive and succeeding in the classroom is, obviously, a basic function of the university. But the forms of surveillance, oriented towards “wellness” and organized through apparently “personal” relationships, can appear cruelly ironic in the context of actual lives.

Some years ago a male student emailed me one morning to say that he had been raped some time before and was feeling too sad to get to class. This was, at a minimum, a request to be excused for that day, and, probably, a plea for help. I do not think that he knew I was contractually obligated to report this information both to the Title IX office (regardless of whether the rape had involved another member of the university community) and the “wellness” office. Both of these apparatuses performed a “check-in” through which one of their agents contacted my student to ask if he was all right, which I imagine is understood by the university’s lawyers to constitute having done due diligence.

I waited until the end of the day to contact the administrators I had to contact. I thought, hard, about saying nothing. I thought about myself at his age — when my parents had cut off contact with me for being gay, when the only adults I felt I could trust were two history professors who, without ever saying a word to me about what I must be feeling, assured my financial and emotional “wellness” by getting me summer grants and into a Ph.D. program — and how humiliated and miserable I would feel to know my worst moments of vulnerability were the subject of a file passed among bureaucrats. I thought about how much I was letting him down, how little I lived up to the standard set by my own college professors.

Of course, he wasn’t me, or on the way to becoming me. I had no particularly close relationship with him before receiving his email, and I hadn’t attempted to build one. My usual intuition with gay male students is to be a bit more distant than I otherwise would, since rather than uniting us on the basis of our shared histories of marginalization, the sexuality I share with some of my students unfortunately makes me sometimes experience them as a source of danger from which I must protect myself, the way my straight male colleagues do, from any possibility of an ambiguous — and thus perhaps legally actionable — degree of closeness. While my employer periodically enjoins me to connect to students on the basis of our “identity,” it also insists that such connections are perilous.

I didn’t feel safe risking, as some of my female colleagues told me they had risked with female students who had been similarly victimized, an intimate conversation with my student about how he felt and what he wanted, much less of warning him that the university might not be the safest venue to seek help or justice. I worried, to what is now my shame but then seemed elementary prudence, that any specially personal expression of compassion might come off somehow inappropriate, prurient. But because, like me, he was gay — in the effeminate, involuntarily public, and vulnerable way that incites comment, derision, violence — passing his case off to university officials struck me as a despicable act of disloyalty.

Administrators hope that students and faculty will find in the university’s ostentatious celebration of their shared “identities” a means of connecting with each other that secures their mutual commitment to the institution itself and the set of values it serves. In that moment, though, it seemed I had to choose between doing the decent thing for another gay man — allowing him, in a furtive and humane suspension of the imperative to visibility to choose for himself how to make sense of his ordeal — and serving the university. The latter claims that my identity is a resource for relating to students, and thus for helping them to succeed on the university’s terms — terms increasingly shaped by the corporate world outside. But the university also charges me with monitoring my students, and my own relationships with them, as part of a system of surveillance to which genuine connections, based on common identities or otherwise, are disruptive, even dangerous.

In the end I did what I was, by the terms of my employment, supposed to do. But it felt, and still feels, like a betrayal. Instead of offering, as my teachers had, a sheltering opacity in which my student could get the material resources he needed to build his own gay life on his own terms, I exposed him to the surveillance network of “care” workers that has become increasingly central to universities’ functioning, and of which “mentorship” programs are another node. This may have been what my student would have preferred — and even what was, from the soberest vantage, the best thing for him. But, while universities celebrate their own tolerance of diversity and encourage their “diverse” students and staff to be visible members of the campus “community,” I remember with bitterness how our shared gayness made me feel that I had to keep my distance from this student.

In academia and throughout our society, elite institutions are interpellating their members as bearers of minoritized identities. They are eroding the distinctions between a private realm of intimacy and the public, visible, norm-bound realms of institutional life (work, school, etc.). And they ask us to see these hailings and conflations as liberatory. Such summons constrain and deny the way in which thinking about one’s identity is, at least always potentially, a call to begin a perilous intellectual adventure that may put one’s academic and professional “success,” and even one’s identity itself, at risk — and the way that our identities, by connecting us to other people, inspire forms of intimacy and sympathy that urge us to exceed, evade, or otherwise not conform to the responsibilities assigned to us in our professional roles. Real mentoring, perhaps, is what we offer students most in those necessarily unprofessional, unmanageable, almost unbearable moments when they see, in our agonizing uncertainty about what to do, what it means to care about ideas and about each other.