Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

The Trade Secret Of Academia

The Trade Secret Of Academia

The trade secret of academia is first and foremost to understated your subject as well as anyone.

I think that’s 90% of the battle.

After that you can talk circles around anyone who does not know the topic as well as you.

For example, the gender wage gap.

The uninformed are taken back buy such a statistic.

But anyone with a background in statistics can see the obvious omissions.

For they are only telling part of the story.

After years in the academy I have learned a trade secret: If you know enough about a subject, you can confuse anybody by a selective use of the facts.

-Ravi Zacharias, The End of Reason

Meeting Expectations, Or Critical Thinking?

Meeting Expectations, Or Critical Thinking?

Academics might be professionals in meeting expectations.

Ok, what do I mean by that?

It’s ridiculous that professors are hailed as these keepers of originality and critical examination.

All I ever saw was meeting expectations in order to get good grades and graduate, and then finding consensus in order to get published.

I mean, I have heard a professor literally say he needed to “go back and look at the data in a different way” because his current results would “never get the funding he needed.”

Show me a professor always against the grain and ill show you an academic that never gets tenure.

Here is the truth:

Academics are just as likely to rely on emotion as everyone else is.

My fellow academics, taken as a group, are just as reluctant to engage in genuine reflection as the less highly educated person in the street. Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don’t get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think

Sterling Terrell