HOW TO BE A GOOD PROFESSOR

Robert Bloomfield
Nicholas H. Noyes Professor of Accounting and Professor of Management
Johnson Graduate School of Management
Cornell University
rjb9@cornell.edu

September 8, 2015

ABSTRACT
A good Professor achieves a three part mission of research, teaching and service. After
elaborating on this mission, I provide some broad strategies for accomplishing it: know
when to say no; don’t try to win the measurement game; don’t be a jerk (in the
technical sense); “think otherwise”, but judiciously; and be your own adversary. I then
spell out specific learning objectives, explain why they matter, and provide advice on
how to achieve them. Stated in the language of instructional design, a good Professor
will be able to: communicate effectively; craft constructive reviews and effective
response memos; put philosophical insights to practical use; motivate students; share in
the governance of your institution; and blend work and life so that each enriches the
other.

INTRODUCTION
I am deeply grateful for my four years of doctoral studies at the University of Michigan. The
training was both broad and deep, beginning with ½-semester seminars in Philosophy of
Science and Research Design, and followed by semester-long forays into an unusually varied set
of research topics and methods, made possible by the diversity and strengths of the faculty. I
was particularly influenced by Vic Bernard, Bob Libby, and Jim Noel in Accounting, and Marc
Bagnoli and Ken Binmore in Economics.

However, only months into my Assistant Professorship at Cornell, I realized that my training
didn’t prepare me to do my job, which wasn’t just to publish research and teach classes, but to
be a Professor. Fortunately, Bob Libby (who had moved from Michigan to Cornell in the middle
of my doctoral studies) introduced me to the notion of “tacit job knowledge”: the
understanding workers receive through experience and apprenticeship that help them
understand the fine points of the task at hand, and the context and values that help them
understand when a task is done well enough.

Tacit job knowledge is typically learned through direct experience and apprenticeship with
senior colleagues. You can’t learn to ride a bike from reading books. You need to hop on and
start pushing the pedals—ideally with an experienced rider alongside to offer help when you

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need it. Once you master the task, you “know more than you can tell”, in the words of Michael
Polanyi—you have developed tacit job knowledge. 1

But much knowledge is tacit only because no one has tried to articulate it. My goal in this paper
is to lay out an explicit vision of what it takes to be a good Professor. To do so, I lean heavily on
some best practices in instructional design: I first lay out some general goals and attitudes, and
then specify learning objectives that are phrased as assessable tasks that Professors should be
able to perform. As much as possible, I try to convey the key dimensions of tacit knowledge: the
specific tasks that a Professor can accomplish well, the context that shapes how those tasks are
performed, the ideals we strive for, and the values that determine how closely we must attain
those ideals for a task to be done well enough.

I can articulate only so much in these few pages; aspiring Professors still need mentorship and
experience. But I hope this article will provide a framework that will help readers develop their
tacit job knowledge before they graduate and hit the job market, or at least before their tenure
clock winds down. By then, it might be too late. It almost was for me—I received five
rejections before my first revise-and-resubmit. While I’d like to claim my studies were so
pathbreaking that it took time for them to be recognized as the brilliant contributions they
were, mostly I just wrote them poorly and responded unwisely to the feedback I received.
Fortunately, I had Bob Libby and Mark Nelson (my ‘older brother’, hired a year ahead of me and
a font of wisdom) to show me the ropes. Hopefully you’ll find your own Bob and Mark. When
you do, I suspect you’ll put their guidance to better use if you can place it within the framework
provided here.

In the next section, I spell out the goals a Professor is trying to accomplish (research, teaching
and service), along with some broad strategies on how to do so. I then emphasize the value of
the instructional designer’s distinction between knowledge and learning objectives, where the
latter emphasizes actions, rather than just understanding. In subsequent sections, I use the
language of learning objectives (“the Professor will be able to…”) to provide some guidance on
the functions Professors should be able to fulfill, the processes they should be able to master,
the techniques in reading and writing Professors should be able to employ, and the
philosophical tools Professors should be able to use to clarify what they do and do not know,
and why they believe they do or don’t know it. I close with guidance on how to motivate
students to fruitful action, share governance of your institution with administrators, and blend
work and life so that each enriches the other.

All of this advice is written from the perspective of a Professor (1) in a business school at (2) a
non-profit research-oriented university that is (3) located in the United States of America. The
more your ideal Professorship deviates from these three criteria, the less relevant my advice
will be. I suspect that most of the advice will be highly relevant if you seek to be a social
scientist in any field at a research-oriented university in America. Less will be relevant if you are
in the humanities or physical sciences, if you do not intend to pursue research, or if you are
outside the United States. I recommend you share this document with an experienced mentor
who can help you judge how well the various parts of the document apply to your situation.

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1. A PROFESSOR’S GOALS
Remember Your Mission

I am employed by Cornell University, which has this mission: 2

Cornell's mission is to discover, preserve, and disseminate knowledge; produce creative

work; and promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell
community. Cornell also aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and
livelihoods of our students, the people of New York, and others around the world.

I enjoy poking fun at mission statements as much as the next Dilbert reader. 3 But one reason
we make fun of mission statements in the business world is that we have been so heavily
influenced by Milton Friedman’s perspective: that the mission of a business is “to increase its
profits”. 4 To the extent this is true, more elaboration seems insincere. If the executives of
Starbucks decided to sell their stores so they could bioengineer armed combat insects, they
would still be well within their corporate mission. Sure, they would be violating their stated
mission “[t]o inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one
neighborhood at a time.” 5 But for most businesses, their stated mission is better thought of
as a mechanism for maintaining motivated employees and loyal customers—key factors for
turning a healthy profit. 6

In contrast, as a non-profit organization and land grant university, activities like discovering
knowledge are end goals of Cornell’s mission, not just mechanisms to achieve financial
objectives. As a Cornell Professor, I have an obligation to help fulfill that mission, which might
be rephrased and refined from time to time, but is fixed by its original charter.

As a member of the community of Professors, I must live up to an even broader mission. The
American Association of University Professors codified the Professor’s mission with five
statements, the first one of which is: 7

Professors, guided by a deep conviction of the worth and dignity of the advancement of
knowledge, recognize the special responsibilities placed upon them. Their primary
responsibility to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it. To this end
Professors devote their energies to developing and improving their scholarly
competence. They accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment
in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge. They practice intellectual honesty.
Although Professors may follow subsidiary interests, these interests must never
seriously hamper or compromise their freedom of inquiry.

This is an appropriate place to emphasize that I titled this guide “How to be a good Professor”,
not how to be a successful Professor.” Preserving your freedom of inquiry may not always be
the path to success. Hampering or compromising that freedom may help you be a wealthy and
employed Professor, but it won’t make you a good one, because doing so violates your mission.

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Having clarified the mission of the Professor, I turn now to a few general principles that will
lead you toward it.

Know When to Say No

Angling to publish a lot and get your work written up in the New York Times? Be a famous
editor? Consult for foreign governments or Wall Street banks? All of those are potentially (and
maybe probably, for a business Professor) consistent with the School’s mission.

In The Uses of the University (2001), former University of California President Clark Kerr admits
that he often thinks of his faculty as “a series of entrepreneurs with a common grievance over
parking.” 8 Being a tenured Professor is even better than Kerr makes it out to be, because even
if your venture doesn’t work out, you still have tenure.

But be careful. Most Professors have plenty of chances to pursue ‘subsidiary interests’ that do
well for us, but don’t further our institutions’ missions. We could overstate our research
findings to get that New York Times coverage, but damage our institution’s and field’s
reputation for disinterested pursuit of knowledge. We could consult for villainous political or
business leaders to pad our bank accounts, but harm the world it is our mission to improve.

Your institution will almost never say no when you consider pursuing a subsidiary interest, and
they are right to leave the choice to you. Michael Jensen and William Meckling argue that
there are two types of knowledge relevant in making decisions, specific and general: 9

We define specific knowledge as knowledge that is costly to transfer among agents and
general knowledge as knowledge that is inexpensive to transmit. Because it is costly to
transfer, getting specific knowledge used in decision-making requires decentralizing
many decision rights in both the economy and in firms.

Your University is not well enough informed to tell you when to say no. You must know when
to say no yourself.

Sometimes you need to say no to your university. Sometimes your university will ask you to
take a larger role in fulfilling your mission. Can you meet with this group of alumni who might
donate money? Teach a course sorely needed to fill out the curriculum? Chair this department,
or that committee? Your institution knows its needs, but it doesn’t know how you are
allocating your time, and what tasks you would have to give up to take on this role.

You can say no! But you need to put the case in their terms. Argue by emphasizing what will
further the mission of the school, not by emphasizing your personal interests.

And remember that sometimes you really do need to say yes to your institution’s requests. Too
many Professors avoid even being asked to serve their schools with a tried and true strategy:
they serve so badly they are not trusted enough to be asked again. But schools don’t ask for
service lightly, so if they are asking, they probably need you. It is true that “no good deed goes
unpunished”, and serving well encourages people to ask you to serve again. But service is part

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of your mission, and you can’t be a good Professor by serving badly or not at all. (This is
especially true for tenured faculty, who are best viewed as partners in the firm, rather than
mere employees.) If you are still tempted to say no, think carefully about whether this is the
least bad time to serve. There is rarely a good time. And consider who will take on that service
role if you don’t. You may be happier with a little more work and a much better outcome.

My advice about saying no (or yes) assumes you are part of a well-run institution, in which
(among other things) Professors do well for themselves by helping the school succeed in its
mission. I know that for some readers, this will not be true. I’m sorry you are in that situation.
You may need to modify my advice to respond to your difficult circumstances, but maybe some
aspects of this advice can help you to improve your institution.

Don’t Try to Win the Measurement Game

What makes you a good researcher? Is it the number of papers you publish? Is it your citation
count? Is it your h-index, which is the greatest number h for which you can say “I have at least
h papers with at least h citations each”? Is it publishing in journals with higher impact factors,
which is calculated in some obscure fashion from citations and page counts?

