Teacher Dilemma: Sued If You Do, Sued If You Don’t

Like many teachers, I have heard all the standard excuses from college students to explain why they didn’t do their homework. Most are straightforward (“I was sick”) or amusing (“I left it in my laundry at my parent’s house”).

Occasionally, though, the justifications are alarming, and I fear that the tip of a daiquiri pitcher is a common source of student failure, as for the young man who candidly informed me, “I partied hardy this weekend, got into a DUI crash and spent the night in jail.”

My reaction in that case was limited by the perverse situation in which modern educators find themselves. We are forbidden (or, rather, scared off by the prospects of litigation) from giving students behavioral remonstrations.

When you see the sports riots on college campuses or hear about out-of-control sex parties in dorms or drinking binges at fraternity houses, recall that the young people in question have no one to tell them to “cut it out.” At one time, schools could exercise the doctrine of in loco parentis, Latin for “in the place of the parents.”

The idea that institutions of higher learning should play some supervisory role over student behavior was a casualty of the 1960s. At that time, the watchwords for students were “freedom” and “independence.” Many faculty members, unfortunately, cheered their rebellious pupils, assuming that getting rid of dress codes, same-sex dorms, curfews, snooping and teacher scolding was part of some larger struggle for human liberation.

The right of 18-year-olds to vote, though, should not have been paired with the right to drink yourself into a coma. It’s time to bring loco back.

Ironically, the courts still pretend that educational institutions have the ability to stymie stupidity. Invariably, the parents of kids who binge-drink themselves to death win legal judgments against the schools they attended. Thus the dilemma: Intervene and risk being sued; allow freedom and get sued for not intervening.

Add to the mix America’s worship of youth itself. Advertisers seem to think that we are all 15 years old or want to be. Yet a youth culture is, by definition, one that needs to be educated and cultivated to maturity, not ogled and aped. Indeed, studies of the brain suggest that the centers that monitor control and reason do not develop fully until much later than the teen years. As the philosopher Kierkegaard put it: “Wisdom does not grow with wisdom teeth.”

Interestingly, among the last bastions of in loco parentis are some of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. I have African American students who transferred or have siblings who attended such institutions. They tell me that teachers there still feel the duty (and are given the license) to tell students to “shape up” and act properly.

Perhaps all of us, parents and teachers, need to reclaim our rights to oversee the behavior of children, even those who can vote or join the Army (which, in past days, was the perfect place to reform “boys gone wild”).

Most of my students are wonderful, law-abiding and decent; otherwise, I wouldn’t be a teacher. But they are also still growing up, and they need strong adult supervision to nurture them.