"As far as I can tell, he’s a moderate leftist who was victimized by the far left. His plight has not inspired him to rethink his overall political philosophy."
They are all basically useless.
In general, they don't know why things ended up this way, don't know how to fix it, wouldn't have the courage to fix it if they knew, and more or less are just hoping that something, they are not sure what, will allow them *personally* to go back to the way things were.
I think you need to regard this kind of liberal as hopeless. This is true even if they were say nominally Republican or whatever. If Woke gets defeated, these people won't contribute much to its defeat.
No, maybe not. But at least this type won't deliberately make things worse and his example will turn more against the woke side, even if that is not what he preaches or even intended. And he can still be a fine classics scholar, which is something of value.
I feel the same about Asians. They will support power even as it actively screws them over. If you ever take power they will fall in line. But at that point, you don't need their help anyway.
This definitely seems true for East Asians, who are particularly high in conformity and low in political engagement. Indians, however, tend to be more explicitly left-leaning and politically active.
1. With respect to #4, that was a significant part of a famous novel you enjoyed as a youth.
2. With respect to #14, maybe the students would be more tolerant of the Katz-Gold relationship if they were told Katz suffers from transchronologicalism, he feels like a young man trapped in an older man's body, and that Gold realizes that she must see him as he sees himself as a matter of justice and tolerance.
3. I believe you have a bet to the effect you won't be personally harmed by wokeness at your university because of your outspoken views (expressed in this very blog post.) Yet students presumably self-selected to favor limited government seem not the sort to defend you if anyone complained you are "SHUDDER" opposed to affirmative action AND STUDENT/TEACHER ROMANCE. And Katz himself shows many academic victims have no interest in going anywhere near as far as you in speaking out. Are you at all concerned, since you made this bet, that you may lose?
That would make a lot of sense. Young inexperienced women attracted to much older powerful men is often a dynamic that doesn't work out well. A few years of perspective and experience would help her make a better decision.
"I had to provocatively respond"
You did, huh?
"I couldn’t tell if I’d stumped my students, or if they just thought I was crazy."
In the movie Frozen Elsa points out to Anna that maybe she's a dumb confused teenager that shouldn't marry like the first guy she ever met after one song. Even children can understand this logic.
"While they’re ultra-tolerant of unconventional sexual orientations and gender identities, a twenty-year age gap grossed them out."
Because all of that weird stuff happens to other people that would never be them, and it's all just thoughtless posturing. A straight relationship between a student and a professor is a lot more real.
---
Look, I don't think any of this had to do with his firing and would find most of the people that treated him this way repugnant, but can't we just say that without trying to be an edge lord about professors trying to make it with young women.
He was already punished for his earlier relationship. As far as we know he did not start his relationship with his current wife until after she graduated so I don't see anything untoward or unprofessional about it. It is indeed bizarre that we are supposed to approve of gay orgies but not a twenty year age gap in a consensual marriage between adults who are not otherwise professionally connected.
"Young inexperienced women attracted to much older powerful men is often a dynamic that doesn't work out well." Maybe. But neither is "young inexperienced women attracted to `bad boys`" and that is probably both more common and more often harmful. Are we going to outlaw that too?
Young inexperienced women have a lot of bad urges.
Older more settled people are supposed to offer them good advice so they can navigate a the world better as they grow.
I'm not outlawing anything. I'm talking about the kind of advice you would give someone. I don't think Bryan's advice really helped him with his objective in this discussion, it strikes me as self indulgent and ideological.
If your daughter came home and said "I'm screwing my professor" I have a feeling your first reaction would be that its probably not a good thing.
"If your daughter came home and said "I'm screwing my professor" I have a feeling your first reaction would be that its probably not a good thing."
Probably. But that would probably be my reaction for pretty much anybody you replace "professor" with.
Are you really endorsing the paternal veto over the sexual choices of adult daughters? That also used to be pretty popular, but I was reliably informed that had totally changed.
Do you mean that I can tell a legally adult daughter who she can date, then use physical violence against her if she does not comply with absolute impunity.
That would be against the law and I would be arrested.
If you mean that a father shouldn't tell his daughter when she's making bad choices because he cares about her well being, then we've got very different ideas on what being a good father means.
