Now, decades later, the case has gone viral again. A Netflix show based on the murders, Monsters, became the most watched show on the platform, and the Menendez brothers’ Wikipedia page became the most viewed entry on the website. More than 400,000 people have signed a petition calling for the brothers to be freed, arguing their claims of sexual abuse were not taken seriously. Their demands have been echoed by several high-profile figures, including Kim Kardashian, and the former District Attorney of Los Angeles County, George Gasc​​ón. Last month, the brothers made their first appearance in court for a hearing that could finally see them freed. The judge has scheduled a second hearing for 30 January.

What makes the widespread support for Lyle and Erik so unsettling is that the brothers are not victims. They’re manipulative predators. And the reason they’re being regarded as victims is that culture and technology have enabled the spread of emotionally-transmitted diseases that debilitate thought. Put simply, stupidity has gone viral.

The facts of the case are well-established: Erik confessed to his therapist, Dr Jerome Oziel, that he and Lyle had killed their father, José, because he was domineering, and their mother, Kitty, because she was hopelessly depressed. Neither brother mentioned sexual abuse to Oziel. Nor did they mention it to their first lawyer, Robert Shapiro.

The brothers’ abuse claims only emerged after they met Erik’s second lawyer, Leslie Abramson, the following year. She started building a self-defence case, arguing the brothers had acted after confronting their parents about the sexual abuse, when their father threatened them. This was a tough strategy in part because there was no good evidence that the brothers had been in imminent danger requiring self-defence — in fact, the murder was clearly premeditated, with the brothers forging the paperwork to purchase two shotguns before the shootings. Nor was there any good evidence they’d been sexually abused.

By contrast, there was ample evidence of the brothers’ greed. A year before the murders, they were caught committing a string of burglaries in their Calabasas neighbourhood, stealing around $100,000 worth of goods. After the killings, they went on an extravagant spending spree, buying Rolexes, Porsches, and even a buffalo wings restaurant.

In order to counter this image of cruelty and greed, the brothers’ lawyers had to get creative. They tried to portray the brothers as sweet and naïve kids, dressing them in boyish jumpers. Lansing kept referring to them in court as “the children”, and Abramson would often maternally place her arm round Erik, and pick lint off his sweater. Her behaviour was so conspicuous the judge reprimanded her for it.

The lawyers also drew on a wealth of abuse-related pseudoscience. They received diagnostic advice from Paul Mones, a lawyer with no clinical training. Eight of the things the brothers claimed their father had done to them, such as poking them with pencils during rape, are mentioned in case studies in Mones’s book, When a Child Kills. Two witnesses said that the brothers had studied Mones’s book in jail.

Ultimately, the jury was unable to reach a verdict, so a second trial was held. Since the lawyers had failed to show during the first trial that Lyle and Erik’s supposed sexual abuse gave them a valid self-defence argument, testimony regarding the abuse allegations was not permitted in the second trial. Under these conditions, the second jury reached a unanimous decision that Lyle and Erik were guilty of murder, and the brothers were jailed for life with no possibility of parole. In other words, justice was served. The brothers had planned their parents’ murder, killed them while they were watching TV, and then celebrated by lavishly spending their money.

And yet, hundreds of thousands of people are now treating the Menendez brothers as victims. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 2015, the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer convinced vast numbers of people that the rapist and murderer Steven Avery was an innocent victim of corrupt police. A petition to release him was signed by more than half-a-million people despite the significant evidence against him.

Why are people so easily convinced that cold-blooded killers are victims? It can’t simply be blamed on stupidity — after all, many gullible campaigns have in the past been led by respected intellectuals. In 1977, the novelist Norman Mailer was struck by the writing ability of the convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott, and, convinced he was reformed, called for his release. His wish was granted, and Abbott used his newfound freedom to stab a waiter dead.

