There's no such thing as a stupid question

Sometimes it's more of a comment

This is the second installment in a new occasional series on Bad Academic Advice. The first was Five Reasons Why We Should Stop Advising Faculty to “Just Say No.

One of the biggest perks of moving back to the Pacific NW has been hanging out with two of my college besties on the regular. I first met Linda and Jayne at a party in one of those dark Seattle basement apartments, full of grungy twenty-somethings standing around in their Doc Martens, drinking Lucky Lager and smoking beedies. We hit it off immediately and permanently. As someone who usually makes friends slowly, it felt miraculous.

Some years later (probably after more Lucky Lager, TBH), these two admitted to me that our meeting at that party was no miracle. Rather, they approached me at that party on a mutual dare. They had recognized me from Organic Chemistry class and dared each other to talk to “that weird girl who sits in the front and asks so many questions”.

The “weird girl who sits in the front and asks so many the questions” is, I have come to understand, a core part of my identity. In high school, my chemistry teacher finally said, exasperated with my incessant questions, “Haswell, everyone else understands this.” Which I doubt they did—most other students weren’t paying attention, much less understanding what he was saying about molecular orbitals. I was mad, but I wasn’t deterred. I still wanted to understand what was going on in class.

And that has stood me in good stead as a scientist. What is science other than a framework for asking questions? But the public performance of asking other people questions, after a talk or a seminar, is a tricky business, and can sometimes be motivated by frustration, a desire to show off, or a need to dominate rather than curiosity.

Curiosity vs. Frustration

At a recent parent-teacher conference, one of my kid’s teachers kindly and constructively communicated that G. gets frustrated when he doesn’t understand something right away. On the way home, we had a good car conversation (the way you have most good convos with teens anymore) where I tried to convey both that 1) he shouldn’t expect to understand everything immediately and without putting in some work and 2) I don’t want him to ignore his fervent desire to understand what his teachers are saying. I do not want G. to just throw up his hands, to stop expecting that he should or could understand what is presented in class. But I also want him to slow those expectations down.

Curiosity vs. Performance

Asking questions can also be performative, and the Q & A session after a departmental seminar can be like the after-hours party at SNL. You are probably familiar with the critique of the “less of a question, more of a comment” genre, but even actual queries are often more than just questions. I came up in a culture where asking a “good” question after a seminar was a sign of intelligence and scientific rigor (“good” = a question that shows how much the question-asker understood the seminar and could relate the content to other work in the field; “bad” = something that was already addressed in the seminar, or that demonstrated any level of ignorance). Asking a question after a seminar as a PhD student was terrifying—I can still hear my heart beating as I raised my hand—but could be a way for a young trainee to get noticed. Knowing the “good” from the “bad” seminar questions is just another example of the hidden curriculum of graduate school.

Curiosity vs. Domination

As a young faculty member, I was told to stop asking questions at faculty candidate chalk talks. Chalk talks are seminars where faculty candidates in the sciences present their plans for their own research and teaching programs (separate from their research seminar, which focuses on past accomplishments). The expectations at these talks are usually poorly defined and they can be extremely nerve-wracking for the candidate. I had asked a candidate who had proposed 9 or 10 different future projects to prioritize them and discuss how they could be organized into funding proposals. In my memory, I was trying to give the candidate an opportunity to address a misstep in their presentation—something that was surely going to be viewed as problematic by other faculty. But that is not how it came across, at least to my colleagues; I don’t know how the candidate felt.

Treating faculty candidates kindly is important, and, though it took me a while, I tried to change my approach. I made an effort to ask questions with kindness and humility, and to consider: is this “more of a comment than a question?” Am I trying to demonstrate something to others or am I actually wanting to know an answer? In this particular case, I was genuinely trying to help the candidate out, but in other cases I am sure I had mixed motives.

That said, I chafed at the tendency for women especially to dissemble before asking a question: “I’m not the expert . . . but” or “Maybe you addressed this and I missed it . . . but”. Some members of my department continued to ask abrupt and aggressively worded questions at seminars and chalk talks right up to when I left. So, who gets to ask questions and the tone they are allowed to use is both cultural and gendered.

We need more ways to say “I have a question”

If just asking a question carries so much baggage, maybe we need to have multiple words for “question”, the way we have multiple words for “rain”. There’s everything from “I’m seriously just wondering” to “I didn’t understand” to “What you said seems wrong” to “I just need to hear my own voice talking” to “I did that experiment back in 1994 but never published it.”

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Discussion Section

• Do we need a new question vocabulary? What other nuances would you add to my list in the last paragraph?

• How do we keep inquiry and curiosity at the center of academic science, and keep performance and undermining to a minimum?