Confronting the Unknown

Why do universities have professors?

Um… to teach students, maybe. And to extend knowledge in some area, isn’t that research…?

If that is so, what criteria makes one a professor?

I would argue: (1) Subject-matter expertise; (2) the ability to help novices gain some expertise in the area; and (3) engaging with ideas at the forefront of our disciplines and thereby possibly extending knowledge. In today’s post, I’d like to delve into these three points and explore some possible synergies.

Note that one doesn’t need to be employed by a university to cover the criteria above. You could be an independent itinerant scholar-professor; although for many of us, being employed by a university brings us into a vibrant community and helps pay the bills.

First, how does one define (or distinguish) the novice from the expert? Is it about being less ignorant and knowing more stuff? I suppose. But I think quantity of knowledge is less useful as a measure. I might know lots of trivial facts; good for Jeopardy perhaps, but have little expertise. Novice students, with some cramming, can spout a veritable fountain of information and spill much ink on to an exam – and still demonstrate little to no expertise.

A more useful indicator of expertise is how one confronts the unknown. What do you do when you come up with a puzzle in your discipline? How do you reason your way through the problem-solving process? I argue that this is how expertise is revealed. The novice clutches at straws, is scattershot in approach, has difficulty evaluating the relative strength of different arguments, and very quickly runs out of productive ideas. If not willing to admit ignorance, the novice is too quick to proclaim a definitive answer. The expert, on the other hand, sieves the good from the bad, marshals a range of arguments with associated probabilities, and is able to provide a complex but coherent (possibly partial) solution towards the answer, without proclaiming it solved.

The periodic table is full of such puzzles if you examine it closely. One teaser for my general chemistry students is explaining the anomalously weak bond of F₂. For my physical chemistry students, given that the the two-electron H₂ bond is stronger than its one-electron counterpart H₂⁺, why is the opposite observed for Li₂ and Li₂⁺? For inorganic chemistry, why are the ground state valence electron configurations for Ni, Pd, and Pt, different?

Second, how do we as professors move novices on the road to expertise? By growing the knowledge of our students? I would argue, yes, but I think we should also grow their ignorance – and thereby teach them how to critically confront the unknown. I think that superficial learning may increase knowledge while lessening ignorance, but that in deeper learning, both knowledge and ignorance grow together. It’s not just the recognition of ignorance; a student who does poorly on an exam recognizes his or her ignorance upon getting back the exam and seeing the low score. Rather it’s the recognition of increased uncertainty as one wades into complexity and delves deeper into knowledge. Assumptions are questioned and interrogated. Probabilities begin to mount as certainties fade.

The author Arnold Wentzel in his book Teaching Complex Ideas has a chapter titled: “If you want students to reason like experts, don’t teach them how to reason.” He draws from educational psychology research, but the underlying principle is that the art (or skill) of general reasoning is a primary biological trait, as argued by Geary. What’s important is to provide the conditions for reasoning, and this requires disciplinary-based knowledge – something that must be learned – and engaging in the back-and-forth of argument and counterargument based on this knowledge and its limits (ignorance). This underscores the importance of “teaching” critical thinking within the context of one’s discipline. There is little evidence for the overall utility and effectiveness of teaching un-anchored generalized “critical thinking” skills – unfortunately a present fad that I hope runs its course soon.

Third, and perhaps unsurprising, is that as professors pushing the boundaries of knowledge we are directly engaged in confronting the unknown. There’s an impression that professors focus on some esoteric figment of knowledge that’s useless to society at large; the academy needs to counteract this view by continually engaging the broad areas in each of our disciplines. We should be doing this in our teaching and in our public service to the university and beyond; the warped incentive structure of academia notwithstanding (that we should combat). We should take advantage of teaching to immerse both ourselves and our students in the fundamental nature of our subject matter. Teaching and learning blur, as both professors and students learn together – at different levels perhaps, but still learning.

When I first started out as a professor, teaching and research felt like two separate spheres. Class felt like the place where I conveyed information to students that was familiar to me, but not to them. I was moving them from ignorance to knowledge. My research seemed to have little connection to my classes, other than providing timely real-world examples here and there. Today, I work less on the “productive” parts of my research (usually measured in peer-review articles) and spend more time thinking about both deeper and broader questions in my area, which spill over more into my classes. My reading has broadened, and my excitement for learning new things has increased! I hope to instill this in my students, although I’m not sure if I’m doing this coherently. Sometimes it feels like grasping in the dark, confronting the unknown. Paradoxically, I might be on to something!