On humility

Some months ago, fellow professor-who-has-run-ultramarathons Sabrina Little posed and answered the question Why is it hard to be humble?

Her three reasons, in brief: we are confused about what humility is; our limits change; pride offers an appealing narrative.

Sabrina’s reasons are good, yet they do not directly cover my favorite hypothesis, which is that humility is hard because we often don’t assess our abilities and limitations with enough granularity. For example, if we think of intelligence as a single trait, the basic options would seem to be “I am intelligent” and “I am not that intelligent,” and of course most of us want to think of ourselves as intelligent, which then makes humility hard. But if we instead think of intelligence as multifaceted (as it surely is, as laid out by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences), then this unlocks many more options, e.g., “I have high math intelligence and high musical intelligence, but not-so-great emotional intelligence or spatial intelligence.” This granularity can help us take pride in our specific strengths while still being humble about our specific limitations.

This kind of humility is good for its own sake, but it can also be very useful professionally.

For the last several years, I’ve been working on the issue of how to make undergraduate biology exams “better,” by which I mean simultaneously more rigorous and more fair. Could my approach be informative to other instructors of Human Anatomy, where the courses are often defined mostly by mile-long lists of structures for students to identify?

Over the years, my attitudes toward others’ Human Anatomy exams have ranged from arrogance (“If you bludgeon students with thousands of vocabulary words, you can’t expect them to think critically and solve interesting problems!”) to timidity (“I’m not that great an anatomist, so why should other anatomy instructors listen to me?”). But by thinking about my strengths and weaknesses in a granular way, I was ultimately able to recognize what I had to offer (innovative ideas about exams), what I could not do on my own (independent checking of my anatomy examples), and what I needed (anatomy-savvy collaborators).

The resulting paper (Crowther et al. 2024) is one I’m proud of — in part because doing it well required some humility.