Two Minds Blog

With Dr. Scott Harpin Scholarly writing is one of the great challenges of academic life, often summarized as “publish or perish.” Yet many of us in this business feel that we are perishing. Despite writing’s importance, the typical faculty feeling about it is something like this: “Writing is a backburner thing: I simply do not have enough time to make it happen.” Writing is a behavior that’s hard to change despite the existence of real-world consequences. In the worst-case scenario failure to write means that a faculty members don’t get tenure and lose their jobs, but the less-severe consequences include bad annual reviews, lack of recognition for their work, and a personal sense of shame or failure. Even those who are  successful  at writing by objective measures (publication counts, citation indices) almost always go through periods of writers’ block, anxiety about writing, and self-recrimination for failing to write. Writing is a key to success in academia. Why is it so h...

After a year of living in pandemic conditions, many people have experienced at least some level of traumatic events . These can include things like isolation and disruption of social support networks; unemployment and financial strains; living with continual threats to health and safety; negotiating differing levels of risk tolerance with others in a highly politicized environment; witnessing the illness or actual death of people in your social network including family members; and being unable to respond in typical ways or participate in typical grieving rituals because of the pandemic. Additional stressors include frequently changing health policy and community rules, the desire to maintain aspects of "normal" life (e.g., holidays, vacations) despite pandemic-related changes, the additional cost or difficulty associated with doing so, and the indefinite and uncertain nature of the changes that have occurred in everyday living. Layered on all of these things is a climate of ...

My youngest child moves up from elementary school to middle school this year, which means that I’m ending my 7-year tenure as a PTA parent coordinator for her school’s science fair. People love to hate the science fair. Some of the most common critiques are that: (a) the events are unnecessarily competitive and therefore a source of stress for children, (b) that the assignment highlights resource gaps because affluent families can provide more support to their children’s projects at home, or worse buy their kids a high-quality project (!), and (c) that many of the experiments are cookie-cutter projects taken from books and aren’t actually all that interesting. Many aspects of these are true, and in fact the same critiques could be leveled at the last professional poster session that I attended: there’s competition that can make junior scientists feel bad about their work, the rich schools have better projects and more of them, and a lot of the scientific findings are pretty predictab...