And once you take a Darwinian perspective you can see that a young woman might be interested in a cad her parents disapprove of, if she expects her parents will still bail her out if she has a kid. Of course, many of the things our culture currently promotes are against your Darwinian interest to take seriously.
Doesn't most of recorded history make you question this? Younger women dating/marrying older men was quite common, although possibly still not the majority of cases. 20 years is a pretty significant gap, but not unheard of.
It seems to me that you are taking an excessively strong stance here, while not really addressing Caplan's actual points of "Does anything make it ok?" I would highly caution my girls against dating much older men, but at some point they are adults and have to, and get to, make their own decisions. Last I checked, that point was somewhere around the "allowed to vote, or get sent off to die on some god forsaken rock," although it does seem like society is pushing off adulthood later and later these days.
It's a lot less common today because we aren't marrying off our 14 year old daughter to that older lord we need a military alliance with.
It's not impossible, but it's unlikely. Strong skepticism should be the default in these cases. A 20+ year age difference is very out of line with normal human experience.
See, you aren't thinking clearly. It has nothing to do with marrying off young daughters to lords; what percentage of marriages could that possibly be? Less than the 1% of current marriages with >=20 year age differences from the wiki article.
Women married older men previously for a number of reasons. Older men were established and thus there was less of a gamble regarding whether or not they were going to "make it"; you could see if they were successful because they already were. Further, women died in childbirth much more frequently, resulting older widowers looking to remarry. Very young men tended to die more frequently in war, often leaving a surplus of women looking to marry after a bloody war. The list goes on.
It probably is the case that wide age discrepancies between spouses is not ideal for most people, but that doesn't mean that it isn't good and useful for some people. Even a small percentage like 5% is going to show up more than you might expect, specifically around certain social networks.
We had a skeezball biology teacher in my high school that gave out As to girls that sat on his lap and stayed late after class. If someone those girls got off on it, it would still have been skeezball.
I'm not interested in the power dynamic aspect of things, beyond the fact that power is attractive enough that young women often make poor long term choices based on that.
Older men often seem more powerful because they've had a much longer adult life to build up power, but that can be a false positive. They can seem mature compared to a young man, but those young men will grow up. I'm skeptical about many young women being able to accurately judge the character of a middle aged romantic partner.
In addition marrying an older person has a lot of problems. You are at very different stages of your lives. You have very different peer groups. The situation with children is going to be difficult too. As you get older, one partner will start to decline and ultimately die a long time before the other partner.
I don't know Katz's marriage situation. I gathered from Bryan's write up that he had a history of inappropriate sexual relationships with students (this was a different woman then his wife, right?). The fact that this is his history makes such relationships questionable.
But really, the details of this situation aren't important. Bryan seemed indignant about the very idea that an age difference can be a problem, not whether it was a problem in Katz's specific situation.
1) So Katz has a consensual - repeat: consensual - affair with a student 15 years ago. SO WHAT?
And then he is punished 10 years later by the university? Affairs are not illegal, and universities are not soviet gulags (or perhaps they are). Nobody finds this strange? 10 years later? What is this, the Soviet Union?
2) Eisgruber is the ultimate idiot. He publicly said that in Princeton there was and is "systemic racism". When (still under the Trump Admin) he was called out by the US Dept of Education, he ducked. He cowered. If in Princeton there is really systematic racism, then Eisgruber should give up his multi-million dollar salary and Princeton should sell its 22 billion dollar endowment and give it to the oppressed minorities. But Eisgruber and Princeton will not do it, of course, because they are idiots.
3) Nobody points out this: are you all an army of saints without fault? Can all and everybody of you, including all in Princeton students, faculty, staff, throw the first stone, because you are all free of sin? Yes, you are all free of sin?
If yes, how do you do it? Because certainly I am not free of sin, and I cannot throw the first stone.
As stated in the essay, it may well be that Josh Katz does not deserve the same objective assessment as Cleon, and it may well be his professional situation is unrelated to his morality. I address only this conflict between what is to be done when you view someone as a moral reprobate. If you assessment of their morality is wrong that is a different concern.