Absolutely not! Calculations like the h-index and impact factors provide us with measures of
performance, but they are not performance itself. Unfortunately, you will face many pressures
to make those measures look favorable. This is hardly an ideal state of affairs, but these
measures are hard to avoid, and they are becoming more important. 10 As I write in What
Counts and What Gets Counted: 11

Thoughtless adherence to performance measures leads many to decry “bean counters”, and
quote Albert Einstein (though according to this link the quote actually comes from
sociologist William Bruce Cameron): “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not
everything that can be counted counts.” 12

The sad truth is that people are always going to count what can be counted, even though it
isn’t what counts. After all, we can’t count what can’t be counted. And if we want to reward
people when they deserve credit and punish them when they deserve blame, not counting
anything is not an option. Something is going to get counted.

A related point in What Counts is that no performance reporting system is perfect, for the same
reason that no two-dimensional map is a perfect representation of the three-dimensional
earth:

Good managerial reporting systems are very selective in the data they collect and
report; otherwise, they would overload people with information and administrative
tasks. They issue reports that simplify the world, just as a flat two-dimensional map
simplifies the round three-dimensional nature of the Earth. To represent the more
important parts of a map more accurately, mapmakers use a variety of “projections”
that distort or delete parts that are less important. Like mapmakers, people who design
reporting systems must choose which parts of their world they will misrepresent. No

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 system is perfect, which means that designing the right reporting system for an
organization is as much about deciding what it will do poorly as what it will do well.

The same is true for academic measures, like the h-index, impact factors, citation counts, lines
on your CV, teacher evaluations, and so on. These will be counted, but they distort the world,
and ultimately they are not the things that count. Fortunately, they only have a major impact
on your career at a few moments: when you are trying to get hired, promoted, and tenured.
They can have a minor effect via raise decisions, and (if you let them) by how you view yourself
and what you do. Remember that at most institutions, these decisions are determined by
subjective assessments by peer reviewers, who are influenced by far more than the measures
of your performance. The measures do have some feedback value: if you are publishing few
papers, publishing in journals with low impact factors, or publishing papers that are cited
infrequently, you may be making mistakes worth correcting. But take these measures with a
grain of salt, and don’t let them drive your work any more than necessary.

Think Otherwise…Judiciously

Carl Becker, one of Cornell’s most famous Professors, is supposed to have said in the early 20th
century, “A Professor is somebody who thinks otherwise”. You can’t succeed in your mission if
you just go along with the crowd. This isn’t easy. As Andrew Oswald says: 13

If the majority of referees like your research, you can be certain that you are doing
boring work. To push forward ideas that will matter to the world, you and I may as well
accept that we are going to have to upset people and crawl through the trenches of
muddy carping and explosive criticism. All referees – and I suppose that must include
me – are subconsciously looking for manuscripts that play back to them ideas they
already find familiar and palatable, and ones that lend support to their own prior
research. That is bad and sad. However, it also happens to be human.

Of course, all referees will tell you that they are open-minded, write gently and are on
the lookout for work of fabulous creativity. But they aren’t. It is hard for a human being
to absorb ideas that are of first-order originality; such ideas, by definition, barely
compute. Moreover, it is emotionally difficult for reviewers to be charitable about
others’ manuscripts. Schadenfreude survives, if quietly.

Doctoral students often pose the problem this way when they tackle their dissertations: they
are supposed to do something new and different, while relying on their advisors’ guidance
(which is based on the old and familiar), and appealing to reviewers who have a stake in the old
and familiar.

What to do? Think otherwise, but not about everything. I find it useful to classify research by
topic, theory, and method. Don’t try to change them all at once! Use a new method to test
how well a familiar theory can predict behavior in a familiar topic. Test a familiar method’s
ability to predict new behaviors in a familiar topic area, or familiar behaviors in a new topic
area. This isn’t “first-order originality”, but at least it “computes” for most readers and
reviewers.

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Be Your Own Adversary

The Professor’s job looks similar to many others. Lawyers, lobbyists, and spokespeople are
often trying to teach others, uncover new knowledge, and change society. But they act as
advocates for particular positions. These advocates can’t do just anything that works in service
of their case; lawyers cannot make false statements or conceal certain information, lobbyists
aren’t allowed to bribe people they wish to influence (though the definition of bribery is fuzzy).
Journalists can’t misrepresent themselves to gain access to data or people. But within those
restrictions, a lawyer, lobbyist, or spokesperson can make the strongest legal case for their side,
expecting adversaries to counter them when they can. But you can’t count on editors and
reviewers to do that for you—their incentive to vet your claims is far lower than your incentive
to make a one-sided case. Professors must act as their own adversaries, by seeking out and
addressing the strongest possible criticisms of their work, whether or not anyone else insists
that you do so.

Paul Romer recently named this self-adversarial attitude “Feynman Integrity”, quoting one of
the famous physicists’ commencement speeches: 14

It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a

kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an
experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only
what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results;
and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how
they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.
You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to
explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you
must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.
There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make
an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those
things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the
finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

Feynman captures the ideal, but this excerpt omits an important point—you still need to make
sure people understand your thesis and the evidence you believe supports it, which is very hard
to do if you are going to raise every possible caveat. One solution is to be your own private
adversary. You don’t have to spell out a criticism if you have already considered it and
redesigned your research or rewritten your document to address it. One general solution is to
remember this quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of
truth than lies.” 15 An even more general solution:

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Don’t Be a Jerk

I use the term ‘jerk’ in a technical sense, following the definition of philosopher Eric
Schwitzgebel, in his article A Theory of Jerks : 16

“I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the
jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as
tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic
peers.”

To accomplish your mission as a Professor, you must be both willing and able to appreciate the
perspectives of those around you, and to feel empathy for their struggles, which are just as real
as yours. Those who aren’t willing are surely culpable for their failure to do so; those who
aren’t able are culpable if they don’t try to build the skills necessary to do so. The bulk of what
follows is intended to help you develop such skills.

2. LEARNING OBJECTIVES VS. KNOWLEDGE

Professors are fond of spelling out learning objectives for their students, invariably phrased in
the form “the student will be able to…” Learning objectives spell out what students will be able
to do (such as the actions in this list) rather than simply what they know. 17 The distinction is
useful for two reasons:

• Knowledge is not observable. Even the best teachers lack access to their students’
internal mental states. The only way I can determine whether you “know” something is
to see how you accomplish tasks that would be hard to accomplish without that
understanding. For example, I hope that by the end of my doctoral seminar, my
students will know how the characteristics of traders, markets and regulations affect the
informational efficiency of a market price. But to assess that knowledge, I must spell
out a learning objective that describes a task you should be able to accomplish with that
knowledge and that would be hard to accomplish without it: “students should be able to
read a description of two markets and explain why one will generate more
informationally efficient prices.” I can test how well you have accomplished this
objective by asking questions during class, reading what you have written, and so on.
• Knowledge is not enough. You must be able to apply that knowledge to improve your
actions. Even in academia, your success will be determined by what you do, not what
you know. Can you generate new ideas, persuade others they are reasonable, and
write constructive referee reports? Can you communicate those ideas effectively in a
four-page introduction or a four-minute discussion during a conference cocktail party?
Can you respond to criticisms on your feet in a presentation and revise your paper
accordingly? Knowledge is necessary to accomplish these tasks, but hardly sufficient.
You also need to apply that knowledge using a host of other skills (such as how to
communicate effectively). To borrow from the title of my book on Managerial
Reporting, What Counts and What Gets Counted, having knowledge and achieving

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 learning objectives “count”, but only the latter “gets counted”, because that is all
anyone can see. 18

But why should Professors spell out learning objectives only for their students? As Clarice
Starling said to the genius psychopath Hannibal Lector, “You see a lot, Doctor. But are you
strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself?” 19 In the spirit of self-
reflection, and in an attempt to model good teaching practice, I structure the remainder of this
document in the form of learning objectives: ‘The Professor will be able to….’

What follows are two sets of learning objectives for Professors, each organized according to a
different view of what we must do if we are to be good Professors: what functions we must
fulfill, and what procedures we must perform.

3. THE PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO CONDUCT RESEARCH, TEACH AND SERVE

Now we are in a position to break down the Professor’s three-part mission into learning
objectives. Here’s some of what a good Professor will be able to do:

• Research. Be able to extend the knowledge of their colleagues by stating a new thesis,
using appropriate methods to test that thesis, and persuading scholars that their
evidence for or against the thesis is novel, important, and interesting.
• Teaching. Be able to communicate an existing body of knowledge to students by
defining learning objectives specifying how students will apply that knowledge, creating
tasks that help students practice achieving those objectives, and assessing how well
students perform those tasks. A good Professor also creates an environment that
encourages students to learn and interact with one another appropriately, and helps
students learn efficiently and enjoyably.
• Service. Be able to help others at their own institution and in their broader community
of scholars. The most frequent form of service is collegiality: helping maintain a
productive work environment and providing others with input (or merely a sounding
board). Service also includes contributing to discussions in workshops; reviewing or
editing papers for journals; advising doctoral students and junior faculty; and writing
and/or presenting discussions of others’ papers for conferences. As faculty become
more senior, service includes administrative and executive roles, such as serving on
committees or as an officer for their institution and scholarly organizations (e.g., the
American Accounting Association). Faculty also provide service to society at large, as
advisors, consultants, Board members and so on.

When I teach a doctoral seminar, I try to make the course a microcosm of academia, so that
students can start honing their skills right away. This isn’t too hard, because a doctoral seminar
includes so many elements of all three of the research, teaching and service functions. Stated
in the usual form of learning objectives, students (in their role of Professors-in-training) will be
able to…

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 • Conduct Research. Be able to state theses that would extend the body of knowledge
covered in the syllabus, propose (though typically not execute) appropriate methods of
testing them, and persuade their Professor and fellow colleagues that the proposal, if
executed, would be novel, important, and interesting.
• Teach. Be able to help colleagues understand the body of knowledge covered in the
syllabus and assess how well other students are performing in the seminar, all while
helping maintain and improve the learning environment. This should occur both in class
(as students answer other students’ questions) and outside of class (should students
choose to study together).
• Serve. Be able to help colleagues accomplish the course’s learning objectives, and
provide them with input or a sounding board. Participate actively in the seminar, much
as in a workshop, and be able to present more detailed views of papers as would a
discussant at a conference.