A few years later, the Nobel Prize-winning novelists Günter Grass and Elfriede Jelinek, touched by the writings of rapist and murderer Jack Unterweger, petitioned for his release. Once out of prison, he celebrated by raping and murdering nine more women. The delusions of these authors, as well as those of the viewers of Making A Murderer, were born not from stupidity, but from empathy — or the tendency to try to feel what others feel.

The Menendez brothers, who had both written works of fiction, were masters of evoking both empathy and sympathy. Erik was an aspiring actor and Lyle admitted to his biographer Norma Novelli that he practiced crying convincingly. In the first trial, the brothers made heavy use of their acting and storytelling abilities, relating vivid tales of abuse while weeping with cinematic gravitas.

Curiously, during the first trial, the brothers’ claims proved more persuasive to women than men. Erik’s trial resulted in a hung jury, with all six of the male jurors pressing for a murder conviction, and all six female jurors pressing for a lesser conviction because they believed the brothers’ claims of abuse. Today, too, women seem to disproportionally trust the brothers’ story; most of the names on the petition to free the brothers are female.

One reason for this gender disparity may be that women, like great novelists, tend to be more empathic than the average man. A substantial number of studies have found that in mock sexual abuse trials, female jurors tend to be significantly more empathetic toward the alleged victims, lending greater weight to their expressed emotions and personal testimony when deciding on the verdict. Another study found that in a Menendez-style mock court trial in which the defendant was charged with killing their allegedly abusive father, female jurors were more likely to believe the defendants’ claims of abuse and consider them innocent of murder.

The same crocodile tears that won over female jurors in Erik’s first trial have now gone viral on social media, convincing many more of the Menendez brothers’ innocence. Since 2020, footage of the brothers’ courtroom acting has been frequently sliced into snippets, set to heartfelt music, and posted on TikTok. And yet social media alone is not to blame: the world is not just technologically different from the era when Lyle and Erik were convicted, it’s also culturally different. And culture has been pivotal in spreading falsehoods about the Menendez case.

To understand how culture has changed, we need to look again at the empathy gender gap. This difference doesn’t just affect the verdicts of juries. It likely also impacts the entire field of psychology, which in the 20th century was dominated by men, but in the 21st has increasingly become dominated by women. Between 2011 and 2021, the share of registered female psychologists in the US increased from 61% to 69%, and in the UK, women now make up more than three-quarters of all registered psychologists. This has correlated with a change in the way psychology is conducted, from the old masculine approach of objectifying humans as specimens to be studied with cold and often cruel detachment, to a more feminine, empathic approach that centres the feelings and lived experience of those under examination, even if this conflicts with objective reality.

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This matters because the social sciences shape mainstream culture, defining which human behaviours are normal and healthy, and which are aberrations to be cured. In a patriarchal, Islamist country like Iran, for instance, female immodesty is often considered a mental illness, and a mental health clinic will soon open to “treat” women who refuse to wear a hijab. Meanwhile, the West’s matriarchal field of psychology has normalised empathy, defining a lack of it as a problem to be fixed. This helps to explain why the last two decades have seen a surge in the use of the word “empathy” in published books.

One consequence of Western society’s idolisation of empathy is that certain myths have been allowed to flourish because they’re empathogenic: they foster empathy. The most important of these myths is “blank-slatism”, which sees people as “blank slates” who have little to no inherent nature, and are shaped largely by culture. In this view, people only become criminals due to negative experiences such as abuse or poverty, so a core part of any criminal case becomes identifying the trauma that produced the criminal. This is a seductive view for social scientists because it means anyone can be “fixed” through exposure to the right environment. It also encourages empathy because it’s easier and more rational to empathise with others if we’re all fundamentally the same person, differentiated only by experience.

The problem is, we’re not all the same. Blank-slatism has been resoundingly disproven by decades of twin studies. It can also be disproven by common sense. If people become criminals only because of experiences like abuse or poverty, then everyone who was poor or abused would become a criminal, yet the overwhelming majority don’t — and many who are neither poor nor abused do. In fact, the majority of crime is committed by a small minority of repeat offenders, suggesting personality plays a key role.