Certainly, the people Bryan is talking to believe this moral view, and I'm not sure trying to convince them that professor/student relations are "true love" is fruitful here. Bryan would be better off admitting that they are frought and dangerous things that maybe even ought to disbarred by the university. Having said that, that was not the rules when this took place, and we don't try a man twice, and really its all just an excuse for a different cause.
The desire to unperson moral reprobates has some purpose. It's necessary. It is in fact a substitute for formal institutional and ultimately forceful imposition of social norms. Such imposition ought best be understand as a failure of informal social pressure to do what it needs to do.
Telling people that think they are doing justice shouldn't do justice or making nonsensical gotcha side arugements is a non starter.
You linked to an essay, “After Priggery, What?”by C.S. Lewis, who married a woman, Joy Davidman, 17 years his junior. Though she was not in her 20s, she was married to someone else when she fell in love with Lewis and moved to England with her two sons to try to win him (although I don’t think he understood that she had moved to England with that purpose). https://lithub.com/finding-joy/. Priggery would be far better aimed at Lewis and Davidman than Katz and Gold. But I don’t think it should properly be aimed at either. The brief marriage brought great joy (sorry, but that’s the word) to Lewis, and Davidman’s death from cancer brought forth one of his best books, A Grief Observed. Lewis and Davidman were individual people, not age brackets. So are Katz and Gold. They are best judged as such.
Joy Davidman was 40 or something, and it seems see very much knew what she was getting into. She went to England for the express stated purpose of seducing Lewis. JRR Tolkien strongly disapproved of her.
Lewis seems to have had some strange issues with sex. He was in a weird relationship with an older woman for a long time before that. He had some kind of strange abandonment issues with his mother. Overall, I don't think he made many healthy decisions in his personal life with women. Many of his friends seemed to share this assessment.
Anyway, these were grown adults not in any kind of professional relationship. This example really doesn't relate to the general matter of middle aged man trying to bed 20 year old women that they have authority over.
You think there should be opprobrium against older men marrying younger women. CS Lewis, who you think for some reason can “explain your case,” doesn’t agree with you. Solveig Gold says that she is the alpha in her relationship with Katz. Are you going to engage with that, or are you just going keep repeating your mantra about “men who have authority over younger women”?
***When they earnestly observed, “There’s a power imbalance here,” I replied, “Maybe some people like a power imbalance.”***
I wonder why they (and Bryan?) apparently assumed the power imbalance put Katz above the student instead of vice-versa. Would they make the same assumption if the professor were a woman and the student a man? Or if they were both women or both men?
What happens after "waiting a few years"? The age gap's going to disappear? - "Waiting" with what, exactly? Dating, kissing, parking? - Any power "imbalance" is MUCH reduced by marriage. (Even the considerable power of the younger partner - to just get a lover much younger than their "elderly" spouse). When Madonna or Liz Taylor do it, I guess it's "liberating".
Yes, and that can be--to use a much abused word--"problematic." I am sure there are unhappy cases of that, but given my lack of personal experience in this and that the happy cases will be kept closely secret by all involved, I am not even confident that it is on the whole a harmful thing.
I doubt that the students claiming it was "problematic" due to "power dynamics" could explain what exactly the problem was if they had to use only simple, non-academic language that a child could understand.
Re 11: "Other than the government itself, it is hard to think of any other large organization where profit-and-loss matter less than elite universities."
I've come to think "corporate" is quite accurate. Think of universities as defense contractors. Defense contractors get paid by the federal government (indirectly, because congress funds it and DoD gets it) to produce products that are, fortunately, of an almost wholly unknown quantity (we don't use most of this stuff to actually wage war with, so we don't have a very good idea of whether it works or not).
Even for elite universities, the business is likewise "selling" education which is directly or indirectly (through subsidy and regulation) required to be purchased by the government. They produce an intangible good of almost wholly unknown quantity, just like "defense".
In both cases, profit maximization for the corporation has a requirement that the suppliers create demand for their products. Defense contractors lobby ceaselessly for more defense spending. Educators lobby ceaselessly for more subsidies for education, and at heart HR and DEI stuff is theoretically advancing more "educational requirements" upon people. The folks doing the educating will be making a profit by doing this.
