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Overcoming Academic Pressure with Intellectual Character

November 9, 2021

Tuesday, November 9th at 7pm ET

Educators and scholars face unending pressure to publish, innovate in the classroom, win grants, serve their institutions, and more. These practices are key to producing knowledge and training new thinkers, but the expectations around them can also produce unhealthy stress that threatens intellectual focus and productive dialogue. What professional mindsets and policies can we adopt to best pursue knowledge while addressing the stresses of academic life?

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Join HxA for a discussion of intellectual character — curiosity, humility, empathy, and more — and the ways it can mitigate academic stress and effect cultural change. We'll be joined by Margarita Mooney Suarez, Jason Baehr, and Lisa Jaremka for an evening spent learning how to deepen our practices as scholars, teachers, and colleagues.

About the speakers:

Jason Baehr is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He specializes in theoretical and applied virtue epistemology. His books include Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (Routledge, 2016), and The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2011). From 2012-2015, Baehr directed the Intellectual Virtues and Education Project at LMU, which was funded by a grant of over $1 million from the John Templeton Foundation, and involved the founding of the Intellectual Virtues Academy of Long Beach, a charter middle school in Southern California. Baehr has done extensive work with educators at all levels surrounding the theory and practice of educating for virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and intellectual courage.

Lisa Jaremka is an associate professor in psychology at the University of Delaware. The bulk of her research program aims to understand how feeling socially disconnected (e.g., lonely) affects health, with a specific focus on underlying physiological mechanisms. More recently, she has been involved in work about burnout, rejection, and impostor syndrome, with the goal of raising awareness about these issues in academia and proposing potential solutions.

Margarita Mooney Suarez is associate professor of congregational studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, where her work lies at the intersection of the social sciences with philosophy and theology. She has also been on the faculty of Yale University, Princeton University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Pepperdine University. Margarita’s most recent book, The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts (2021), grew out of her decades of experience as a teacher and scholar. Her book Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009) demonstrated how religious communities support the successful adaptation of Haitian immigrants in the U.S., Canada, and France. In 2016, Margarita founded the Scala Foundation, which is dedicated to infusing meaning and purpose into American education by restoring a classical liberal arts education. She continues to serve as Scala’s Executive Director.

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