4. THE PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO WORK HARD AND WORK SMART, AND COMMUNICATE
EFFECTIVELY AND APPROPRIATELY
Professors fulfill their research, teaching and service functions by performing a number of
procedures effectively. Most of these apply across all three functions.

Work hard and work smart. Variation in academic success is largely determined by how hard
people work, and how wisely they spend their time. (Intelligence matters, but even the least
intelligent doctoral student is pretty sharp!). Working hard isn’t merely ‘time on task’; the
quality of that time matters. Working smart means making intelligent choices on what tasks
are worth more attention, and how to organize their workflow to be as efficient as possible.
Everyone’s work style is different, but there are some rules most people find useful:

• Control your environment. Don’t try to read academic papers at a football game.
• Avoid reinventing the wheel. Take notes or use other memory aids to limit how many
times you need to redo a task. Use what others have already created (with
attribution!), unless doing so would violate standards of academic integrity.
• Act with intent. Whether you are reading, writing or speaking, have a clear
understanding of what you are trying to accomplish.
• Don’t switch tasks too often. Interruptions almost always reduce productivity. Most
good academics define relatively large time blocks during which they focus on a single
task. (For this reason, be extremely careful when you engage with email and social
media, like Twitter. While these can foster valuable interactions and relationships, they
induce a lot of task switching.).
• Establish internal deadlines. Almost everyone works harder (if not smarter) when they
face a deadline. This can distort academics’ priorities, because deadlines for research
typically extend to months or years, while those for teaching and service can be as soon
as days or hours. Good academics find ways to avoid letting short-term external
deadlines drive their work flow, either by setting rules for how much time to spend on

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 research every day, or by imposing their own internal research deadlines (“I will
complete this analysis by Thursday.”).

Write and speak often and in varied ways. Good Professors speak and write a great deal and
in many different modes. They might write 300-page books, 30-page articles, and 3-page
reviews. They might speak for 1.5 hours when teaching or presenting research, 15 minutes
when discussing a paper, and 1.5 minutes when contributing in a workshop. Naturally, doctoral
students rarely write books or present research. But the best way to become effective at
writing and speaking at length is to get a lot of practice doing so in brief. Speak up in seminar.
Speak up in workshop. Write down your ideas.

Advance Discourse. No matter how long or short the text or speech, you need to advance the
state of knowledge through the three-step process of proposing extensions, critiquing others’
extensions, and collaborating to synthesize the proposal and critique into an improved
extension. Academics advance discourse most effectively when they first ensure that everyone
is working from a shared set of knowledge (common ground) and only then propose their
extension. When they critique another’s extension, they do so in a way that provides as much
direction as possible on possible responses. They respond to critiques by improving their
proposed extensions in light of what they have learned.

Communicate precisely and efficiently. Successful academics know that their audience’s time
and attention are valuable. They state their points precisely, using terms that are known to
their audience (introducing new terms only when necessary). They make clear why they are
speaking—what is the audience supposed to take away? And when they have accomplished
their task, they stop.

Follow the rules of conduct. Successful academics speak and write a great deal, but do so
following fairly constrained rules of conduct that govern when to speak, what to speak about,
and how to speak.

• When. They make their points when it will be easiest to establish common ground,
typically because much of it has recently been established by another.
• What. They focus on what others have written, said or done, not on the people who
have written, said or done things. It is rarely appropriate to discuss a scholar’s
intentions, abilities, character or personal characteristics in an academic setting. The
first items are unobservable, so you will probably be wrong; the last is likely to be
offensive and irrelevant.
• How. They avoid naïve realism, which involves acting as if your beliefs perfectly depict
reality. Clarify the basis for your assertions. It is almost always better to say “My
understanding is that X is true” or “According to Smith, X is true” than to simply say “X is
true”. Avoid overgeneralization, which involves stating beliefs that are too simple to
depict reality. Think twice before using the words “always” and “never.” Finally, avoid
expressing emotions that interfere with constructive discourse. Enthusiasm, curiosity,
respect, and openness are helpful; anger, boredom, condescension, and defensiveness
are not.

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5. THE PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO READ GENEROUSLY AND WRITE UNDERSTANDABLY
The challenge of reading and writing is similar to the challenge of performance measurement
discussed in Section 1: just as people are always going to count what can be counted, even though
it isn’t what counts, readers are always going to interpret what is written, even though it isn’t
what the writer actually thinks and intends for us to understand. And just as every
performance reporting system is imperfect because it reduces many dimensions of
performance to a few measures, our understanding of the world—and the research studies we
spend hundreds of hours crafting and refining—is richly high-dimensional. But we must be very
selective as we report our findings to colleagues. And because we are selective, we will
necessarily simplify the world to focus on the most important parts.

From this perspective—that words are simplified representations of the thoughts and
intentions behind them—I derive a handful of principles to guide how Professors should write
and read, and lay out a few techniques for implementing them in particular settings, like writing
reviews, responding to reviewers, and reading others’ work.

Some General Principles

• Act as if all anyone knows about what you think, know, and intend is what you wrote.
Don’t assume a generous reader who understands the limits of words and gives your
writing the best possible interpretation. A generous reader is a gift you can’t expect to
receive. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Don't write merely to be understood. Write so
that you cannot possibly be misunderstood.”
• Write simply. Your readers are extremely busy people who have many other choices.
Make life as easy as possible for them by keeping your writing short and simple, and
laser-focused on the most important points you hope to communicate. A corollary to
this principle is “don’t try to seem smart.” Many ambitious young scholars rely on big
words, arcane but unimportant distinctions, and convoluted sentence structures to
impress. This rarely works, even if the most important point you hope to communicate
is “I am smart” (which it almost never is). Your reader will think you are a lot smarter if
you teach them something they didn’t know.
• Don’t worry if your writing is repetitive. Academic writing requires far more precision
than other forms of writing, which leads to a particular form of repetition you have
probably spent years learning to avoid. You have probably had many teachers tell you
to use variety in your writing: don’t say “he said”, “she said”, and “they said”. Instead,
try “he whined”, “she demurred”, and “they laughed”. That is good advice for fiction,
but it is rarely good advice for academia. Each of those words mean something slightly
different, and your reader is going to assume those differences are important. Once you
find the right word, define it before you use it, and then keep using it. For example,
perhaps you are studying managers’ tendency to overstate performance. Don’t spice up
your writing by alternating between overstate, overclaim, exaggerate, inflate, puff up,
etc. Once you’ve done the hard work of helping your readers understand what you
mean by overstate (and they’ve done the hard work of understanding it), stick with it.
Even a generous reader will assume that the only reason to throw all that hard work

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 away by saying “overclaim” is because it is a better term than “overstate”, and they will
want to know why and in what way.
• Be a generous reader. Writing is hard. Remember that all you know about what the
writer thinks, knows, and intends is what they wrote. Give them the benefit of the best
possible interpretation, especially in first readings, by assuming you do have something
to learn from them, and by assuming they are communicating in good faith. (Of course,
if you have the chance to provide comments, help the author understand the sources of
your confusion.)
• Start by assuming it’s your fault. If your reader doesn’t understand what you have
written, don’t immediately blame the reader. Figure out what you did that led them
astray. A single sentence or phrase in the opening of a paper can lead readers to
completely misunderstand where you are headed, and that is your fault, not theirs.
Similarly, if you don’t understand what someone else has written, assume you didn’t
read carefully enough.

Some Useful Writing Techniques

Revise and Delete

The difficulty of communicating precisely and efficiently in such a short space is illustrated well
by Blaise Pascal’s famous remark, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time
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to make it shorter.” Good writing is almost always the result of rewriting, which typically
involves more deleting than inserting. Read each sentence and paragraph carefully and revise it
to convey the same information more concisely. I routinely delete words, sentences,
paragraphs, and entire sections when I revise papers. While rewriting is painful, reading
unnecessarily long and confusing text is at least as painful to my readers. Following the simple
guideline “Don’t be a jerk!”, the conclusion is simple: spend a lot of time rewriting.

Follow the Principle of Chekhov’s Gun

Revision is not simply a matter of conveying the same information in a shorter space; you must
also winnow out information that does not advance your argument. To make your writing
more efficient, follow the principle of Chekhov’s gun, espoused by Russian playwright Anton
Chekhov in the late 19th century: 21

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that
there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go
off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

Not all playwrights agree with Chekhov’s austere vision of drama, but it is quite useful in
academic prose. If you are going to tell the reader in the first paragraph that a large body of
literature shows that people are overconfident, that fact ‘absolutely must go off’ to make a
point in a later paragraph. If you aren’t going to refer to something you directed the reader’s
attention to early on, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

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Make The Character of Each Sentence its Subject, and the Main Action the Verb.

Consider this sentence, which would be at home in many academic papers:

“The effect of explicit incentive compensation schemes on worker’s allocations of effort

is substantial.”

Wow, that sentence is hard to read! Why? First, note that the subject of the sentence is nearly
as long as the sentence itself: “the effect of explicit incentive compensation schemes on
worker’s allocations of effort”. That whole thing, all 12 words of it, functions as the subject of
the sentence. We have to wait in suspense for the verb, "is", at the very end. So the structure
of the sentence is basically "Stuff is big", but the "stuff" is really complicated.

Here is my advice, paraphrased from my favorite writing book ever, Joseph Williams' Style:
Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 22 Trust me, it is worth the time to get the book and practice
improving your writing, especially if you want to persuade people to follow your
recommendations. (The book is also a lot of fun, because it has so many examples of terrible
writing in business contexts.)

The advice: Every sentence has a subject and a verb, but since it tells a story, it also has a
character and an action. MAKE THE CHARACTER YOUR SUBJECT AND THE ACTION THE VERB. In
this case, the character is "explicit incentive compensation scheme" and the action is that they
affect worker’s allocations of effort. So here is a rewrite that makes the character the subject
and the action the verb:

Explicit incentive compensation schemes substantially affect worker’s allocations of

effort.