Now, does some DEI mandarin at Princeton think in these terms? No. But the "Security Experts" that are always telling us to spend heavily to prepare for the next war... they often truly believe the next war is around the corner too. They're still pushing what can be rightly called their corporate agenda.
I knew Solveig Gold (not well). She can look after herself. She thinks there is a power imbalance between her and Professor Katz in her favor — see the link in #9 above. I can think of a couple good scholarly marriages with age disparities (Will and Ariel Durant; Russell and Annette Kirk); I have a friend with a much younger wife and a toddler; they seem happy. On the bad side the Causubons in Middlemarch and Chip and Melissa in The Corrections come to mind. But those are both fiction and in neither is there a power imbalance in favor of the older man IMO. I’m mildly surprised people are so bothered by Katz and Gold.
Many people are shocked when liberals and centrists are radicalized by run-ins with the woke. Like Bryan, I’m more surprised when they aren’t radicalized.
I'd have also been interested to know their feelings if the genders had been reversed. If the objection were to do with the power dynamic was this purely because the professor was older (and that he was a man was irrelevant), or was him being a man the issue? What about if it had been a gay relationship with a 20 year gap?
Let's be blunt, when there is a 20 year age gap its usually predatory with the older partner doing it for personal sexual gratification, with the likely outcome that the younger partner is set aside when they are bored with them.
What if we all committed to condemning older parties who do set aside their younger partners after growing bored of them, but not people like Katz who don't appear to have done that?
Whether that is 'usually' the case is an empirical question which I don't have the answer to. However the direction of predation/exploitation is very often framed the other way around with the younger partner implied to be marrying the older one to get their money. Perhaps this framing is more common when it is an older woman and a younger man, hence my original question.
Yes, we definitely need to crack down on relationships in which people use each other just for sexual gratification without any long-term commitment. That's disgusting.
On a completely unrelated subject, isn't it outrageous how to fascist homophobes dare suggest putting a pause on gay orgies until monkeypox is under control?
Number of sexual relationships has a negative correlation with marriage outcomes and happiness. The traditional norms on sex are basically correct for long term life outcomes.
I don't know what "crack down" means, but I am raising my daughters not to treat sex flippantly because I value their happiness and well being.
Yes, gays are reckless hedonists whose sexual conduct often endangers themselves and often those around them.
You are an advocate of some level of sexual self-constraint. I may agree. I may not. But that is a longer argument I am not prepared to have here and today.
What Prof. Caplan (and I and perhaps other commenters) were dunking on was not you.
What we were mocking was the phenomenon of the modern self-proclaimed liberationist who loudly shouts their tolerance... nay, embrace, of every form of adult (at least) sexual practice, but will, the second they encounter one associated with an outgroup, display a level of prudishness and censoriousness that would embarrass the stereotype of a Victorian divine.
Many university policies are too sweeping for sure (at Texas A&M it is a officially a fireable offense for a physics grad student to hook up with an agriculture senior if they meet at a bar). But I don’t understand where you and your Twitter followers get the idea that 20% of faculty have multiple affairs with undergrads in their classes.
Thanks for the links - I'm very sorry to hear what Dr. Katz did, and what happened to him, but glad that he seems to have found faith, and a good wife.
I do wonder what it would take for more Bret Weinsteins to emerge, though.
"As far as I can tell, he’s a moderate leftist who was victimized by the far left. His plight has not inspired him to rethink his overall political philosophy."
They are all basically useless.
In general, they don't know why things ended up this way, don't know how to fix it, wouldn't have the courage to fix it if they knew, and more or less are just hoping that something, they are not sure what, will allow them *personally* to go back to the way things were.
I think you need to regard this kind of liberal as hopeless. This is true even if they were say nominally Republican or whatever. If Woke gets defeated, these people won't contribute much to its defeat.
No, maybe not. But at least this type won't deliberately make things worse and his example will turn more against the woke side, even if that is not what he preaches or even intended. And he can still be a fine classics scholar, which is something of value.
Agreed.
I feel the same about Asians. They will support power even as it actively screws them over. If you ever take power they will fall in line. But at that point, you don't need their help anyway.
This definitely seems true for East Asians, who are particularly high in conformity and low in political engagement. Indians, however, tend to be more explicitly left-leaning and politically active.