Since we all have distinct personalities, our minds are more alien to each other than we might assume. This makes empathy an inaccurate way to understand or predict the behaviour of others. A recent study found that, while women do tend to be more empathetic than men, they’re no better at inferring other people’s mental states. And while empathy is useful for some things, such as forming personal connections with others, it is a social guide, not a moral or judicial one. Nowadays, though, people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, which is dangerously delusional.

A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathise with people, only with the people we think they are. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for others, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealise them, clouding our better judgement.

When we start identifying too strongly with another person, we will often go to great lengths to defend our idealised image of them. For instance, Lyle and Erik’s supporters sometimes argue that the brothers’ lavish spending spree with their murdered parents’ money was further evidence they were traumatised, because it showed they were trying to cope through “retail therapy”. As if the natural response to a lifetime of sexual abuse is to purchase a buffalo wings restaurant.

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Ultimately, empathy is a form of imagination. Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez in Monsters, became convinced the brothers were telling the truth, and even visited them in prison. And yet although it was Koch’s job to put himself in Erik’s shoes, he never actually empathised with Erik; only with the idealised version of Erik he’d decided to portray.

Despite deluding so many people, empathy rarely gets any pushback in the West today. This is because there’s an assumption that empathy is key to compassion, and opposing compassion is a good way to be ostracised from polite society. However, not only is empathy not required to be compassionate, but it can also be an obstacle to it. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom compares empathy to a spotlight: we only shine it on a few people at a time, and whenever we do, we lose sight of, and concern for, everyone else.

But empathy doesn’t just reduce our concern for others, it can also make us spiteful toward them if we feel they pose a threat to the object of our empathy. In one study, participants were told of a contest between two students for a small cash prize. Those who empathised strongly with the poorer contestant acted cruelly towards her rival — even though her rival was not responsible for her financial distress. Empathy-driven spite can also frequently be seen in the real world, such as in the recent case of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose murder was widely celebrated on social media due to his company’s history of denying health insurance claims. In such cases those who empathise with one side’s pain often wish to inflict even greater pain on the other. One might even say empathy is a major cause of sadism in the world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that many mock trial studies that find female jurors are more empathetic toward the alleged abuse victim also find they’re more punitive toward the alleged abuser, demanding significantly harsher sentences. We see this same empathic spite in the online Menendez discourse, most notably in the fact that many people who believe Lyle and Erik are victims also claim they were right to murder their parents. Some TikTok clips even celebrate the shooting. Predictably, TikTok is now also filled with clips attacking Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor in the first trial. One clip, which so far has more than 120,000 likes, shows photographs of Bozanich as a young woman and then as an older one, and states: “This is how you age when you’re a cunt.”

Not only does empathy make people spiteful, it also makes them unjust. In one study, participants watched an interview with a fictitious, terminally-ill girl called Sheri, and were then asked whether they would move her up the waiting list to receive end-of-life care — even though this would disadvantage other terminally-ill kids who needed the help more. Of those who were told to decide objectively, one-third opted to move Sheri up the list; of those who’d been asked explicitly to empathise with her, three-quarters did. Crucially, the participants admitted their decision to favour Sheri was unfair. Their empathy overruled their principles.

This has also been apparent in the Menendez case. Not only did some of Lyle’s friends, including his ex-girlfriend Traci Baker, agree to lie for him in court, but, recently, web users are now knowingly lying on their behalf. A Wikipedia editor called “Limitlessyou” started adding false and misleading claims on the “Lyle and Erik Menendez” page to portray the brothers as victims. One claim was that Erik’s prosecutor, Lester Kuriyama, theorised that Erik’s alleged homosexuality suggested José’s alleged molestation was consensual. The LA Times article that Limitlessyou cited for this claim included no such quote, because the quote was a fabrication; in reality, Kuriyama had theorised that Erik’s supposed homosexuality may have been the real cause of friction between Erik and José. Limitlessyou’s dishonest edit seems to have been intended to portray Kuriyama as a horrid person.

