Jessai Flores

In elementary school, I was a teacher’s pet. Not in a snitching way, but in an itching for brownie points way. Jarred by voices and brows raised in response to disobedience, I avoided the kids whose mettle drew them to the metal legs of the time-out stool. When my kindergarten teacher asked me to count to 100 using the tiniest foam ones blocks — while other kids got to use tens — I held in my mutinous tears rather than betray any hint of resistance. The best way to the front of the line, I thought, was to be granted the privilege of being its leader. 

I encountered a third-grade teacher who spent months showing us how to bind books because she never really got the hang of teaching long division and a fifth-grade teacher who had us read “The Grapes of Wrath” because we were supposedly gifted and talented — I understood seven sentences on the three pages I got through. My mom linked herself on an email chain with parents who felt the teacher’s tyrannical disposition was worth resisting, but I never really understood why. Shouldn’t anyone whose name started with a “Ms.” know best?

Come high school, my friends and I had dropped the titles and the total obsequience, running late to classrooms and Google Classroom deadlines, tacitly agreeing that school was something to survive, not to satisfy. Students who stayed after class to ask teachers questions were suck-ups, the administration was out to get the newspaper board and obedience was idiotic if it didn’t get you anywhere. 

This mindset taught me to not question values, but rather the perverse effects that they had on me. Teachers weren’t objectively bad unless they gave low grades, and ID policies at the school entryway weren’t meant to control threats to our safety, but rather the behavior of the student population. Why? For their own entertainment. Because the ID ladies were perpetually underpaid, misunderstood and wanted to take their disgruntledness out on us. Because adults thought they knew better. 

But I have returned to my roots. At Yale, adults do know better. Each professor has countless accolades and a handful of postgraduate degrees. Each alumni guest speaker is an expert in a field from which they have collected wildflowers perfumed with insight over the years. If you believe in your own future impact, you won’t question their outlook, because they are what you will become — an indisputable source of inspiration and truth. 

I’ve realized that not everyone actually thinks this way.

I leave yet another hour-long event with another prominent speaker, head spinning with the intoxicating fumes of success.

“What did you think?” I ask my friend as we wait for the elevator, knowing what she’ll say, because she is the kindest person I’ve ever met and had taken dutiful notes throughout the event. The speaker had been perceptive, conquering, galvanizing, brave. I’d known they would be even before they’d started speaking.

As we cross Prospect Street, she expresses her disillusionment with the guest’s view of the world. “It’s like they’re stuck in 2012,” she says. Not for the first time, it dawns on me that I approach every “expert” as a beacon of veracity, when really, they are susceptible to the same whims of falsehood and delusion that I am. Why do I think that anyone and everyone endowed with the title of “guest speaker” starts at 100, when really, they should have to build their credibility up from zero; when really, degrees and CVs don’t have anything to do with a person’s proximity to truth? Just as elementary school me worshiped the “Ms.,” college me lauds the “expert,” the “Pulitzer prize winner,” the “pioneer.” 

This deference to authority follows me at night, like a petulant shadow, dogging my steps through Hobbes, Hegel, Hume. As I tackle these texts, I’m plagued by my willingness to accept the words before me as valid, so that they enter my understanding not as theory, but as truth. I no longer try to recognize the point of view of an author, having thrown off the acronyms of AP U.S. History; now, I instinctively inhabit a thinker’s perspective in order to seek shelter from the rains of uncertainty. 

So how do I substantiate my own umbrella, my own lens which allows me to simultaneously view the world and be protected from it? How do I stop deferring to social authority, relinquishing my ability to grapple with the truth before I get to seek it out? I don’t know — but maybe not knowing is correct. Perhaps it is the best hydrophobic protection against the watershed moment governing college campuses.