Maybe Dr. Katz can get hired at University of Austin or Ralston College, two places where his freedom of speech would certainly be honored.
Thank you, Bryan for exposing this corruption. Sadly, it is not surprising.
Add this the the list of points you make in The Case Against Education.
Bryan,
1. With respect to #4, that was a significant part of a famous novel you enjoyed as a youth.
2. With respect to #14, maybe the students would be more tolerant of the Katz-Gold relationship if they were told Katz suffers from transchronologicalism, he feels like a young man trapped in an older man's body, and that Gold realizes that she must see him as he sees himself as a matter of justice and tolerance.
3. I believe you have a bet to the effect you won't be personally harmed by wokeness at your university because of your outspoken views (expressed in this very blog post.) Yet students presumably self-selected to favor limited government seem not the sort to defend you if anyone complained you are "SHUDDER" opposed to affirmative action AND STUDENT/TEACHER ROMANCE. And Katz himself shows many academic victims have no interest in going anywhere near as far as you in speaking out. Are you at all concerned, since you made this bet, that you may lose?
Which novel was #4 from?
Atlas Shrugged
"I had fun challenging these attitudes."
Why?
“Maybe some people like a power imbalance.”
Sure, that's why they can be really dangerous.
“What if it’s true love?”
It probably isn't.
“Well, they can just wait a few years.”
That would make a lot of sense. Young inexperienced women attracted to much older powerful men is often a dynamic that doesn't work out well. A few years of perspective and experience would help her make a better decision.
"I had to provocatively respond"
You did, huh?
"I couldn’t tell if I’d stumped my students, or if they just thought I was crazy."
In the movie Frozen Elsa points out to Anna that maybe she's a dumb confused teenager that shouldn't marry like the first guy she ever met after one song. Even children can understand this logic.
"While they’re ultra-tolerant of unconventional sexual orientations and gender identities, a twenty-year age gap grossed them out."
Because all of that weird stuff happens to other people that would never be them, and it's all just thoughtless posturing. A straight relationship between a student and a professor is a lot more real.
---
Look, I don't think any of this had to do with his firing and would find most of the people that treated him this way repugnant, but can't we just say that without trying to be an edge lord about professors trying to make it with young women.
He was already punished for his earlier relationship. As far as we know he did not start his relationship with his current wife until after she graduated so I don't see anything untoward or unprofessional about it. It is indeed bizarre that we are supposed to approve of gay orgies but not a twenty year age gap in a consensual marriage between adults who are not otherwise professionally connected.
Sodom and Gomorrah were fictional, unlike AIDS.
"Young inexperienced women attracted to much older powerful men is often a dynamic that doesn't work out well." Maybe. But neither is "young inexperienced women attracted to `bad boys`" and that is probably both more common and more often harmful. Are we going to outlaw that too?
Young inexperienced women have a lot of bad urges.
Older more settled people are supposed to offer them good advice so they can navigate a the world better as they grow.
I'm not outlawing anything. I'm talking about the kind of advice you would give someone. I don't think Bryan's advice really helped him with his objective in this discussion, it strikes me as self indulgent and ideological.
If your daughter came home and said "I'm screwing my professor" I have a feeling your first reaction would be that its probably not a good thing.
Heaven preserve us from powerful institutions trying to shield us from our bad urges!
"If your daughter came home and said "I'm screwing my professor" I have a feeling your first reaction would be that its probably not a good thing."
Probably. But that would probably be my reaction for pretty much anybody you replace "professor" with.
Are you really endorsing the paternal veto over the sexual choices of adult daughters? That also used to be pretty popular, but I was reliably informed that had totally changed.
What does a paternal veto mean?
Do you mean that I can tell a legally adult daughter who she can date, then use physical violence against her if she does not comply with absolute impunity.
That would be against the law and I would be arrested.
If you mean that a father shouldn't tell his daughter when she's making bad choices because he cares about her well being, then we've got very different ideas on what being a good father means.
Older, more affluent and surprisingly naive men being attracted to attractive, powerful young women is often a dynamic that doesn't work out well.
There, fixed it. And you're right, the premise of the implied question is deeply disturbing. There's a lot of intolerance about, these days.
