To hug or not to hug

Iam a hugger. With close friends and family, I love giving, and getting, a good hug, particularly if I haven’t seen that person in a bit. There’s nothing that warms the heart like a big hug with a loved one you’ve missed.

My father was the same way. Pop sometimes would wait for me after my high school football practices, leaning on the hood of the car and smoking his cigs. When I would walk up, he would hug me and give me a big wet kiss on the cheek.

My teammates thought that my dad and I were weird, and they harassed me about it. I laughed it off, though, and let Pop do what he did without comment to him, because I knew that’s just how he was, a physically affectionate, bear of a man.

While I’m not quite the bear of a man he was — although I do paw my wife a lot — I, too, am physically affectionate.

Still, I’m no Joe Biden. I don’t give hugs to people I don’t know well, I don’t give unsolicited shoulder rubs and I don’t sniff the hair of women I hardly know.

With my students, I’m hands-off. Yes, it’s a small campus of maybe 1,000 students, and because of that I sometimes have students in a few different classes, which means we get to know each other well. Still, my rule is no embraces while they’re still students.

Being in the Imperial Valley, I don’t have to worry too much about hugs with my male students, because we’re all machos here and if we do hug it is sort of that hand clasp/backslap hybrid thing that guys do. We guys in the Valley think we are too tough to show our emotions except for a special few occasions: the births of our children, the marriages of our children, our favorite team winning a championship. (Go Raiders!)

With my female students, however, my rule tends to be no hugs until graduation day, or at least their graduation week. Many of my female students, though, tend to be huggers. Some want to hug me after not seeing me over summer vacation and such, but I generally try to avoid such contact as politely as possible. I just don’t think it’s proper and never have.

Now, with the #MeToo movement and the Biden stuff, a man, particularly a man who holds a position of power over a woman, has to be careful about any physical contact, and rightly so.

We had our commencement ceremony on our campus last week, and the question in this national climate was: to hug or not to hug? After receiving their diplomas, even some of the guys graduating want to pull me in for an embrace, an abrazo, as they say, and so often do, in Spain.

Complicating matters last week was that I was master of ceremonies for the commencement. So any hugs, or any awkward denials of embraces, were going to be out there for thousands to see. Last year it was a bit of an issue because some students wanted to give me a hug, which was fine with me but not with the stage setup, as equipment, and one student, went a-tumblin’.

This year I was in a position onstage where it would be harder to reach me, but some students did seek me out for a good hug, which was fine because nothing, and no one, fell.

After the ceremony, I walked into the seating area and congratulated all the students I know. And I exchanged hearty hugs with the ones I know well, present political climate be damned.

But I did not, I promise, sniff any hair.