Overworking Our Critical Thinking Skills

Moving from judgement to discernment in academic science

I started to get serious about running when I was a postdoc living the good life in Pasadena, CA. The weather was almost always agreeable, the sidewalks were empty, and one could devise many running routes that end up at Peet’s Coffee. But I kept getting injured, and eventually realized that many of my enforced pauses in training were due to an imbalance in muscular strength. My quadriceps were over-developed and my hamstrings were weak. After some trial and error, I discovered that cross-training with yoga and weights helped even things out. I was so used to using my quads for everything that I had to consciously focus on engaging my hamstrings in forward folds or deadlifts.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a different type of imbalance, one that I was predisposed to and that was encouraged in my career. I’m talking about strengthening of my already substantial ability to judge over my underdeveloped power of empathy. I’ve come to believe that, in academic science, we are overtraining our critical thinking while perspective and kindness are left to atrophy.

Critical thinking in academic science

Let me first say that science absolutely requires critical thinking. It’s the foundation of the scientific method, and is—as it turns out—a HUGE part of a faculty member’s job. During my last few years as a Biology professor, my days were filled with activities that involve judging other people’s work:

• grading assessments for the courses I was teaching

• administering and grading qualifying exams for PhD students

• graduate student teaching assessments

• thesis meetings and defenses

• quarterly grad student evaluations

• assistant and associate professor evaluations

• accepting or rejecting manuscripts as a journal editor

• reviewing manuscripts as a peer reviewer

• ranking grant proposals while serving on grant panels

• evaluating tenure and promotion packages

• writing and reading letters of reference

• ranking new faculty search applications

• graduate student admissions decisions

• critical reading of newly published papers

• attending and engaging in seminars and talks

• probably more

The more senior I got, the more these activities dominated my time—leaving less and less time to do my own work (that would then be critiqued and evaluated by others!).

In retrospect, I think this shift was a big contributor to my decision to leave.

It’s not that I don’t like this aspect of science; in fact, I love it and am good at it! I was never happier than in lab meetings where we could ask: What does this experiment really tell us? Do these controls narrow the interpretation? Is there an alternative explanation for these results? Are the data compelling? I enjoy pinpointing what is and isn’t convincing about a figure or a panel, and derive a particular pleasure from identifying cases of over-interpretation. All to say—my critical thinking muscles are very, very developed.

Scientists specifically train our judgmental muscles

I was trained to interact with the literature and other scientists in this way. One of the most memorable ways I learned critical thinking skills was through journal clubs. This is a group meeting where (often) a recently published paper was savagely dissected and critiqued on everything from the methods to the color scheme used in bar graphs. I rolled my eyes hard when a fellow postdoc defended a paper they were presenting in journal club by saying, “I think we should just believe what the authors say.” This immediately elicited a chorus of groans from the room. “That is the opposite of what journal club is for!” Tearing a paper apart was so prevalent that it became a breath of fresh air for someone to say “this is just a fantastic paper”.

As a result, I learned to present my work in a way that would forestall criticism. When I first started my faculty position, I gave my first grant proposal to my colleague Ursula Goodenough for comments before submitting it, and true to form she returned it to me absolutely shredded. The point I remember most vividly is in a comment box at the beginning of the document. “Why are you working on these proteins here instead of those proteins over there? You don’t lay out why these are the most important questions to ask.” I understood in an instant that it was my job to frontload all of the information a reviewer would need to evaluate my ideas, including not just what I was doing but why I was doing it. Ursula was telling me that the author of a successful paper or proposal must put themselves in the position of the reader, who will be far more critical of the work than the author would be.

After a while, it was as if I could only use that muscle. I would walk into any situation ready to engage my bulging critical evaluation skills like a sprinter at a starting line. It meant that I always had something to contribute to an exam or meeting or journal club—but it didn’t always mean that what I contributed was helpful. In fact, it was often harmful. Over-strengthening my critical muscles kept me from seeing the terrible effect this approach was having on the young people around me.

Criticism versus discernment

A few years after I got tenure, I was admitted to a wonderful program designed to encourage women to enter university leadership. As part of the program, I met with a career coach and mentioned my growing discomfort with the way I was engaging with the judgy parts of my job. She suggested that I aim for discernment rather than judgement. I liked this—discernment involves both critical thinking and empathy. Sure, this paper isn’t showing xyz—but it does show abc. Yes, a student doesn’t fully understand this point in their quals—but they were on top of other points more relevant to their own work. OK, I see the wrong answer on the homework—but I also see how the student might have reached that conclusion.

It felt better, but relaxing my dependence on judgment didn’t fix everything. It could make evaluations agonizing. As a journal editor, I could flipflop for days on a manuscript decision that I wasn’t sure about, asking myself over and over what I might be missing, if I had the background to appreciate what the authors were trying to do, if I was biased based on the identity of the authors, the reviewers, the subject area. It had been so much easier just to muscle through with rules about what is “right” and what is “wrong.”

I do think I was on the right track here, though in the end the constant need to evaluate others, coupled with my uncertainty that I was doing any of it well or without harm, contributed to my resignation from academia. I know that others around me were capable of balancing things better than I, but in general scientists are too obsessed with evaluation, criticism, and hierarchy. I’m not suggesting that we lower the bar for anything, but that we work to balance our strong judgement muscles with generosity—aiming for a well-balanced approach like discernment.

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Discussion Section

• Are there ways to reduce how much senior faculty do w/respect to evaluating others?

• Could we reframe annual reviews of junior faculty to be more “what should we celebrate” and less “where are they failing”?

• What assessments are truly needed because they help the student learn and which are unnecessary? Qualifying exams seem ripe for adjustment based on what is useful for students (listen to episodes 8-11 of SRSLY?SRLSY, by J. Nemhauser).