On Finding Your Place at the Academic Table

I've been watching my students struggle with something that shouldn't be difficult, and it's starting to irritate me. Not them—they're doing their best with an impossible task. What irritates me is how we've managed to turn one of the most natural human activities—having a conversation—into an exercise in intellectual contortion that would impress a medieval theologian. Take one student, who spent our last meeting apologizing for their research interests. They'd discovered something genuinel...