A few points to note:

1. The subject of the original sentence was a “nominalization”, because it turned a verb
(affect) into a noun clause (the effect of…). But the sentence still needs a verb. Since
the important action is already embedded in the subject, the verb ends up being the
nearly empty “is”.
2. The subject of the original sentence didn’t just nominalize the key action—it also
included the object of the action (worker’s allocations of effort). Writing this way forces
the reader to understand many ideas at once, before they even know what is going to
happen. (And then what happens is “is”.)
3. Note that the character need not be a person. My revision assumes that the main actor
is the incentive scheme itself. But concreteness is a virtue, so you might improve the
sentence further by casting the worker as the actor: “Workers allocate their effort in
response to explicit incentive compensation schemes.”
4. Another way to improve your sentences is to pare noun clauses as much as you can. Do
readers need to know that you are referring only to “incentive compensation”, rather
than just compensation? Do they need to know you are referring only to “explicit”
(rather than implicit) compensation? And what does the word “scheme” add? Similarly,

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 why refer to the “allocation” of effort, instead of just effort alone? Maybe these are
important distinctions, but if you can delay them, and get rid of the unnecessary
“substantially”, you might end up with just “Incentive schemes affect worker effort.”
5. Now that the sentence is this simple, you can see that it isn’t very substantive. Maybe
you don’t need it at all. Sadly, this is often the course of my own revisions. At least the
papers end up shorter!

Work from the familiar to the new

Here is another great bit of advice from Joseph Williams: lead your reader through difficult
content by starting each sentence with familiar terms, and closing with new terms. Consider
these two paragraphs, which follow a discussion of double-entry bookkeeping:

1. …blah blah blah, double entry bookkeeping. Double-entry bookkeeping generates many
measures, and one of the most important is comprehensive income. To calculate
comprehensive income through an orderly procedure, the FASB created the asset-
liability approach. The asset-liability approach starts with the observation that assets
and liabilities completely determine comprehensive income, which is simply the period-
to period change in the difference between assets and liabilities, net assets. Getting net
assets right in each period, FASB reasoned, is therefore the best way to calculate
comprehensive income.
2. …blah blah blah, double-entry bookkeeping. Comprehensive income is one of the most
important measures generated by double-entry bookkeeping. The FASB created the
asset-liability approach so that they would have an orderly procedure for computing
comprehensive income. The asset-liability approach starts with the observation that
comprehensive income is the change in net assets, which is the difference between
assets and liabilities from one period to the next. So FASB reasoned that best way to
calculate income is to begin by getting the net assets right on balance sheet.

Both paragraphs have the same content, but the first is far easier to read. Why? Because each
sentence picks up where the last left off, as you can see when I highlight the each new term in
its own color when it is introduced and reused.

1. …blah blah blah, double-entry bookkeeping. Double-entry bookkeeping generates many

measures, and one of the most important is comprehensive income. To calculate
comprehensive income through an orderly procedure, the FASB created the asset-
liability approach. The asset-liability approach starts with the observation that assets
and liabilities completely determine comprehensive income, which is simply the period-
to period change in the difference between assets and liabilities, net assets. Getting net
assets right in each period, FASB reasoned, is therefore the best way to calculate
comprehensive income.
2. …blah blah blah, double-entry bookkeeping. Comprehensive income is one of the most
important measures generated by double-entry bookkeeping. The FASB created the
asset-liability approach so that they would have an orderly procedure for computing
comprehensive income. The asset-liability approach starts with the observation that

15
 comprehensive income is the change in net assets, which is the difference between
assets and liabilities from one period to the next. So FASB reasoned that best way to
calculate income is to begin by getting the net assets right on balance sheet.

Consider the work you require of your reader in the second version: they have to hold an
unfamiliar term in memory while they wait to see how it relates to what they have just read.
You will lose readers quickly that way.

6. THE PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO WRITE CONSTRUCTIVE REVIEWS AND EFFECTIVE RESPONSE
MEMOS
Two of a Professor’s most important activities are reviewing research articles and responding to
reviewer comments. In the first case, you are asked to hold another Professor’s career in your
hands; in the second, you are forced to confront criticism head on. Here is some guidance on
both tasks.

How to Write a Review

Many young reviewers think the goal of an editor is to reject bad papers. If this were so,
reviewing would be easy. For even the most influential work, data are imperfect, theories are
imprecise, designs are flawed, contributions overlap with prior work, and writing is flawed.
Most senior faculty could write a persuasive review nixing even the most influential (previously
published) papers in just about any field. Here is some dated but still relevant proof from 1982,
when two Cornell psychologists resubmitted papers to psychology journals that had already
been accepted at other comparable psychology journals.23 Back then, reviewers would know
authors names, so they changed the authors’ names and indicated they were affiliated with
lower status institutions. Most of the papers were rejected, even though they had already
been published. It doesn’t seem that the situation differs much today or in fields closer to
home. Matthew Spiegel sent me the following letter a few years back, upon accepting
my submission to Review of Financial Studies on the very first round of review: 24

As you will see the referee likes your paper quite a bit and only has a few minor
comments. Having read the paper and the report I have decided to beg off adding my
two cents. Any suggestions I have would likely make the paper different rather than
better, and there is no point wasting your time if that is the case. Since authors are
often puzzled when they get a letter like this, here is a brief explanation regarding my
thinking. Currently RFS receives close to 800 submissions a year. It seems inconceivable
to me that not even 1% of those papers are publishable as is. More to the point, take
any accepted paper at any of the “big three” journals and submit it to one of the other
two (or any other journal). Is there any chance it would be accepted as is? No. At best
the article would receive a revise and resubmit and it is not unlikely it would be rejected
outright. Something is wrong when no published article is “good enough” to publish. My
little push against this trend is to try and accept about one article more or less as is per

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 year. Based on the referee’s report and my reading of your paper, your article fits the
criteria for an essentially publishable as is article and that is how this decision came
about. I hope the speed and professionalism with which your paper has been handled
will encourage you to make the RFS the first journal to which you submit your papers.

I’ll be brief with my advice on writing reviews, since I make many of the key points elsewhere
(Don’t be a jerk!), and because some finance professors have written an excellent and more
comprehensive guide for reviewers. 25 I follow the overarching principle that I would never write
anything in a review I wouldn’t want in the New York Times with my name on it, because
people will guess who I am. I suggest you do the same. (For all of the authors whose work I’ve
reviewed, let me emphasize that I never conceal my identity by changing fonts, writing style or
content. You know who you are. I mean, you know who I am.) Some key points:

• Start with your explanation of what the authors did and found, and why we care, not
what they claim. This is what the editor most wants to know. Then you can spell out
any concerns that your interpretations differ.
• Be constructive. Whenever you identify a concern, be clear on what the authors could
do to fix it (if anything). Never indicate you are drawing inferences about the authors’
training or intent.
• Don’t say anything about your recommendation in the review itself—that is for the
editor’s letter only. The typical decision rule is to determine whether there is a feasible
path to publication that doesn’t effectively entail submitting a new manuscript, rather
than revising this one. If not, reject. If yes, recommend ‘revise-and-resubmit with
minor revisions’ if it isn’t too much work and there isn’t too much outcome risk (that is,
if they do what you ask, you would accept). Otherwise, recommend a ‘revise-and-
resubmit with major revisions’ (esp. if they could do something you ask, like run new
analyses or a 2nd experiment, but the results might still lead you to recommend
rejection, so there is a lot of outcome risk).
• Work from the most important to the least important, and make it clear which is which.
This not only saves the editors’ and authors’ time, but helps them focus their responses
on what really matters.

Two Useful Techniques for Writing Response Memos

Few people enjoy being criticized, no matter how accurately and constructively. But Professors
must not only steel ourselves for massive amounts of criticism, we must also be able to write
gracious response memos that thank reviewers for their comments and communicate how the
revised manuscript addresses their concerns. This is not easy to do! But here are two tricks I’ve
found very helpful.

Practice the Insult Surprise Maximization technique

Read each sentence from your response memo out loud, and at the end, add an insulting
epithet. Rewrite the sentence until the epithet becomes so jarring it’s laughable.

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Consider this sentence:

As we argued on page 6 of our last version, the Friml method’s tight ties to theory
clearly outweigh the costs of its data requirements…you doofus.

When I read this out loud, I sound like a teenager whose parents are ruining his life because
they won’t let him go to the big party, even though he DID SO clean his room like they asked
(even though that consisted only of shoving dirty clothes into a pile under the bed.) So when I
add “doofus” (a stupid, incompetent person) at the end, it isn’t surprising at all. This sentence
is not appropriate for a response memo to a reviewer!

Now consider this revised sentence:

In our revised manuscript, we now emphasize on page 6 of the revision that “the Friml
method has tight ties to theory, which we believe outweigh the cost of its data
requirements”…you doofus.

It is hard for me to sound peevish reading this out loud, so the closing “you doofus” comes
across as unexpected and fairly ridiculous. This sentence is ready to be included in a response
memo. (Pro tip—delete the epithet first. You’d be surprised how often people have sent me
papers with changes still tracked and comments undeleted. One of these was actually
published: “Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?”) 26

Focus on the present, not the past

Many authors think that the way to write a polite response memo is to be as obsequious and
apologetic as possible.

“We thank the reviewer from the bottom of our hearts for finding the typographical
error in column 6 of panel E of table 7.” We are sorry we wrote “teh” instead of “the”,
and the correction has dramatically improved the paper.

To me, “doofus” wouldn’t sound odd at all at the end of this overweening gratitude. But you
can maximize the surprise of insults without any thanks or apologies at all. The trick is simple:
focus on what your revised manuscript does well as a result of the reviewers’ feedback, not
what your prior manuscript did badly. This allows you to avoid sounding defensive (we did SO,
you doofus!), and also helps the reviewer see immediately where to find the improvement.
Note that the unrevised version of above sentence defending the Friml method seems churlish
primarily because it acts as if the original manuscript was just fine, and the reviewer was too
stupid to tell. Maybe so, but what matters is that the new version provides a strong
justification for the authors’ choice on page 6.

