How often do you have brunch with your students?”
An undergraduate at the University of Dallas asked me this, cheerfully and innocently, on a recent Saturday morning. I was visiting the university to deliver a lecture, and this student had invited me to brunch. I joined him in a run-down but much-loved apartment in Irving, Texas, together with fifteen or so other UD students, a few recent alumni, two babies of recent alumni, and a distinguished historian on the faculty. Laid out on the table before us, below a picture of an armadillo (we were in the Lone Star State) and an Irish flag (two of the residents of the apartment have Celtic blood and a name to show for it), was a fine spread: sausages, a yummy frittata, coffee and pound cake, orange juice and prosecco, and (as a nod to my Oxford education, I was told) marmalade.
My immediate reaction to the student's question was to laugh. Then I began to tear up. The simple answer is that I never have brunch with my students anymore. For one thing, I don’t have any students now that Princeton University, which recently branded me a racist, no longer permits me to teach while it “relitigate[s] incidents from years earlier that ha[ve] already been adjudicated” (to quote Anne Applebaum). Even if I were still properly employed in academia, however, I probably wouldn’t be having brunch with my students. And if, somehow, I were having brunch with them anyway, it certainly couldn’t be in a private residence and it certainly couldn’t involve prosecco. It is 2022, after all, and every action and every word, every smile and every joke, every against-the-grain remark and every allusion to the founding fathers is liable to cause offense.
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