Academic jet-setting offers comfort and clout — but beneath the lounges, robes, and performative productivity lies a world shaped by privilege. If you’re lucky enough to fly, stay grounded. Use the altitude to reflect, recalibrate, and help others rise.
Passion drives research but can also distort it. Bias creeps in when personal conviction shapes how we interpret evidence. Staying responsible means naming our interests, inviting critique, and staying open to being wrong. Rigour and humility go hand in hand.
When a professor stops contributing — missing deadlines, skipping meetings, failing students — the whole department feels the strain. Collegiality has limits. Institutions must know when to intervene, how to balance compassion with accountability, and what’s at stake when they don’t.
New open issue of the Canadian Journal of Bioethics / Revue canadienne de bioéthique is now online: cjb-rcb.ca
Features work on vulnerability & stigma, decentralized trials & consent, MAiD & disability, AI in mental health, psychedelic research, and evolving clinical ethics practices.
Self-censorship is academia’s silent crisis. Fear of backlash and institutional caution narrow inquiry and erode trust. Silence isn’t neutral, it’s complicity. Critical debate depends on courage and solidarity.
Academia doesn’t reward kindness, it selects for endurance. Reviewer #2 breaks you, committees finish the job, and somehow you still call it “professional development.”
Classroom disruption isn’t just annoying, it’s a breach of shared ethics. Teaching is performance and presence, shaped by gender and power. From silent stares to sonic boundaries, educators can foster respect without yelling. Authority is earned, embodied, and enacted with care.
Academic advice is often contradictory, shaped by discipline, culture, and personal experience. There’s no single path to success. Build a diverse mentoring network, ask for context, and trust your gut. Advice isn’t a map; it’s a toolbox. Use it to chart your own course.
Bioethics isn’t abstract theory — it’s about navigating complexity, clarifying values, and supporting decisions when there are no perfect answers. It asks why we think something is right or wrong, and how to act responsibly amid uncertainty and competing interests. #bioethics #ethics #healthcare
Academia’s full of people who mistake confidence for competence. The know-it-all opines on everything, learns nothing, and still gets invited to the panel. Expertise isn’t the problem — ego is.
Succession isn’t about replication. Efforts to secure continuity can slip into control and undermine fairness. True renewal means letting go, trusting colleagues to adapt, and recognizing that vibrant institutions evolve, not preserve power.
When inclusion becomes ritual — land acknowledgments, token representation, ceremonial openings — it risks becoming virtue signalling. Real change demands relationships, education, structural shifts, and listening beyond performative moments. Inclusion isn’t about looking good, but doing good.
What is bioethics for in polarized times? The new issue of the CJB/RCB (cjb-rcb.ca) explores whether bioethicists should be advocates, activists, or architects of moral space amid geopolitical strain and threats to research and public health. A timely, provocative collection — open access.
Supervision is more than deadlines and feedback, it’s trust, empathy, and adapting to each student’s rhythm. The role shifts between guide, cheerleader, and steady presence. At its best, mentoring becomes a shared journey of growth, resilience, and learning.
Prestige, autonomy, and strategic disengagement are often rewarded over collegiality and shared purpose. Rethinking hiring and institutional practices means valuing collaboration, emotional labour, and accountability — not just individual ambition.
We’re all in the same storm, even if our boats differ. Calling others “snowflakes” masks our own fragility. Resilience grows through interdependence, solidarity, and seeing diversity as strength. Snowflakes don’t just survive the storm, they transform it.
Strong ideas aren’t enough — academic publishing demands strategy, resilience, and revision. Align with journal scope, treat peer review as collaboration, and refine your arguments. Rejection isn’t failure; it’s part of the path to publication.
Generative AI can support writing by enhancing structure and flow — but it demands effort, transparency, and critical engagement. It can’t replace authorship. Instead of banning it, we need AI literacy and thoughtful integration to avoid plagiarism and preserve analytic rigour.
Digital purgatory: ten tabs across, seven down, none relevant. Endless approval chains, cryptic validators, and checkboxes that scream: “You can’t be trusted.” Where research and reason go to die in triplicate. Welcome to bureaucracy’s ninth circle. #bureaucracy #university #administration
Science fiction asks the hardest questions: What if? Should we? From AI to digital afterlives, SF helps us explore ethics beyond theory — identity, justice, and the futures we’re building. It’s not prediction; it’s provocation. #Bioethics, #Futures, #Speculative
Academic promotion is a long climb marked by ambition, pressure, and quiet resilience. Each stage brings new challenges and growth. Success isn’t just reaching the summit, it’s knowing when to pause, reflect, and support others on their own journey.
Teaching bioethics means more than sharing knowledge, it’s about fostering ethical awareness, critical thinking, and the courage to face discomfort. The goal isn’t perfection, but ethical competence: acting with integrity in morally complex, emotionally charged contexts.
Grant writing is exhausting: time-consuming, bureaucratic, and often demoralizing. Creative ideas must fit rigid templates, outdated platforms slow the process, and idealized teams are built for optics. When form trumps substance, collaboration and innovation risk getting lost.
Rigid identity categories can fragment more than unite. Human identity is messy, evolving, and overlapping. Real inclusion means rejecting simplistic labels, fostering dialogue, and building structures where everyone belongs, so “safe spaces” become unnecessary.
The CJB/RCB (cjb-rcb.ca) has just published a special issue "MAiD in Canada: A Sober Second Look", edited by Daryl Pullman & Jennifer Flynn. It brings together leading voices in bioethics, law, philosophy, and healthcare to critically examine Canada’s evolving medical assistance in dying regime.
Welcome to the tangled thicket of academic writing, where clarity goes to die and jargon multiplies like gremlins after midnight. Fear not: armed with your vorpal pen, you can hack through the fluff, slay the Jabberwock, and rescue meaning from the clutches of sesquipedalian nonsense.
Students learn not only through formal instruction but by observing how their professors navigate academic life. Modelling ethical conduct, resilience in the face of failure, work-life balance, and intellectual curiosity plays a crucial role in shaping how students understand professionalism.
The Ministry of Language Refinement has issued an updated memorandum on lexical discipline, reaffirming the Party’s commitment to semantic clarity and identity standardization. Citizens are reminded: in Newspeak, there is no ambiguity, only alignment.
Academic talks too often feel like PowerPoint purgatory — 80 slides in 20 minutes, lime-green text, and speakers who mumble while taping Morse code with a pen. The issue isn’t the research, it’s the delivery. Despite being in the business of ideas, academia treats communication like an afterthought.
I see shifts happening, but it's dependent on local and institutional culture. In my department and faculty, it's clearly something that's being taken much more seriously.