Focusing on the present also helps you keep your responses short. This is a personal matter for
me. Today I am preparing to review a revised manuscript that has 40 pages of double-spaced
text. It comes with response memos that total 23 pages of text, single spaced. While the
responses are comprehensive, they would be more helpful if they simply directed me to the
relevant revisions in the manuscript itself. After all, I am reviewing the revised manuscript, not

18
the reviewer memos. By focusing on the present, you will find it easier to craft the response
memo as a road map to the revised manuscript, and you will be less likely to belabor points that
you didn’t see important enough to include in the paper you hope to publish.

7. A PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO PUT PHILOSOPHICAL INSIGHTS TO PRACTICAL USE

For millennia, philosophers have been attempting to answer questions like “what do we
know?”, “how do we know it?” and “what should we do with this knowledge?” Such questions
are central to a Professor’s mission of advancing, communicating, and applying knowledge. If
philosophy seems like irrelevant nonsense to you, you are mistaken— you are probably relying
on philosophical ideas all the time, but you simply don’t realize it. In this way, you are like the
“practical men” of whom John Maynard Keynes famously said: 27

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when
they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is
ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

The same can be said of Professors and philosophers: as much as we hard-headed researchers
might believe ourselves to be exempt from the influence of beard-stroking intellectuals, too
many of us are slaves of philosophers who are not so much defunct as unstudied. And those
who don’t study philosophers are condemned to repeat their mistakes and misapply what they
got right.

This attitude about the irrelevance of philosophy is itself heavily influenced by unstudied
philosophers, especially William James and John Dewey, who (along with Charles Pierce)
founded the quintessentially American philosophy of pragmatism. James introduces the
philosophy in “What Pragmatism Means”, by telling the story of when he returned from a walk
to find his friends engaged in a fierce argument: 28

The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one
side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was
imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving
rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the
opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that
never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does
the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the
squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel?

James’s friends are evenly split on the question, so they ask James to cast the deciding vote. He
settles the dispute by redefining terms:

Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make
a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right”, I

19
 said, "depends on what you practically mean by 'going round’ the squirrel. If you mean
passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then
to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these
successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on
the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as
obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the
squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back
turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any further dispute.”

To James, this is pragmatism in action:

I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to
speak of as the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of
settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or
many? fated or free? material or spiritual? here are notions either of which may or may
not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic
method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical
consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather
than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the
alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute
is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from
one side or the other's being right.

James’ attitude is distinctly American: even Professors in America tend to belittle idle disputes
with no practical importance, even though such disputes arguably capture the very definition of
an “academic” argument. Even worse, many Professors simply assume that their unstudied
pragmatism gives them a ‘get out of philosophy free’ card, and that they will never need to
understand arcane terms like epistemology, ontology and incommensurability. But these terms
have powerful practical impact on both the content and conduct of research, teaching and
service (as we apply our knowledge to the world around us).

In particular, Professors must use philosophy to find a middle ground between many
compelling extremes. We must recognize how little we actually know, but still be able to teach
our students in the classroom and our colleagues in workshops and journals. We must be
skeptical of evidence, but not ignore it completely. We must categorize our objects of study,
but avoid claiming that those categories indicate their members’ essential natures. We must
ask whether our theories are falsifiable, without placing too much weight on falsifiability as the
one true method of science. And we must develop valid rules for selecting one theory over
another, while recognizing that those rules are shaped by sociological forces.

The remainder of this section summarizes the philosophical ideas that I have found most
pragmatically useful in my own career. This brief presentation surely suffers from many
historical and technical oversimplifications, but hopefully it is accurate enough for you to find it
useful. As usual, my headings are imperatives describing what you should be able to do.

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Two Philosophical Attitudes: Humility and Pragmatism

My overarching goal in this review of philosophy is to help you tread the middle ground
between the extreme views of “I know everything” and “I know nothing”, and to recognize
when and exactly how you or others are wandering far afield. Since most of us err toward the
side of thinking we know everything, I start by establishing an attitude of Socratic humility. I
then emphasize that pragmatic knowledge is enough for us to be effective Professors.

Know that you know nothing. The Oracle of Delphi, when asked who was the wisest man in
ancient Greece, replied “Socrates is the wisest.” Doubting this proclamation, Socrates
visited the most successful, influential and articulate leaders of his society, to ask them
probing questions using what is now known as the ‘Socratic method’: allowing people to
state their beliefs and then asking them how they would address weaknesses (and
especially contradictions) in their arguments. After these forays, he is said to have
concluded that he was indeed the wisest man in Greece, because “I know that I know
nothing.” Understanding and applying philosophy to your research, teaching, and service
will help you avoid claiming you know more than you know, and help you determine when
others are doing so.

Be satisfied with knowing something useful. How are you to publish research, teach, or
improve the world around you if you know nothing? I’ve discussed pragmatism already,
and will discuss it again in a few pages, so I won’t belabor the point here, other than to
emphasize James’s point that disputes about knowledge can be unending. Thus we must
always ask: “What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than
that notion were true?” We can’t answer every question, but we can try to answer enough
to make a difference.

Types of Things We Could Know

As we build up from Socratic humility to pragmatic knowledge, we must distinguish among

many different things we could know, even if we don’t yet. Here are three useful distinctions
among types of knowledge:

Distinguish Claims of ‘What Is’ from Claims of ‘How We Know What Is’. Epistemology is
the study of how we can know what is. Can we trust our senses? What methods of
observation are reliable? Can we trust the results of logical and mathematical reasoning?
Ontology is the study of how to describe “what is”, and is also used to refer to a particular
description of what is. Ontologies are often represented by organizing a world of things in a
framework called a taxonomy. Lists of economic forces, organizational forms, or
psychological behaviors are all ontologies. Be sure you know whether you are making claims
about the nature of the setting you are investigating, or about how you know those claims
are true.

Distinguish Between Analytic and Synthetic Knowledge. Epistemologists distinguish

between knowledge we can obtain simply through logical and mathematical reasoning, and
knowledge that requires such reasoning to be combined (synthesized) with empirical

21
 observation. The former is often referred to as analytic or a priori (before) knowledge,
while the latter is often referred to as synthetic or a posteriori (after) knowledge. For
example, “all bachelors are unmarried males” is analytic (a priori) knowledge, because we
only need to know the definition of the term bachelor to know the statement is true. “All
bachelors are untidy” is synthetic (a posteriori) knowledge, because we cannot evaluate its
truth without observation. How much of what you think you know is simply true by
definition, rather than based on evidence?

Distinguish Between Positive vs. Normative Claims. Positive claims are assertions about
what is; normative claims are assertions of what ought to be. For example, ‘the speaker is
wearing clothes’ is a positive statement; ‘the speaker ought to wear clothes’ is a normative
statement. The Scottish philosopher David Hume normally receives credit for not only
clarifying the distinction between is and ought, but also emphasizing the difficulty, if not the
impossibility, of deriving ought from is. One common view is that normative statements
require positive claims to be supplemented with value claims, which identify desired goals.
Thus, one can conclude that a speaker ought to wear clothes by establishing that people
have greater respect for clothed speakers than unclothed speakers (a positive claim), and
that respect is valuable to a speaker (a value claim). Good scientists, especially those
operating in fields with clear impact on human welfare (such as economics and business),
take great pains to distinguish their normative claims from their positive ones, and clarify
any value claims that lead them from the positive to the normative. Many prestigious
journals refuse to publish papers that include normative claims, although it is unclear why
they ought to hold this policy.

Epistemological Challenges

Much of the weakness in our knowledge is epistemological. I emphasize two challenges in

interpreting empirical evidence: inferring reality from data, and determining whether our own
thoughts and emotions count as data at all.

Be Skeptical of Data. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave tells the story of prisoners in a cave,
shackled to chairs so tightly that all they can see the shadows in front of them, cast by
objects (“forms”) that lie behind them, and are therefore unseeable. Plato’s distinction
between shadows and forms maps neatly into the social scientists’ distinction between
empirical measures and the theoretical constructs those measures are intended to capture.
Both frameworks emphasize that we cannot observe reality directly. This distinction
between shadows and forms is the foundation of my book on Managerial Reporting, What
Counts and What Gets Counted, because performance measures are merely shadows of the
true performance they are intended to capture. 29 “To them,” said Socrates, “the truth will
be nothing but the shadows.” While Socrates uses “them” to refer to the prisoners in the
cave, we can easily refer instead to ourselves, whether the shadows refer to variables in our
empirical research or to our citation counts.

Recognize Intuitionist and Behaviorist Attitudes Toward Evidence, and Value Them Both.
Intuitionists believe that our internal mental states represent a form of empirical evidence.

22
 Adam Smith and David Hume used intuitionism to develop a theory of morality (the theory
of moral sentiments), arguing that we could ascertain what is moral by observing human
emotions. If most people feel anger when seeing someone cut in line ahead of them, we
combine that observation with analytic knowledge to conclude that cutting in line is
immoral. Intuitionism fell out of favor after the rise of positivism, resulting in a stream of
psychology (behaviorism) that rejected mental states as empirical evidence, relying instead
on observable behaviors. Consider two people who are concluding a first date. According
to intuitionists, it would be reasonable for one to say to access their internal experiences
and say to the other “I had a good time. Did you?” According to behaviorists, the
statement would be without foundation, and the question would be unanswerable.
Behaviorists would be more comfortable recommending that one say to the other “You had
a good time. Did I”? The speaker could justify his statement by observing the other’s
behavior, and the other could answer the question by observing the speaker’s behavior.
While few researchers these days claim to be strict behaviorists, many use a behaviorist
cudgel to bully those who ask experimental subjects and survey respondents about internal
mental states (e.g., “How likely would you be to invest in this company?”). Such responses
can be problematic, but be careful not to overstate this concern: I have little doubt what the
most behavioristically inclined reviewers would say after a first date.

Ontological Challenges

Epistemological challenges are so visible to most Professors (especially those engaged in

empirical research) that we often forget about challenges we face in characterizing the world
we are trying to observe. If we get the ontology of the world wrong, empirical data is not of
much help! Here is some advice on using ontological distinctions and debates to avoid claiming
you know more than you actually do.