The ease with which people who empathise with Lyle and Erik can be inspired to lie for them is important because it casts doubt on two pieces of evidence recently submitted to exonerate the brothers. The first of these is a recently “discovered” letter, supposedly written by Erik to his cousin Andy Cano a year before the murders, in which Erik alludes to being sexually abused. The second is a sworn affidavit by Roy Rossello — a former member of Menudo, a boy band once managed by José Menendez — in which Rossello alleges he was raped by Jose. This evidence has not yet been authenticated, and yet it was cited by the former District Attorney for Los Angeles County, George Gascón, to support his push for a resentencing hearing to free the brothers.

As a former prosecutor, Gascón should be more discerning of a criminal case than the average TikToker or Hollywood celebrity, and yet he appears to be no less gullible. His political history suggests he’s embraced the same idealistic blank-slatism that characterises our age of empathy: criminals are not born but made, therefore criminals are victims and require understanding, not condemnation. He has spent his career trying to soften California’s approach to crime, introducing policies based on a fictional model of humanity. In 2011, he replaced Kamala Harris as district attorney of San Francisco, a position he held until 2019. During his two terms, San Francisco prosecutors filed criminal charges in less than half of cases presented by city police, and violent crime, which had been decreasing, increased by 15% while property crimes like vehicle break-ins increased by almost 50%.

In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd race riots, having pledged to tackle “systemic racism”, Gascón then became district attorney of America’s most populous county, Los Angeles. His approach to crime in LA was even laxer than in San Francisco, and within three years of his arrival, shoplifting had increased by a staggering 133%. He soon faced a public backlash, including from his own prosecutors, and last month was finally voted out of office. Ironically, the push to unseat him was led by victims of crime, who’d been left in the dark when Gascón chose to shine his empathy spotlight on criminals. It goes to show that when idealistic empathy becomes legislation, the world becomes more dangerous.

Despite Gascón being evicted from office, the Menendez brothers could still be freed, due to a habeas corpus petition they filed last year, which is backed by huge public pressure. For those of us who value objectivity, the best we can do is to learn, and share, the lesson of the Menendez fiasco: that empathy doesn’t work as a moral or judicial guide. Far from making us kinder people, empathy makes us gullible, biased, dishonest, cruel, and unjust. If we wish to know who’s right and wrong, guilty and innocent, we should spend less time trying to inhabit other people’s heads, and make more use of our own.

Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.

Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.

Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas. Stalin never returned to the verse of his adolescence, but the young poet known as “Soselo” had won anthology places for the fragile tenderness of Georgian lyrics such as “To the Moon” (translation by Donald Rayfield):

Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.

Later, as a vigilant, hands-on editor, Stalin knew how to cut the theoretical waffle, keep things concrete and tell a striking story. In mass-circulation works such as the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its 36 million copies printed in the decade after 1938, he especially liked to strike out “laudatory accounts of his own role”. He insisted that cloying hero-worship made his stomach turn. “What are people supposed to do?” Stalin asked sarcastically as he toned down the official Short Biography of himself published in 1946. “Get down on their knees and pray to me?” No court jester dared answer: “Yes”.

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Of all the mind-scrambling glimpses of the despot as an “emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual” gathered in Stalin’s Library, none quite matches the record of a Central Committee meeting, held in September 1940, about the limits of artistic expression. The General Secretary spoke up firmly on the side of freedom. “You have to let people express themselves,” Comrade Stalin argued. Artists should avoid fairy-tales that toe the party line.

