Adulthood is Learned

but what if no one teaches it?

Through fourteen weeks of OSUT — one-station unit training, the infantry equivalent of basic training — I had three drill sergeants, one more than the usual number. We had the third drill sergeant because the army has reservists who train in that role in case the organization needs to be rapidly expanded; it keeps a cadre of training NCOs ready for the role with weekend drill and two weeks of duty in the summer. They were practicing.

The reservists played drill sergeants, like they’d learned the role from Full Metal Jacket. They yelled a lot, threatened a lot, punished a lot, stormed around with their arms cocked like gunfighters.

Several of the regular army drill sergeants, on the other hand, were at their most devastatingly effective when they got quiet. It was never a good sign. “Come gather around me and take a knee.” Uh-oh. Their theme was who you are. They told us that we were revealing ourselves, and they could see us. Your discipline, your effort, your willingness to complete something difficult, those are the man you are. I remember very distinctly the moment that Drill Sergeant Rodney Flores asked us all, 25 years ago, “What are your children gonna see when they look at you?” If you fail me, he said, you’ll fail them. Because that’s the man you’ve chosen to be. And everyone will know.

They foregrounded the choice: you can’t leave here without deciding who you are, and marking that decision with your behavior. To a remarkable degree, and in ways that only became clear over time, our drill sergeants were teaching husband and father manhood, adult behavior: duty, loyalty, commitment, presence. You said you would do [thing here], so do it.

We have three basic institutions that teach adulthood: You can go to college, you can enlist in the military, or you can leave high school and just go to work and start supporting yourself. And then, in theory, a variety of mentors teach you into adulthood.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, had students to his house for dinner recently, and they took over his home for an anti-Israel protest. Going to dinner at the dean’s home is teaching; it’s meant to prepare law students for professional behavior. J.D. Vance wrote about this: He grew up dirt poor, then went to Yale Law. His professors taught him how to hold the wine glass, how to look like a member of his profession and its implied social class, and that teaching was also law school.

I was an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college where dinner at the professor’s house was sometimes part of the educational universe, and students were frequently expected to interact with professors in ways that resembled peer relationships — like “faculty fireside,” when a professor presented his or her latest research to students next to the fireplace in a dorm building, and students were expected to ask meaningful questions about research agendas and the examination of evidence. In grad school at a giant research university, those relationships get dialed up to the next level, and dinner at the professor’s house becomes more important. You behave like the role you’re preparing to enter. You learn.

So what happens when the institutions that teach adulthood are degraded?

Everyone has noticed the humorless and not-terribly-bright PhD candidate at Columbia who demanded that the university deliver food and drinks to students who broke into a campus building and occupied it by force, warning that the student occupiers would die of dehydration if they weren’t given beverages by the institution. But this comment gets right to the important point:

Who taught her? What did they teach her? Here, watch a sociology professor explain that a university is objecting to the destructive occupation of a campus building because “MAGA Republicans” have corrupted the minds of university leaders:

No one is teaching. Or, rather, the teachers are teaching the ego-tantrum, validating toddler politics with their own toddler politics. You have to have a cohort of adults to prepare the next cohort of adults. And so here we are. Anyone who objects to you making your encampment on campus a Jew-free zone is obviously a MAGA jerk.

Universities have to teach. Here’s the president of Yale, getting it right:

As a university dedicated to learning and the search for truth, we hold the exchange of ideas and the diversity of viewpoints to be fundamental. To claim control of a shared physical space and to impose an intellectual and ideological litmus test are not in keeping with our bedrock principles and values.

There aren’t many academic leaders who have passed this test.

If you don’t put a beverage in my mouth, I’ll die of dehydration. That comes from somewhere. It’s learned behavior, and we should be angrier at the people who taught it than we are at the students who learned it.