Can a professor’s affair with a student diagnose what ails our culture? When that professor gets a celebratory profile in The New Yorker, the answer is, a resounding — and depressing — yes.
Agnes Callard is a married University of Chicago professor who left her husband for a male student, divorcing the former and marrying the latter. As Callard reported the affair to the administration before they had a chance to investigate, the celebrated philosopher managed to keep her tenured position.
Professors have been leaving their long-suffering wives for their students for a very long time. Callard’s case reverses the typical gender roles, but it’s 2023. Most of us recognize, that given enough liberty to do so, some women behave just as badly as men. Isn’t that part of what feminism fought for? The freedom of women to make the same reckless, consequence-free decisions as their husbands and brothers?
Callard, of course, takes it a little farther than the standard-issue account of an affair. In a long and worshipful profile by Rachel Aviv, Callard argues that her divorce and second marriage are part of an Aristotelian pursuit of the Good, the Noble, and the True. Just six weeks after falling in love with her student, she came clean to her classes, not pleading for forgiveness but asking them to join her on a philosophical investigation of the nature of love:
After the talk, a colleague told Agnes that she was speaking as if she thought she were Socrates. ‘I was,