Take the wonderful Chekhov, who “has no heroes but rather grey people”. Stalin approves. Even the enemies of the Soviet Union should not be depicted as monsters “lacking all human traits”. Even Trotsky — here you imagine stifled intakes of breath around a smoky Kremlin chamber — was a “capable person” who must be shown with all his “positive qualities”. Was a capable person: just a couple of weeks earlier, Ramón Mercader had, on Stalin’s orders, buried an ice-axe in Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City. Thus putting a definitive end to his character development, positive or negative.

How many other people did Stalin kill? If Cold War-era historians such as Robert Conquest laid 15-20 million deaths at his door (in The Great Terror), post-Soviet research has led scholars such as Timothy Snyder to suggest a revised estimate of between six and nine million (Bloodlands). Even the lowest figure freezes the imagination. For almost a century, allies, enemies, victims and a wondering posterity have struggled to understand how this gigantic annihilation of life and hope emerged from the ideas and deeds not of a “psychopath” — Roberts rightly rejects the term — but a shrewd, calm, widely-read and thoughtful politician-manager who had learned both to “rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule”. Trotsky lies dead in a Mexican morgue. A shame: such a smart guy…

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Stalin, then, presents a challenge to anyone who claims a specific link between deep reading and the pursuit of ethical or social virtue. Learning nurtures wisdom in many ancient traditions. But the years since the millennium have seen a small explosion in research that tries to prove a non-trivial link between consistent reading and the empathy that allows us to inhabit other souls and walk a verst (or many) in their shoes. If literature doesn’t exactly make you better, runs the refrain of many experimental papers in psychology and neuroscience, then regular exposure to it — especially fiction — will enhance those social skills that demand an understanding of the world perceived through other eyes.

“Specifically, engaging with narrative fiction and mentally simulating the social experiences represented may improve or maintain social skills, especially skills of empathy and social understanding,” reports one widely-cited Canadian paper from 2009, referenced in the back-up materials for World Book Day (celebrated on 3 March). Toronto novelist-psychologist Keith Oatley, one of its authors, has emerged as a leading champion of reading as an empathy shot. (Interestingly, his University of Toronto co-researchers on that paper included Jordan B Peterson, later to find wider fame elsewhere.)

A survey of the evidence from 2016 affirms that “Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) — the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings — than non-readers, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors”. The World Book Day outreach projects aim to put books into non-readers’ hands, on the basis that “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success — more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.” Here, empathy as social asset takes a back seat as voluntary reading becomes a sort of educational superpower.

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Stalin, by the way, did read plenty of fiction, drama, poetry and narrative history in addition to political and economic analysis. He loved the novels of Émile Zola, made writer Maxim Gorky the most fêted private citizen in the USSR, and ran the Stalin Prizes for creative writing from his own office. Dmitry Shepilov, Pravda editor and court intellectual, later wrote that Stalin “was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else”. Sinister tales abound of his creepily close-focus attention to the literary arts in Soviet Russia.

One of the best known, not mentioned in Roberts’s book, concerns the arrest and persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1934, Stalin phoned the detained poet’s friend, Boris Pasternak. “Mandelstam’s case is being analysed”, Stalin reassures Pasternak:

“Everything will be worked out. Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me? If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.”

Then Stalin dons his critic’s hat to ask “But is he or is he not a master?” Pasternak replies “That’s not the point!”, and requests a meeting. But Stalin hangs up. In the event, the Kremlin Mountaineer — the title of Mandelstam’s famous anti-Stalin satire — did not exactly murder the poet. Exile, jail and illness killed Mandelstam in 1938. It was not quite an execution; not an exoneration either. More a lethal “m-da”.

Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy — or rather, that empathy is a value to cherish. Roberts, though, maintains that whatever vital sparks of humanity the Soviet autocrat lacked, the ability to conceive the independent life of other minds was not among them. Indeed, he credits Stalin with “too much human empathy” as the grand paranoiac envisaged the hearts of his rivals seething with non-existent plots and stratagems to oust him. What the ultimate scholar-slayer missed was any shred of the “compassion or sympathy” that might stay his hand before he sent the bodies of those minds to a slow, cold fate in the Gulag or a quicker end in the basement of the Lubyanka.

