In this episode, I join my fellow queer studies friends and colleagues Robert McRuer and Anthony Michael D’Agostino to make a case for why teaching sex matters more than ever to the intellectual and interpersonal growth of generations of American youth. In the absence of any standardized sex education at the K-12 level, and in the face of a growing loneliness epidemic exacerbated by social media addiction and our society’s post-covid emotional hangover, we discuss how studying the history of sexuality can grant Gen Z a greater sense of agency, freedom and awareness about how different groups of people across history have organized their intimate and erotic relationships. We especially stress how the history of LGBTQ sexuality offers many powerful examples of alternative community formation, including the celebration of long-term friendship and mutual aid that emerged out of different forms of exclusion from a predominantly heterosexual society. Not only does sex matter to higher education because it is a fundamental part of our species existence, but also because it provides equipment for living in a time of intense alienation and social atrophy. Moreover, in a world dominated by rampant sexual harassment, abuse and intimate partner violence, the study of sex and sexuality in all its dimensions (sociological, psychological, cultural, historical and political) has the potential to produce less abusive, more thoughtful, caring, and self-aware citizens who just might have healthier friendships, romantic relationships, marriages, and community networks because of it. We think the real scandal is how aggressively politicians and members of the public want to banish discussion of sex and sexuality from the very university spaces where those conversations need to be happening if we want a future where more people have better and more humane sex, and like it!

In this week's Knowledge Drop, I reunite with my superhero teammate and bestie Anthony Michael D'Agostino to talk about what it means to get a PhD in the humanities. A PhD or Doctor of Philosophy is a terminal degree or the highest level of official education one can receive in a given field. Only two percent of Americans have a doctoral degree and it's nearly always a requirement to be a full-time university professor. We talk about the process of getting a Ph.D., the pleasures and challenges of contributing genuinely original knowledge to a field of study, and how the degree has been an integral part in shaping the scholars and teachers we've become. Our hope is to give listeners a picture of the kind of years-long training that professors go through in order to teach generations of college students.

Today, I’ve brought together two of the most accomplished teachers I know to talk about the unique opportunities and challenges of teaching Gen Z, that awesomely diverse group of sixteen to twenty-eight year olds who are poised to inherent a wildly uncertain American future. On one end of the spectrum, Darieck Scott has been teaching at UC Berkeley for nearly thirty years as professor of African American literature; as he nears retirement, Darieck still celebrates the capacity of the university classroom experience to spark a life-changing encounter with the unknown—in his words, to experience something “mind-blowing”—including students’ interactions with literary texts and works of art that long preceded the digital age. On the other, my fellow UW Madison colleague Ainehi Edoro has been a professor for seven years; still at the start of her teaching journey, Ainehi has committed herself to training this generation of students in social media and AI literacy, encouraging them to be intelligent and inventive producers of digital media content rather than passive consumers of it.

In our dialogue we share some of our observations about the long-term effects of Covid, economic uncertainty, and non-stop political upheaval on our students as well as our divergent strategies for responding to this generation’s shifting educational and career aspirations. Later in the episode, we invite the Nerd Form the Future production team, UW Madison English major Ella Rae Olson and journalism major Oliver Gerharz, to join our conversation. They help us debunk a series of myths about Gen Z, reminding us that this generation is incredibly hardworking, self-critical about their own overreliance on technology, deeply eager for more in-person interaction, and earnestly committed to making a more just world. We collectively arrive at the conclusion that we could all use a hefty dose of intergenerational dialogue to dispose of some of the narrow cliches we’ve attached to the most diverse generation in American history before they’ve even come into their own.