You're citing fictional evidence. There's no reason to think Disney films today contain logic rather than the currently fashionable nonsense.
I find it more worthwhile to ask WHY the young make foolish decisions rather than, say listening to their parents.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/why_dont_the_yo.html
And once you take a Darwinian perspective you can see that a young woman might be interested in a cad her parents disapprove of, if she expects her parents will still bail her out if she has a kid. Of course, many of the things our culture currently promotes are against your Darwinian interest to take seriously.
Doesn't most of recorded history make you question this? Younger women dating/marrying older men was quite common, although possibly still not the majority of cases. 20 years is a pretty significant gap, but not unheard of.
It seems to me that you are taking an excessively strong stance here, while not really addressing Caplan's actual points of "Does anything make it ok?" I would highly caution my girls against dating much older men, but at some point they are adults and have to, and get to, make their own decisions. Last I checked, that point was somewhere around the "allowed to vote, or get sent off to die on some god forsaken rock," although it does seem like society is pushing off adulthood later and later these days.
It's a lot less common today because we aren't marrying off our 14 year old daughter to that older lord we need a military alliance with.
It's not impossible, but it's unlikely. Strong skepticism should be the default in these cases. A 20+ year age difference is very out of line with normal human experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships
See, you aren't thinking clearly. It has nothing to do with marrying off young daughters to lords; what percentage of marriages could that possibly be? Less than the 1% of current marriages with >=20 year age differences from the wiki article.
Women married older men previously for a number of reasons. Older men were established and thus there was less of a gamble regarding whether or not they were going to "make it"; you could see if they were successful because they already were. Further, women died in childbirth much more frequently, resulting older widowers looking to remarry. Very young men tended to die more frequently in war, often leaving a surplus of women looking to marry after a bloody war. The list goes on.
It probably is the case that wide age discrepancies between spouses is not ideal for most people, but that doesn't mean that it isn't good and useful for some people. Even a small percentage like 5% is going to show up more than you might expect, specifically around certain social networks.
We are debating relationships with a 20+ year age difference. Not sophomores dating seniors.
Yikes!
Yes, that doesn't make it a good idea.
We had a skeezball biology teacher in my high school that gave out As to girls that sat on his lap and stayed late after class. If someone those girls got off on it, it would still have been skeezball.
I'm not interested in the power dynamic aspect of things, beyond the fact that power is attractive enough that young women often make poor long term choices based on that.
Older men often seem more powerful because they've had a much longer adult life to build up power, but that can be a false positive. They can seem mature compared to a young man, but those young men will grow up. I'm skeptical about many young women being able to accurately judge the character of a middle aged romantic partner.
In addition marrying an older person has a lot of problems. You are at very different stages of your lives. You have very different peer groups. The situation with children is going to be difficult too. As you get older, one partner will start to decline and ultimately die a long time before the other partner.
I don't know Katz's marriage situation. I gathered from Bryan's write up that he had a history of inappropriate sexual relationships with students (this was a different woman then his wife, right?). The fact that this is his history makes such relationships questionable.
But really, the details of this situation aren't important. Bryan seemed indignant about the very idea that an age difference can be a problem, not whether it was a problem in Katz's specific situation.
"Does it occur to you that there are young women who want to make it with their professors?"
That is a sexual perversion which no decent, moral society could tolerate. Have you no shame, sir?
1) So Katz has a consensual - repeat: consensual - affair with a student 15 years ago. SO WHAT?
And then he is punished 10 years later by the university? Affairs are not illegal, and universities are not soviet gulags (or perhaps they are). Nobody finds this strange? 10 years later? What is this, the Soviet Union?
2) Eisgruber is the ultimate idiot. He publicly said that in Princeton there was and is "systemic racism". When (still under the Trump Admin) he was called out by the US Dept of Education, he ducked. He cowered. If in Princeton there is really systematic racism, then Eisgruber should give up his multi-million dollar salary and Princeton should sell its 22 billion dollar endowment and give it to the oppressed minorities. But Eisgruber and Princeton will not do it, of course, because they are idiots.