In his reading, Stalin preferred strong characters — real or fictional — with firmly-marked personality and agency, not blurred ciphers of a class or an epoch. “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine,” he proclaimed about the great Tsars in the course of a critique of the over-theoretical Soviet textbooks of the 1930s, “They rested on certain classes … but they acted, they were historical figures”. Stalin may never actually have said anything like “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (though the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky did). But the apocryphal wisecrack at least captures an empathetic reader’s ability to feel the weight of individual lives and minds.

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Stalin did not lack empathy, then, for writers or their work. He grasped too — as censorious heresy-hunters still do not — that books acquire meaning and value separate from their creators’ beliefs. Defending the genius of the “reactionary” Nicolai Gogol, he urged that “the world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers”. Nothing in Stalin’s long, complex and sometimes subtle engagement with culture disproves the advocates of intensive reading as a highway to empathy. The flaw, rather, lies in treating that quality as a firm proxy for interpersonal goodwill.

However robust and reliable on its own terms, research on the reading-empathy connection comes out of a cognitive science that finds it hard to define and describe a social world far beyond its probings of the story-stimulated mind. The 2016 paper I cited on “Reading fiction and reading minds” leaps from a scrutiny of the brain’s “default network”, and its activation by reading, to the assertion that: “Historically, highly literate societies, especially societies that produced psychologically rich literature, function more empathically and less violently than less literate societies.”

Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”. Without the norms, laws and institutions to scale up private understanding into public civility, the solitary reader’s empathy will be, at best, an advantageous knack. After all, every low-grade swindler, conman and fraudster depends on a serviceable theory of other minds and how they work. And, if your milieu and your ideology impose no veto on mass persecution and state murder, the ability to mess with your victims’ heads simply adds another weapon to the oppressor’s armoury.

Perhaps the empathy that books deepen can only do collective good if a community — whether a household or a nation — decides to reward the sort of fellow-feeling that brings help and not harm to others. Whereas in the moral wasteland of Stalin’s Russia, the insight into other minds conferred by some of these 25,000 volumes served as just another manipulative tool of domination. Reading alone, could not make Stalin less Stalinist. If anything, his lifelong bookworm’s habits seem to have turned him — to quote his own formula for the writer’s role — into a more cunning and devious “engineer of human souls”.

Make no mistake, Weinstein is a sexual predator who deserves a long spell behind bars. Biden, however, is something different. He seems to be a man who punctuates his emotions with physical contact. He probably needs to rein it in, and he definitely needs to apologise to those who found his gestures unwelcome. But I doubt there’s anything inherently evil in his behaviour. I suspect Biden is a victim of his own empathy.

“Joe has a deep desire to share in the lives of others – their grief, pain, and joy” the former Missouri Senator Jean Carnahan recently tweeted. She had experienced the therapeutic power of Biden’s empathy after she lost her husband and son in a plane crash. “He reaches out… to connect and express … feelings. … it’s part of who he is. Like everything else about his big, Irish personality, he expresses those feelings with exuberance and sincerity.”

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And that worries me. Carnahan’s description of Biden sounds a little bit like me. I’m certainly far more restrained when it comes to physicality, but I do sometimes express emotions with contact – a tap to the forearm for instance. I, too, convey feelings with exuberance and I involve myself in the lives of others.

Let’s make it clear: I’m not talking about touch – the sort of thing that got Biden into trouble. I’m talking about connectedness: I open myself emotionally to people and welcome it when they open themselves to me. Compassion is a two-way street. This, for me, is simple humanity, something devoid of sexual intent and applied equally to men and women.

But I’m worried now. Standards of acceptable behaviour seem suddenly to have shifted. Empathy – with or without that touch on the arm – is hazardous.