Be Able to Identify Reductionism and Emergent Properties. Reductionists claim that the
behavior of complex systems, like people and societies, can be reduced to systematic rules
about the behavior of the elements that make up those systems. Many of the pre-Socratic
philosophers were reductionists, who sought to identify the elements that could not be
reduced further (atoms, from the Greek meaning “uncuttable”). Lucretius, a post-Socratic
philosopher, rejected this view, saying ‘Surely a man can laugh and not be made of laughing
particles’. Lucretius’s insight has been developed into the notion of ‘emergent properties’:
the most appropriate theory to describe a system might refer to the system itself, rather to
constituent particles. For example, a theory describing the behavior of a firm may refer to
its size and organization, rather than to its component employees, assets and contracts.
Reductionism is a powerful tool, but if you apply it without realizing you are doing so, you
are likely to ignore forces that emerge from the low-level forces you are emphasizing.

Be Skeptical of Essentialist Claims. Aristotle argued that everything in the world was an
instance of its ‘natural kind’. He used this view to determine what it means to live well—to
express the purpose of your natural kind. The purpose of a plant is to grow; the purpose of
a lion is to prey on antelope; the purpose of a man is to reason. That purpose is not simply
a characteristic than many plants (or lions or men) share—it is the very essence of the

23
 category. But the history of biology is one of constant revision away from essentialism, and
toward recognizing that only blurry lines separate races, genders, species, and virtually any
other distinction we make in everyday life.

Professors often make unwittingly essentialist claims when they say, for example, that
“banks” act one way and “manufacturers” act another way. This presumes that these
classes of firms are meaningful categories, and that each type of firm has some essential
nature. But what about a manufacturer that loans money to customers, and that speculates
on derivative contracts for key supplies? What about a bank that develops and sells
software applications? These are not epistemological problems, they are ontological
problems.

Ludwig Wittgenstein provided a powerful argument against essentialism by focusing on the

nature of language and the meaning of words. Wittgenstein argued that they every
category we might think of as a ‘natural kind’ is nothing more than the word that names it,
and words mean simply what people use them to mean. Their definitions change across
time and culture, typically in ways that make them more useful for communication.

We can see evidence for Wittgenstein’s views in the evolution of Facebook’s taxonomy of
gender, from “man or woman” (long thought of as two distinct natural kinds, each with
their own essential nature) to a set of 58 distinct categories, and then (because Facebook
could simply not keep up with changing terminology) an option to coin your own term in a
free text field. 30 Or we can look at the distinctions between banks and manufacturers,
which change as their business practices change. Categories are useful, but consider the
problematic edge cases between them before taking them too seriously.

Evaluating Theories

Much of a Professor’s teaching and research entails embracing some theories and rejecting
others. Many philosophers have tackled this problem over the last century or so. Here is a
sampling of particularly influential approaches.

Acknowledge Whether Your Theory Makes Claims About Reality or is Simple A Useful
Tool. The most natural interpretation of scientific theories is that they make claims about
reality. However, such scientific realism runs headlong into all of the epistemological and
ontological challenges we’ve just discussed. As an alternative, we can take the far more
skeptical stance of instrumentalism, which simply views theories as useful tools
(instruments) for helping us predict observable phenomena. Most researchers are skeptical
enough of our epistemological limits to apply realism with a light hand. Milton Friedman
wrote a very influential essay espousing instrumentalism (although he called it positivism).
In the essay, he argued that it is inappropriate to criticize a theory for unrealistic
assumptions; all that matters is whether the theory predicts behavior. Then we can act ‘as
if’ the theories assumptions are true. Almost any time you see as if italicized, the authors
are referring to Friedman’s essay.

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One extreme form of instrumentalism is operationalism, which rejects the view that
measured variables capture underlying constructs. Instead, they argue that we can only
make claims about empirical measures, and attempting to identify constructs is a fool’s
errand. But few researchers want to take instrumentalism too far. Operationalist attitudes
often remind me of Bishop David Berkeley (pronounced “Barklee”), who espoused a
philosophy claiming that matter did not exist, only ideas. Samuel Johnson took issue with
this approach, adopting a pragmatic perspective many of my colleagues might take,
only more cleverly. Boswell writes: 31
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop
Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every
thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his
doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with
which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till
he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

In practice, few researchers behave as if they are instrumentalists, other than when they
are defending unrealistic assumptions. Instead, many adopt the pragmatic attitude that
constructs are worth defining because they simplify communication and guide future
research. However, we need not believe that the ontology implied by our theory actually
captures reality. As pragmatist John Dewey puts it:

...conceptions, theories and systems of thought ... are tools. As in the case of all tools,
their value resides not in themselves but in the capacity to work, as shown in the
consequences of their use. (Dewey, 1920, p. 145)

This pragmatic attitude sidesteps many tricky issues in ontology and epistemology. But we
must still grapple with the question of when a theory is “successful” or simply more
successful than another. I turn to these questions now.

Take Positivism and Falsificationism With a Grain of Salt. Positivists believe that it is
possible to explain (rather than simply describe) reality, but only through scientific methods
that blend analytical methods and formal methods of observation. Ironically, positivism is
founded on the verificationist principle (we can only know what we can verify through
observation), a claim that most philosophers agree cannot itself be verified. Karl Popper
narrowed positivist claims by asserting that scientists should focus exclusively on falsifying
theories. He justified this theory of falsificationism by arguing that one can disprove “all
swans are white” by observing a single black swan, but you can prove it only by observing all
actual and potential swans, which isn’t possible. Falsificationism has been very influential
among philosophers of science, but almost no practicing scientists actually restrict
themselves to falsificationist research. One reason is that falsificationism provides no
guidance into how you might construct theories to falsify. However, most scientists have
little respect for theories that provide no opportunity to be falsified.

Distinguish Between Normal Science and Paradigmatic Shifts, But Value Them Both.
Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities base their research programs on a set
(paradigm) of maintained beliefs, many of which are unverified. According to Kuhn,

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“normal science” involves testing and extending the paradigm to make it a more useful and
predictive theory. If there are enough discrepancies between the paradigm’s predictions
and scientists’ observations, someone may devise a new paradigm. For example, in
Ptolemy’s time, astronomers assumed the earth was the center of the universe. However,
observation indicated that the planets occasionally reverse their direction, forcing normal
science to develop a theory of “epicycles” to fit the anomalous findings into the existing
paradigm. Eventually, the inelegance of existing theory led Galileo to propose a new
paradigm: the sun is the center of the solar system. Kuhn’s view of scientific progress is
distilled into his citation of Max Planck’s Scientific Principle: “A new scientific truth does not
triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its
opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”. 32

Remember That Scientific Theories Are Rarely Commensurable, and Sociological Forces
Are Powerful. Scientific theories are commensurable if it is possible, in principle, to
determine that one is better than another. Most philosophers and researchers agree that
most scientific theories are incommensurable, allowing for contradictory theories to be held
by different scientists, with little promise that one group’s theory will displace another for
objective reasons. In his book “Against Method”, Feyerabend argued that scientific theories
compete not according to their objective performance, but according to scientists’ social
interactions. He argued that theories hold sway over the scientific community simply due
to the prestige of its proponents and the socially accepted persuasive power of their clever
‘tricks’ (Feyerabend’s term, which includes accepted methods of statistical analysis). Most
scientists now accept the importance of sociological forces in determining how scientists
behave; however, they reject Feyerabend’s much stronger claim that scientific theories
have no relative or absolute merit other than being accepted by other scientists. Like the
irony of the verification principle not being verifiable, those who argue the sociological
theory of scientific change must admit that there are only sociological reasons to accept
their theory over any other.

Apply Occam’s (or Ockham’s) Razor, But Only When You Can (Which is Rarely). William of
Occam was a medieval philosopher who proposed a compelling method of comparing two
theories that yield similar predictions: choose the simpler one. This approach to theory
selection is quite popular among scientists, since one can always make a theory a bit more
complex to address its failures. As von Neumann is purported to have claimed, “With four
parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” This claim
has been successfully implemented, showing that Professors can do surprising things when
they set their mind to them, without concern about how silly their goals or theory. 33
Despite this compelling demonstration, Occam’s Razor has no clear foundation in logic or
scientific method, and it is rarely directly applicable, since few competing theories share
identical predictions. Occam’s razor provides no basis for evaluating the cost of complexity
or the benefit of improved (or simply different) predictive power

Acknowledge Theories are ‘Turtles All the Way Down’. Young children are notorious for
asking ‘why’ (‘Mommy, why is the sky blue?’), and responding to the explanation by asking
why yet again (‘But mommy, why does air bend sunlight?’), until they receive an impatient

26
 dismissal (‘Ask your father; I have work to do.’). Effective scientists try to maintain the
curiosity of a young child, while understanding that even though they can always ask
another ‘why’, eventually their colleagues will lose patience. They are therefore willing to
accept that every approach, no matter how insightful, lacks an ultimate foundation; rather,
it is ‘turtles all the way down.’ This colorful phrase comes from a 1905 letter by Bishop
Oliver Sabin, who wrote of an American preacher… 34

… [who] said the world was flat and stood on a turtle. They asked him what the turtle
stood on and he said another turtle, and they asked what that turtle stood on and he
said another turtle, and finally they got him in a hole and he said. "I tell you there are
turtles all the way down."

Philosophy can be an endless source of fascination for anyone, but it should be a standard part
of a Professor’s everyday toolkit. This brief treatment defines some of the most important
tools and provides just enough context to show how they might be useful. But like any form of
tacit job knowledge, you learn through experience and apprenticeship. I encourage you to
apply these tools to every paper you write and read, and see how they help you make their
claims more precise and justifiable.

8. THE PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO MOTIVATE STUDENTS TO FRUITFUL ACTION

Teaching bears many similarities to research. In the classroom, we teach our students what our
colleagues already know; in research, we teach our colleagues something new. Thus, all of the
advice provided up to this point applies to both teaching and research with little modification:
don’t be a jerk; work hard and work smart; read, write and speak effectively; be constructive in
evaluating others’ work and respond appropriately when you are evaluated; use philosophy to
clarify exactly what you do and do not know.

But teaching is a special part of our mission, because its costs and benefits to both society and
our institution are so visible, as we improve the world and our school, one student at the time.
In this section, I begin by clarifying the dual goals of teaching—one high-minded and one
practical. I then turn to some advice on how to teach effectively. There are many excellent
guides to teaching, many teachers better than I am, and many different ways to teach
effectively. I therefore limit my comments to a few general observations.