3) Nobody points out this: are you all an army of saints without fault? Can all and everybody of you, including all in Princeton students, faculty, staff, throw the first stone, because you are all free of sin? Yes, you are all free of sin?
If yes, how do you do it? Because certainly I am not free of sin, and I cannot throw the first stone.
I felt the following could best explain my case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI9PJrQsZq4
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vdnBD_e_BXCPg6VJ90AQcbabmy79GCVx/view
As stated in the essay, it may well be that Josh Katz does not deserve the same objective assessment as Cleon, and it may well be his professional situation is unrelated to his morality. I address only this conflict between what is to be done when you view someone as a moral reprobate. If you assessment of their morality is wrong that is a different concern.
Certainly, the people Bryan is talking to believe this moral view, and I'm not sure trying to convince them that professor/student relations are "true love" is fruitful here. Bryan would be better off admitting that they are frought and dangerous things that maybe even ought to disbarred by the university. Having said that, that was not the rules when this took place, and we don't try a man twice, and really its all just an excuse for a different cause.
The desire to unperson moral reprobates has some purpose. It's necessary. It is in fact a substitute for formal institutional and ultimately forceful imposition of social norms. Such imposition ought best be understand as a failure of informal social pressure to do what it needs to do.
Telling people that think they are doing justice shouldn't do justice or making nonsensical gotcha side arugements is a non starter.
You linked to an essay, “After Priggery, What?”by C.S. Lewis, who married a woman, Joy Davidman, 17 years his junior. Though she was not in her 20s, she was married to someone else when she fell in love with Lewis and moved to England with her two sons to try to win him (although I don’t think he understood that she had moved to England with that purpose). https://lithub.com/finding-joy/. Priggery would be far better aimed at Lewis and Davidman than Katz and Gold. But I don’t think it should properly be aimed at either. The brief marriage brought great joy (sorry, but that’s the word) to Lewis, and Davidman’s death from cancer brought forth one of his best books, A Grief Observed. Lewis and Davidman were individual people, not age brackets. So are Katz and Gold. They are best judged as such.
Joy Davidman was 40 or something, and it seems see very much knew what she was getting into. She went to England for the express stated purpose of seducing Lewis. JRR Tolkien strongly disapproved of her.
Lewis seems to have had some strange issues with sex. He was in a weird relationship with an older woman for a long time before that. He had some kind of strange abandonment issues with his mother. Overall, I don't think he made many healthy decisions in his personal life with women. Many of his friends seemed to share this assessment.
Anyway, these were grown adults not in any kind of professional relationship. This example really doesn't relate to the general matter of middle aged man trying to bed 20 year old women that they have authority over.
You think there should be opprobrium against older men marrying younger women. CS Lewis, who you think for some reason can “explain your case,” doesn’t agree with you. Solveig Gold says that she is the alpha in her relationship with Katz. Are you going to engage with that, or are you just going keep repeating your mantra about “men who have authority over younger women”?
***When they earnestly observed, “There’s a power imbalance here,” I replied, “Maybe some people like a power imbalance.”***
I wonder why they (and Bryan?) apparently assumed the power imbalance put Katz above the student instead of vice-versa. Would they make the same assumption if the professor were a woman and the student a man? Or if they were both women or both men?
What happens after "waiting a few years"? The age gap's going to disappear? - "Waiting" with what, exactly? Dating, kissing, parking? - Any power "imbalance" is MUCH reduced by marriage. (Even the considerable power of the younger partner - to just get a lover much younger than their "elderly" spouse). When Madonna or Liz Taylor do it, I guess it's "liberating".
Why shouldn’t a 10yo be with a 30yo?
10 sounds pre-pubescent.
I think they were talking about the professor/student affair
Yes, and that can be--to use a much abused word--"problematic." I am sure there are unhappy cases of that, but given my lack of personal experience in this and that the happy cases will be kept closely secret by all involved, I am not even confident that it is on the whole a harmful thing.
I doubt that the students claiming it was "problematic" due to "power dynamics" could explain what exactly the problem was if they had to use only simple, non-academic language that a child could understand.
Are they upset that such injustices happen? Or just incensed that it happened to them?
Re 11: "Other than the government itself, it is hard to think of any other large organization where profit-and-loss matter less than elite universities."