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My worries are compounded by the fact that empathy plays a large part in my profession – or at least it should. I’m a university teacher. I prefer that description to ‘professor’, which connotes an aloofness detrimental to compassion. For many of my colleagues, that aloofness offers a safe haven that doesn’t require emotional commitment to one’s students.

Yet many students seek such commitment from their teachers. They’re alone in a stressful world, away from parents. Yes, they have friends, but sometimes they need someone else – someone older, not necessarily a friend, but a person they can trust.

We’re now officially advised, though, that we should not try to help students with emotional problems, and should instead pass them on to the ‘professionals’ at Student Support. I suppose that’s because the dangers of giving wrong advice are too high. We’re no longer trusted to help, no longer trusted with human compassion.

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Yet, if only professionals are allowed to help, that can institutionalise a problem or give it a stigma with which the student is uncomfortable. It can escalate that problem to a level the student doesn’t want.

So I ignore that advice; I respect the student’s decision to seek out me. Lots of students – of both sexes – end up crying in my office. I’ve had colleagues do the same. For me, it’s part of the job and a reflection of who I am. I’m not formally trained to deal with these problems, but I do have experience – 35 years of it.

I’m painfully aware that my profession carries significant dangers. Students are often emotionally vulnerable. We see them in private with doors closed so that they feel comfortable about being candid. Taken together, these circumstances constitute a ticking time bomb.

Lecturers and professors have enormous power over students; some use that power for sexual favour. Over a long career, I’ve heard plenty of stories of despicable behaviour – many were probably true. Long ago, a colleague was so notoriously predatory that female students avoided going to his office alone. Keen to avoid a scandal, his university quietly encouraged him to take a job elsewhere. Otherwise, nothing was done, no sanctions imposed. Theoretically, gross moral turpitude – having sex with a student – was the only acceptable grounds for firing an academic. Yet in all my years in universities, I’ve never seen anyone fired. Some should have been.

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But they were the predators. Nowadays, I’m worried about the empathisers – people like me, who let students in to pour out their hearts. In the past, I might have expressed compassion for a student with a pat on the shoulder, but I would no longer do so. Some time ago, a young colleague broke down in my office after male students had been unkind to her – something that happens all the time. She was a vulnerable wreck in need of compassion. That situation now frightens me because it carries so many risks.

A prominent female academic, faced with a similar situation, hugged her colleague. She ended up accused of unsolicited sexual contact, leading to a large out-of-court settlement by her university. Have my fears rendered my empathy less effective? Yes, I think so. I’m certainly more careful, more aware of the hazards of empathy. More guarded.

In my profession, suspicion runs deep; compassion now seems to carry unaffordable risk. We’re so afraid of the potential consequences of intimacy that we’re building walls to prevent its occurrence. Trust has disappeared. Safety lies in a cold heart. Some colleagues in America are no longer allowed to consult students in private because their institutions are deathly afraid of litigation. Extrapolating forward, it’s not inconceivable that future consultations will have to take place with student and teacher divided by a glass barrier, as in prison.

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Can academia be saved from the mob?

By Debra Soh

Almost every one of us has had, in our past, a teacher who changed our life, who put us on course toward where we are now. That connection most likely came through empathy, a personal bond that transcended mere conveyance of knowledge. A teacher who took the time to make an emotional connection with my son turned his life around. He’s now at university only because of her. If we remove empathy from education we might as well turn teaching over to computers.

Is this fear of empathy a problem that extends beyond education? I expect so. We’re all victims in this brave new world. We all lose when compassion is seen as risky and openness a danger. I’d like to be able to offer a solution, a path back to sanity and trust. But I don’t know of one.

The future scares me. I’m glad I’m retiring. I’ve got three weeks of teaching left, three weeks to avoid trouble. I once had the best job in the world, but now it’s gone. Goodbye to all that.