Pursue the Dual Goals of Teaching

Historians Will and Ariel Durant said that “Education is the transmission of civilization”, and
they didn’t overstate the point.35 They might also have said that “education is the sustenance
of your institution”, because it is an essential source of both direct revenues (tuition) and
indirect support from governments and communities (funding, tax relief and so on). Teaching
thus has dual goals and you must achieve them both to be a good Professor. You must transmit
and improve civilization by teaching passionately and effectively. And you must also sustain
your institution by teaching enough students not only to earn your keep, but to fund the

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expenses that support the institution’s mission as a whole. Administrators, like your Dean and
Department Chair, count on you to teach well enough to attract students to your course and to
your major, which helps them argue for a share of the institutions resources that will help your
area grow, or at least not shrink. If you teach poorly, you undermine their arguments, and
make them struggle to stave off a downward spiral at the same time they must deal with
complaints about your performance.

The dual goals of teaching inspire no end of political battles. Some of these are unavoidable,
like battles over how large classes should be, how much time Professors should devote to
teaching and research, how extensively institutions should hire faculty with no research
obligations, how much faculty should be paid, and increasingly, how much teaching can take
place online, rather than in the classroom. It is part of your service mission to engage in these
discussions thoughtfully, with good information, and with full appreciation for the perspectives
your peers (i.e., don’t be a jerk).

Teaching’s dual mission provokes other political battles that are largely avoidable. Too many
arguments presuppose that some fields (like the humanities and liberal arts) transmit
civilization, while others (like engineering and business) merely pay the bills. To this Professor
of Accounting, such differences seem overstated. Archeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat has
forged a powerful argument that accounting drove the development of the first written
languages, and indeed of many of the features we associate with modern civilization itself.36
Historian Jacob Soll has extended this argument to more recent times in his book The
Reckoning, by showing the close link between good accounting and successful statecraft over
the last five centuries. Thus, two professors in supposedly impractical fields of the humanities
have demonstrated the civilizing influence of a supposedly unintellectual business discipline,
while at the same time using that discipline to advance their own fields.

Most good Professors are transmitting civilization at the same time they are achieving more
practical goals for their students and their institution, whatever their field. Little good comes
from exaggerating differences in how and how well they achieve these twin aims.

Motivate Your Students to Action

If there is one common thread among all of the great teachers I’ve known, it is that they
motivate their students to work hard. My colleague Mark Nelson, upon receiving a national
award for teaching excellence, described his approach this way: 37

“My teaching metaphor is that I’m a personal trainer,” Nelson said. “My students hire
me because of my expertise, so they aren’t in charge. Rather, they need to follow my
program of somewhat painful exercises in order to get stronger and achieve their
objectives. But we still have fun along the way.”

Mark’s metaphor underscores a central truth of teaching: ultimately, students must teach
themselves through their own efforts, whether they are working on problem sets, struggling to
understand a difficult text, or arguing with friends in the bar after a seminar. Good Professors
make their students want to undertake these efforts. Some act as drill sergeants, others as a

28
trusted (but professional!) friend, or as a surrogate for that parent whose respect always
seemed just out of reach. Others count on reciprocity: they make it obvious how hard they are
working to teach well, and students respond in kind. Find a method that suits you, your
students and the subject matter.

Placing such emphasis on motivation helps answer a common question: is the student a
customer or a product? The answer is neither: they are part of the production process.
Naturally, students want to get good value for the time and money they devote to education,
so they have customer-like attributes. And equally naturally, employers and society want to
our students to skilled, informed and thoughtful, so they have product-like attributes. But
everyone who is part of a production process shares these attributes: they want to be well
compensated, well treated and improved by their efforts so that they can take on new and
increasingly important challenges that are valued by others.

Challenge Students Appropriately

It isn’t enough to motivate students to action; that action must be fruitful, so you must design
your course to present challenges that are appropriate to your learning goals and your
students’ abilities.

One way to match challenges to your learning goals is to study Bloom’s taxonomy of learning,
along with the related best instructional practices. 38 A quicker but still useful path is to reverse
the usual order of course design. Most teachers start by identifying all of the content they want
to cover, and then crafting exams, problem sets, projects and other assignments to test
whether students have learned it. Instead, start by crafting the activities students must be able
to complete, and then ensure that you are providing them with the content necessary to do so.

We are now left with the question of how difficult to make your challenges. Harder is not
always better. To balance the difficulty of your challenges, you may find it helpful to implement
a best practice in computer game design. Most games, like most college courses, present a
series of challenges that build in difficulty. Raising the difficulty level too quickly results in
anxiety; raising it too slowly results in boredom. According to game designer Jesse Schell,
author of The Art of Game Design 39, the most engaging games stick within a “flow channel” in
which challenges increase quickly enough to stave off boredom, but not so quickly that they
cause anxiety. But they don’t always hug the upper boundary of the flow channel, which would
leave the player always on the edge of anxiety; instead, they ease off at crucial moments to
allow them to enjoy their newfound mastery. As another game designer describes it: 40

[I]n a shooting game like Halo you start with a basic arsenal and the enemies you
encounter are easy to defeat with your initial arsenal and your basic game skills.
However, as you keep playing, you eventually will get a new weapon that will make you
more powerful. The naive game design approach, according to Schell, would be to
immediately increase the power of the enemies to offer new challenges according to
the new state of the player.

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 However, according to the waved Flow Channel picture [which you can see in the link
above] we should not increase the power of the enemies for a while. In doing so, the
player will enjoy a short period of time feeling powerful and the feeling of progress will
also be reinforced….

So, with the waved Flow Channel we are keeping the player in flow and, in addition, we
are rewarding him simply for playing. And if just playing our game is rewarding for the
player, he will keep playing for the eternity! Epic win for the game designer!

As Mark Nelson said above, “we still have fun along the way.”

Assess Performance Fairly, Constructively, and Promptly

One you have designed your course and delivered your instruction (e.g., lectures, etc.), you
must assess performance. Few aspects of teaching cause more stress and unhappiness for
teachers and students alike. If you are unfair, your students will lose their trust and motivation.
If you aren’t constructive, students will know whether they did well or poorly, but they won’t
know why. If you are not prompt, students will suffer unnecessarily prolonged stress, and lose
their ability to learn from feedback (because they will have forgotten the actions that
generated your responses).

Mastering these aspects of assessment won’t guarantee you teaching awards, but fail on any
one of them and your students will despise you. So may their parents, and don’t be surprised
these days if they helicopter in to let you know it. Many Professors say that grading is the least
enjoyable part of their job. But while it’s hard to make yourself more intelligent, accomplished,
likeable and attractive (all of which tend to improve teacher ratings), you can make your
assessments more fair, constructive and prompt. Give these goals high priority, and your
students will appreciate it.

Illustrate Abstract Frameworks with the Concrete Examples

Most fields of study provide frameworks that students can apply to a range of concrete
examples. Students of physics learn to apply Newton’s three laws of motion to calculate how
far a braking car will travel before it stops completely. Students of regulation learn to apply the
theory of regulatory capture to explain why a judge allegedly promised the Chairwoman of the
Commodity and Futures Trading Commission that he would “never rule in a plaintiff’s favor”
and why 20 years later “A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow.” 41

Examples become vehicles for education when they are moored within framework that allows
the student to generalize their implications; frameworks become relevant and understandable
when they are illustrated with examples that students can connect with and remember. Make
your examples as concrete as possible. Students will immediately grasp the importance of
stopping a car before it hits a pedestrian, or of a judge deciding against wronged widows before
looking at evidence, and will want to understand a framework that leads to better outcomes.
Examples like a wooden block sliding across a rough surface, or an unnamed bureaucrat making
a hypothetical decision, just don’t have the same power.

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Choose Wisely Between Platonic Discovery and Pragmatic Creation

Finally, we can put philosophical ideas to practical use in the classroom: to motivate your
students to fruitful action, you must decide when to help your students master existing
ontologies, and when to help them construct new ones to capture new insights.

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato conveys his epistemological skepticism by emphasizing that
we see only the shadows of reality’s forms. But he also conveys his ontological certainty,
because he viewed the forms as having distinct essential natures, which exist independent of
whether we can know them. The Platonic (or “classical”) approach to education focuses on
teaching students what we believe we already know about the world.

A good deal of great teaching takes a Platonic approach, helping students discover the value of
existing frameworks and taxonomies. When I teach my students how to apply existing
accounting standards to calculate income, I challenge them to master an existing framework. A
biology teacher does the same when teaching taxonomic terms and the concept of convergent
evolution to understand why bats, birds and dragonflies share the ability to fly but are not
closely related.

More recent philosophers, particularly the Pragmatists and Wittgenstein, reject Plato’s
ontological certainty, arguing that nature does not consist of distinguishable forms with
essential natures. They argue that we do not discover Platonic forms, we create our own. As
Pragmatist William James said, babies first experience life as “one great blooming, buzzing
confusion,” but learn to create distinctions between themselves and others, between their
head and their hands, and so on, as they interact with the world. The “progressive” approach
to teaching focuses on teaching students to create their own ontologies, and by doing so, teach
them how to teach us something new. 42

When I challenge my students to create financial reports to measure true performance in the
manner best suited to their organization, I engage them in a task of creating categories, not
discovering them. A biology teacher does the same when challenging students to predict the
effects of changes in a marine environment, which forces them to decide what types of
categories are most useful for their particular question: for example, should they rely on
categories like plankton (oceanic organisms drawn by currents), organisms (like algae and
protists, which are common components of plankton) or stages of life (because many species
are plankton during their larval stage)?

By helping students discover the value of existing ontologies, teachers transmit civilization as it
has been in the past. By challenging students to create their own ontologies, teachers lay the
groundwork for civilization as it will be, preparing students for an ever changing landscape.
Both approaches have their value, and a good Professor can identify when to rely on one rather
than the other.

