Published author here, teaching at a state university, and I can honestly say I have never, ever heard of, much less been involved with, any cracked-out scheme for pairing students off with each other. They manage to do that quite handily themselves. I care about how they use commas and whether they've plagiarized parts of their essays... oopsie, that miiiight be a sore subject around these parts, except I now have to fill out a form to submit to the associate provost because some poor bastard copied such a mangled assortment of sources in his effort to sound learned that it now reads that Sir Thomas More was president of the US. Which, you know, totally existed in his lifetime. Or maybe not.
We do not even remotely try to impose our politics on the students. Actually, a lot of people would probably be surprised to hear how far to the right some of my older colleagues hang. But no part of the political spectrum does that because, to use a quaint phrase from the past, no1curr. They don't want to know about our politics, personal lives, or much of anything besides their grades, which is as it should be -- I'd find it mortally creepifying if some kid did take an interest in either whom I love or how I vote. They manage to pair themselves up quite handily. And it takes far less than six months before they get into one another's physical proximity. Six minutes, sometimes, according to conversations I hear on campus. Not all of the relationships, of course, will last, but as bizarre as it is to expect a student to have a career all mapped out at the age of 18, it is equally bizarre to expect them to be good judges of character at that age. However, more than one of my students did meet a spouse or permanent partner here at State U. after being in my class, which is intended for first-year students, ideally in their first semester.
But since this isn't an environment where we chat about their social lives -- I would actually prefer we chat about the course material -- and I see them for about three hours a week total, it would be literally insane on my part to say, "Hey, Studentboy, I notice you have Star Wars slip-on sneakers on your little footsies. So does Other Student over yonder.* Maybe you should ask that person out." Breach of privacy, breach of etiquette, would require psychic/psychiatric genius far above my pay grade... just no.
What is, of course, far stupider than the Sir Thomas More statement above is a pontification I heard from one male student to another one year as I was boarding a bus. "What you have to realize about women," one young man said earnestly to the other, "is that they're a totally separate species." No... what the advice-seeker needs to realize is pretty well the opposite. We too eat Cheetos, Mr. Iconoclast. We just don't have beards to get the orange dust in.
* Footnote (shoe note?): This is literally true. I have an unusually nerdy 3 pm section this semester.
