Friday, December 23, 2022

Career Advice RE: Maintaining a "Growth Mindset"

 


A few weeks ago I organized a research and teaching luncheon for junior faculty, post-docs and graduate students in my department with two retired faculty (here and here), and the idea was to share thoughts about "advice I wish I received at the beginning of my career". 

There was a very interesting discussion about the isolation of academic work, the pressures of balancing research, teaching, administration, and life.  While I am not (at least yet) at the retired stage of my career, I shared a few insights based on how things look to me now after 23+ years into my academic career.

My comments were informed by the fascinating psychological research done on the difference between a "growth" vs "fixed" mindset.  As I was reading through this book I made a number of linkages with a career in higher education.  And so my comments at the luncheon focused on the importance of 3 "epistemic virtues" that I think, at the start of one's career, it is really important to be aware of and consciously cultivate to help improve the odds that one develops a "growth" vs "fixed" mindset in one's research and teaching. 

The 3 epistemic virtues I emphasized are: 

1.    Curiosity:  a genuine desire to fill the gap between knowledge and understanding vs having a closed/indifferent mindset.

2.    Humility:  being comfortable to acknowledge your own “gaps” in knowledge and the limits of one’s expertise vs acting and thinking like an arrogant “know it all”.

3.    Intellectual risk-taking: taking on some new challenges that have uncertain or more difficult payoffs vs only inhabiting the safety of established research paradigms and professional norms.

Below are a few personal reflections of how I think these virtues can apply in research and teaching.

In the classroom, an instructor can motivate students to learn the class material by stoking their curiosity.  There are a diverse range of ideas historical political thinkers have advanced for diagnosing the societal predicaments that face our societies, and a diverse range of prescriptions for addressing those problems.  What are the merits and demerits of viewing the political landscape through the lens of Marxism vs liberalism vs critical race theory vs feminism vs utilitarianism vs conservatism, etc.?  Where did these different ideas come from? What events or observations inspired thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Marx, Du Bois or MLK, Jr.?

As an instructor if you demonstrate intellectual curiosity in the classroom students will mimic this.  Curiosity is infectious.  In my classes students will often ask me what my own political convictions and perspectives are because they can not discern them from the way I teach.  I take such comments as a complement!  I tell my students I am still figuring out my own political convictions and perspectives. 

In my final year as an undergraduate student I was swayed by anarchism, libertarianism, existentialism and Marxism all within the span of about 12 months!  I am still growing and exploring the moral and political landscape.  I think instructors that approach the classroom with strong ideological commitments do a disservice to the mission of higher education.  They approach the classroom from a fixed mindset (e.g. “I, the course instructor, know the truth about justice, democracy and equality, and my goal is to get you, the student, to espouse what I espouse”).  When the intellectual journey is instead approached as a joint collaboration (e.g. “We all have our starting beliefs and experiences, assumptions and intuitions, and together we will critically assess and explore them and see where that takes us”) that is genuinely open then real learning occurs.  The desire to “virtue signal” that one is “on the right side of some ideological battle” must not trump the prime directive of higher education-  to help facilitate and celebrate critical thinking.

Intellectual humility is another (related) critical mindset for an instructor and researcher.  The opposite of humility is arrogance, the uncritical presumption that you know all the answers to important questions, as well as what constitutes the important questions to be answering in the first place.  Arrogance should not be confused with confidence.  Of course an instructor and researcher should have confidence, at least when they are teaching and researching something they actually have competence in.  But humility is also critical to the educational mission.  Possessing the ability to distinguish between the topics one can speak to with some confidence, vs those that one cannot, is a mark of a good instructor and inquisitive intellectual.  The mindset that tries to prove one knows all things, whether it be to their students or “Twitter followers”, is coming from a motivation of “ego” vs intellectual humility and curiosity. 

For one’s research, I think having intellectual humility can help one step back and re-evaluate the future trajectory of one’s research.  For example, after my PhD I published a few articles from my thesis, defending the Rawlsian paradigm of political philosophy by applying it to the issues of a basic income, free speech and economic incentives.  But then I began to critically reflect on the shortcomings of that paradigm.  If my primary goal was to simply publish more of the same stuff I had already published, or to defend the theoretical tradition I happened to find attractive as a graduate student, I would have constrained my intellectual growth and probably contributed much less to the field in terms of original insights.         

And finally, the third and final epistemic virtue I would encourage a young academic to cultivate is “intellectual risk-taking”.  This virtue occupies the mean between the foolish or careless academic who says “I will write what I want to write, where and when I want… the publishing expectations of the discipline and tenure be dammed!” (good luck getting tenure or even finding a TT job with such an attitude!) and the conservative approach of trying to hedge bets on what would yield the safest and most prodigious publication record in the future.  

One might ask why do any intellectual risk-taking at all?  I think the answer to that question depends on that type of academic you are/want to be.  If you are like me then intellectual risk-taking is where the most significant intellectual development and growth occurs, and it is really fun challenging the wisdom of established research paradigms and trying to forge novel ground in a discipline.

For me, the most rewarding research I have done has involved intellectual risk-taking of the following kind: 

(1) writing a textbook as my first published book (vs my dissertation);

(2) publishing a second book which in some respects represented my anti-dissertation vs dissertation;

(3) publishing papers and books that criticize the dominant methodology of the discipline;

(4) exploring new ways (here and here) to understand a historical thinker whose central ideas I do not espouse (but I think are worth seriously engaging with)

(5) spending 15 years writing a book on a neglected topic in the field in the hopes that a reputable publisher would eventually publish it;

(6) and then, after (5), agreeing to write another book on that same topic from a completely new methodological perspective.

(7) devoting 15 years of my research to a topic that is completely ignored by my discipline, and publishing my articles in journals outside my field, like science, medicine.

Wrapping this long post up… the bottom line in terms of advice I wish when I started my career:  academics ought to reflect, often and deeply and critically, on the question of the type of scholar and instructor they aspire to be.  The research on fixed vs growth mindsets is very relevant to these issues.  I have spent 20+ years refining the epistemic virtues of curiosity, humility and intellectual risk-taking. I am still learning and growing.  And I think the growth mindset has paid the generous dividend of helping me successfully navigate some of the challenges of a career in academia and do so in a way that has not diminished my passion for teaching and research. 

Cheers,

Colin