Lil Kim’s Quiet Storm verse + Downton Abbey + DuBois. 
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You don’t treat your students like friends because they cannot be your friend. Not structurally, not meaningfully and not in any way that truly benefits them. It is manipulative to deny or confuse that social fact.
Friendship cannot happen across those kind of power dynamics. You can be a mentor, a mentee (of theirs!), a guidance counselor, a spiritual advisor. You cannot be friends.
And finally, if no one has told you, your divorce is boring, no one cares about your sex life, your kids are cute and all but not that engaging to hear about. See, I can tell you that because we are equals. I could be a friend. Your student cannot.
Tl;dr is “professoring is servant leadership and not Tinder for bored, boring middle-aged people who like for their friends to be coerced”.
I think a lot of people confuse "friendly" for "friend."
& yet I have become true friends with several of mine after they left school because of the relationship we started during.
I wish this was actually part of like institutional training at universities and companies. I've seen conflicts especially with people who are closer ages but far in status completely utterly unaware of their power differentials and exploitative potential.
Are they truly unaware? or willfully ignorant because it facilitates their (at best) convenience or (at worst) exploitation?
And I think many white dudes in particular do not understand that there are differences. We can treat students like people without insinuating false intimacy.
I agree with this 99.9999% of the time. I've only seen one instance where a student and a professor (both in their fifties) became friends and dated after he took her class. Because there was no significant age gap, it didn't seem icky. They ended up married two years later.
I think the key there though is that it was after he took her class and that there wasn’t a significant age difference, so they were essentially peers and there wasn’t a chance of either of them abusing the relationship for the sake of a grade. That seems fine to me too.
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