The Last Language by Jennifer duBois

Author:Jennifer duBois
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Chapter 13

IT WASN’T THAT I had no ethical objections whatsoever. But then, they really only went so far.

It was a lot like a professor dating a student, I decided—this was truly the best analogy. There are reasons, very good ones, why such a relationship is considered inadvisable. There’s a structural imbalance that can lead to misbehavior, coercion, poor judgment. There’s a distortion in professionalism—for this is very unprofessional—that is likely to make other people uncomfortable. There’s the likelihood of diminished credibility for all involved. The taboo against teacher-student entanglement stems from the norm that, on average, such a relationship is less likely to be equal. It is less likely to be fair. It is less likely, at the end of the day, to be love. This is a conclusion derived from a welter of conventional morality and liability projections and cost-benefit analyses, an anonymous collective saying, “We don’t know you, but if we had to guess, we’d disapprove.”

And yet everyone will admit there are exceptions. The guidelines are not equipped to know which ones they are.

It seemed fair that I might leave my job—not as penance, but as the price of a certain sort of freedom. Beyond that, we were only humans: unconventional, yes, statistically inadvisable, absolutely—but also certain of our love, certain that we were doing no harm.

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