I've come to think "corporate" is quite accurate. Think of universities as defense contractors. Defense contractors get paid by the federal government (indirectly, because congress funds it and DoD gets it) to produce products that are, fortunately, of an almost wholly unknown quantity (we don't use most of this stuff to actually wage war with, so we don't have a very good idea of whether it works or not).
Even for elite universities, the business is likewise "selling" education which is directly or indirectly (through subsidy and regulation) required to be purchased by the government. They produce an intangible good of almost wholly unknown quantity, just like "defense".
In both cases, profit maximization for the corporation has a requirement that the suppliers create demand for their products. Defense contractors lobby ceaselessly for more defense spending. Educators lobby ceaselessly for more subsidies for education, and at heart HR and DEI stuff is theoretically advancing more "educational requirements" upon people. The folks doing the educating will be making a profit by doing this.
Now, does some DEI mandarin at Princeton think in these terms? No. But the "Security Experts" that are always telling us to spend heavily to prepare for the next war... they often truly believe the next war is around the corner too. They're still pushing what can be rightly called their corporate agenda.
I knew Solveig Gold (not well). She can look after herself. She thinks there is a power imbalance between her and Professor Katz in her favor — see the link in #9 above. I can think of a couple good scholarly marriages with age disparities (Will and Ariel Durant; Russell and Annette Kirk); I have a friend with a much younger wife and a toddler; they seem happy. On the bad side the Causubons in Middlemarch and Chip and Melissa in The Corrections come to mind. But those are both fiction and in neither is there a power imbalance in favor of the older man IMO. I’m mildly surprised people are so bothered by Katz and Gold.
Many people are shocked when liberals and centrists are radicalized by run-ins with the woke. Like Bryan, I’m more surprised when they aren’t radicalized.
I'd have also been interested to know their feelings if the genders had been reversed. If the objection were to do with the power dynamic was this purely because the professor was older (and that he was a man was irrelevant), or was him being a man the issue? What about if it had been a gay relationship with a 20 year gap?
Let's be blunt, when there is a 20 year age gap its usually predatory with the older partner doing it for personal sexual gratification, with the likely outcome that the younger partner is set aside when they are bored with them.
What if we all committed to condemning older parties who do set aside their younger partners after growing bored of them, but not people like Katz who don't appear to have done that?
Whether that is 'usually' the case is an empirical question which I don't have the answer to. However the direction of predation/exploitation is very often framed the other way around with the younger partner implied to be marrying the older one to get their money. Perhaps this framing is more common when it is an older woman and a younger man, hence my original question.
Yes, we definitely need to crack down on relationships in which people use each other just for sexual gratification without any long-term commitment. That's disgusting.
On a completely unrelated subject, isn't it outrageous how to fascist homophobes dare suggest putting a pause on gay orgies until monkeypox is under control?
Number of sexual relationships has a negative correlation with marriage outcomes and happiness. The traditional norms on sex are basically correct for long term life outcomes.
I don't know what "crack down" means, but I am raising my daughters not to treat sex flippantly because I value their happiness and well being.
Yes, gays are reckless hedonists whose sexual conduct often endangers themselves and often those around them.
Ok, I think I understand you know.
You are an advocate of some level of sexual self-constraint. I may agree. I may not. But that is a longer argument I am not prepared to have here and today.
What Prof. Caplan (and I and perhaps other commenters) were dunking on was not you.
What we were mocking was the phenomenon of the modern self-proclaimed liberationist who loudly shouts their tolerance... nay, embrace, of every form of adult (at least) sexual practice, but will, the second they encounter one associated with an outgroup, display a level of prudishness and censoriousness that would embarrass the stereotype of a Victorian divine.
Many university policies are too sweeping for sure (at Texas A&M it is a officially a fireable offense for a physics grad student to hook up with an agriculture senior if they meet at a bar). But I don’t understand where you and your Twitter followers get the idea that 20% of faculty have multiple affairs with undergrads in their classes.
There are many bad things a professor could do other than have an affair.
Thanks for the links - I'm very sorry to hear what Dr. Katz did, and what happened to him, but glad that he seems to have found faith, and a good wife.
I do wonder what it would take for more Bret Weinsteins to emerge, though.