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9. A PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO SHARE GOVERNANCE WITH ADMINISTRATORS
We now turn to Advanced Professoring: sharing in the governance of your institution. Before
offering my rather limited advice on this both boring and politically charged topic, I provide an
overview of how faculty and administrators typically share governance duties.

An Overview of Shared Governance

Most non-profit educational institutions operate under a system of shared governance. At

Cornell, administrators have “ultimate fiduciary responsibility”, while faculty are “stewards of
educational policy. This means that final decisions on financial commitments must come from
an administrator, with the level of the administrator typically rising with the significance of the
commitment, from Department Chairs to Deans, and on to Provosts, the President and
eventually the Board of Trustees. Faculty have final word on decisions regarding teaching and
research that involve no new financial commitments, like curricular requirements, granting of
academic credit. But since most important decisions on teaching and research cost money,
faculty are given many opportunities to shape (but not decide on) financial commitments.

Here is how shared governance typically plays out in the matter of hiring faculty. Before any
hiring can take place, administrators must authorize a search. This typically involves a good deal
of negotiation within and across levels of administrators: The hiring unit’s Dean will need to
negotiate the number of searches with the Provost, who must consider the needs of all of the
other Deans who want to hire. The Dean must negotiate with the unit’s Department Chairs
how to allocate those searches among the various departments. Once a search is authorized
and completed, approval for a particular hire rises through the ranks of administration. Job
offers without tenure can typically be approved by Deans, or sometimes Provosts, but tenured
offers (which entail a lifetime commitment) must be approved by the Board of Trustees.

Throughout this process, good administrators are seeking guidance from faculty, who are well-
positioned to answer questions like: How many faculty do we need to staff our courses and
generate good research? What areas of teaching and research are likely to be growing or
shrinking? Is a particular candidate likely to be a good teacher? A good researcher? A good
Professor? Which candidate best meets the needs of the department? Most of these faculty
answers come from committees of faculty members, who consult other faculty members for
additional input. A search committee will seek out, evaluate candidates and recommend which
one to be hired. A tenure committee will solicit letters from peers at other schools, write a
report, and present their report and recommendation to a larger committee (sometimes the
entire tenured faculty of the unit) who will vote on whether or not to offer tenure. However,
these committees are not making final decisions; they are merely advising the administrators
on what to do.

At its best, shared governance allows decisions to be made with full information. Faculty have
better information than administrators on the educational and research needs of a department
and how well each candidate will fill those needs. Administrators have better information
about the financial constraints of the institution, and the other opportunities that might be a

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better use of funds. At its worst, shared governance is a battle between self-interested
Professors who want lots of resources with few obligations, and administrators who want to
expand their empires and position themselves for a more powerful and lucrative position.
Typically, shared governance lies somewhere in between these extremes.

Embrace the Committee Work Appropriate To Your Position

You can’t be a good Professor without sharing in the governance of your institution, which
typically means serving on committees. Committee work tends to come with experience. An
assistant Professor is rarely asked to serve at all, because they must first develop into effective
researchers and teachers, and because they don’t know enough about the institution to share
governance effectively. Over time, you will be asked to serve more frequently and on more
critical matters.

Before rejecting committee assignments, think about what happens to your institution as more
and more faculty make a similar decision. Benjamin Ginsberg argues that this is exactly what
has happened over the past half-century or so. In his book, The Fall of the Faculty, Ginsberg
argues that faculty have gradually handed governance over to a growing army of
administrators. 43 From the book review linked above:

The larger result, he argues, is that universities have shifted their resources and
attention away from teaching and research in order to feed a cadre of administrators
who, he says, do little to advance the central mission of universities and serve chiefly to
inflate their own sense of importance by increasing the number of people who report to
them. "Armies of staffers pose a threat by their very existence," he wrote. "They may
seem harmless enough at their tiresome meetings but if they fall into the wrong hands,
deanlets can become instruments of administrative imperialism and academic
destruction."

Ginsburg may overstate the case—in my experience, many administrators care deeply about
the central mission of their institutions, and faculty can be every bit as self-important and self-
interested. But a more temperately worded case is a strong one: if faculty don’t share in the
governance of their institution, their views on its mission will be ignored, and administrators’
decisions will be poorly informed. Should your institution invest millions in a climbing wall and
other amenities? The trend toward spa-like universities might or might not further the
institution’s mission; but how are administrators to know the faculty’s view, if faculty don’t
participate in the decision. 44

Work for Outcomes that Support the Mission of Your Institution

When you share in the governance of your institution, you must support its mission. I phrase
this imperative in terms of outcomes, not in inputs. Ideally, everyone will argue their position
in good faith, claiming that decisions will further the institution’s mission only when they
actually believe this is true, not simply because the decisions will benefit themselves. But what
if administrators or other faculty are arguing in bad faith, or deploying any of the innumerable
dirty tricks that are daily new fare in national politics: trading votes, threatening to undermine

33
the institution unless they get their way, and so on? Sometimes you must fight fire with fire.
You can engage in political machination and still be a good Professor, as long as your intent is to
generate outcomes that support the mission of your institution.

Above all, remember that your institution is (I am assuming) a not-for-profit organization. It has
a mission, not just a bottom line. I cringe whenever I hear someone say they want to “run the
university like a business.” This phrase is either meaningless or wrong. It is meaningless if they
simply mean that they will try to achieve the university’s mission as efficiently and effectively as
possible. That statement could apply to any goal-oriented endeavor. It is wrong if they mean
that they will do whatever it takes to improve the bottom line, mission be damned. That
attitude might be appropriate for a for-profit organization, but it violates the charter of most
universities. Fortunately, the phrase is often merely a hard-nosed way of saying that they will
pay close attention to the financial constraints of the organization, and ensure that it achieves
its mission efficiently and effectively, and in a manner that is financially sustainable; in other
words, they will run the institution like the non-profit organization it is.

Educate Yourself on the Big Issues, and Be Willing to Take a Side

Wallace Sayre is quoted as saying "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of
politics, because the stakes are so low," or alternatively "The politics of the university are so
intense because the stakes are so low.” I can’t think of quotes so famous that I disagree with so
completely. I disagree with the argument, because it suggests that national politics should be a
meadow of lions and antelope living together in harmony, which hardly seems to be the case.
It seems more accurate to say that politics become more vicious, bitter and intense when the
stakes are high, resources are shrinking rather than expanding (because loss causes pain), the
effects are personal, and the evidence is too poor to resolve disputes about the likely outcomes
of alternative decisions. All of these are true in academia. I disagree with the premise because
the stakes in academia are indeed high. This is true even in supposedly impractical fields like
philosophy, where arguments in seminar often come to be used to justify major policies on
issues from welfare to genocide.

Stakes are especially high when it comes to governance. Should your institution spend millions
on student amenities rather than hiring more faculty? Help faculty unionize, or fight against
them? Hire more or fewer part-time (adjunct) faculty with no teaching responsibilities or job
security, in order to lower instruction costs? Open up a new campus in a totalitarian nation?
Pursue allegations of student sexual misconduct more or less aggressively? Have broader
speech codes, or none at all? Accept money from a donor who wants to dictate how the
money is spent? Commit a hundred million dollars for new facilities? Grant someone lifetime
tenure and a share in the governance of your institution, or force them to find a job elsewhere?

I can’t answer these questions for you, because I have no special insight into these particular
issues, no expertise in the moral and political theories that might provide general principles,
and no knowledge of your individual circumstances. But as you take on a larger share of
governance, you will need to educate yourself on these high-stakes issues, since the more
information you can bring to bear, the more likely you can help the institution make good

34
decisions. And you must be willing to take a stand, even knowing that the politics can be
intense and you are likely to pay some kind of price doing so.

10. A PROFESSOR WILL BE ABLE TO BLEND WORK AND LIFE

Being a good Professor takes a great deal of time. As the saying goes, Professors have
tremendous flexibility; you can work whatever 70 hours a week you want. For other time-
intensive professions, I might now turn to a discussion of work-life balance. But the very term
presupposes a clear distinction between work and life that is quite useful outside academia, but
not so useful within it.

I spend a lot of time reading books, newspapers, blogs and research outside my area. When I
drive from one city to another, I listen to podcasts about philosophy, history and music. It is the
rare family dinner that doesn’t involve debate over any number of topics. These activities have
enriched my life, but they have also broadened my research and given me many great examples
for the classroom. Is this work or life? The blurred line between work and life is one reason
that Professors have stronger claims of ownership over their writings than other employees:
who can say whether their time was part of their obligation to their employer, or a result of
their private hobbies?45

I won’t provide any advice on how to balance work and life, to the extent you have
distinguished between these categories in a way that works for you. Instead, I will encourage
you to take every opportunity to blend work and life, so that your life can enrich your work, and
your work can enrich your life. I learned evolutionary biology decades ago by regularly asking
my wife about her day at school. This strengthened our marriage and opened my eyes to a
fascinating field, but didn’t seem very relevant to my own studies. Years later, I wrote a
dissertation applying principles of population biology to strategic auditing. My research on
incentives and performance measurement helped us help our children to do well in school and
blossom into accomplished musicians. (Key lesson: don’t crowd out intrinsic motivation with
extrinsic incentives.) 46

Now that our kids are out of the house, I spend many evenings telling my wife about my day,
and the challenges I face in research, teaching and service. My wife now knows a great deal
about how to be a good Professor, and was able to provide useful feedback on every part of
this essay. Both the essay and our marriage are stronger for it.

Being able to blend work and life, and letting each enrich the other, is one of the privileges of
an academic career. Make the most of it.

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11.CONCLUSION
A Professor has a mission. If you are not willing to devote yourself to that mission, don’t
become a Professor. If you are willing, you still need to develop a host of abilities through
careful study, experience and apprenticeship. I hope this essay has given you a useful
framework for understanding what you need to learn and how to go about it.

I encourage you to share this document with your senior colleagues and administrators. Share
it with your senior colleagues because they will disagree with some of my advice, and can help
you implement what they do agree with. Share it with your administrators because they might
be able to align Professors’ incentives more effectively with the mission of their institution.
Please let me know what you found helpful, and how this draft might be improved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I received thoughtful feedback on prior drafts from Vincent Bourke, Tamar Bloomfield, and
Mark Nelson.

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