When I Was Wrong: Faculty Lessons From Their Mistakes
We’re all vulnerable to error. Here’s how faculty turned them into success.
Last month, more than 60 faculty and students shared stories about times when they were wrong, as well as the barriers to opening up about intellectual or professional errors. Event organizers, De Brigard and philosophy chair Katherine Brading were joined on a panel by Provost Alec D. Gallimore, history professor Thavolia Glymph and Sanford School professor Frank Bruni in exploring why we get things wrong, but also why these wrong turns can be essential to success.
The event was led by Brading and de Brigard, sponsored by the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry and Belonging and organized by the Office for Faculty Advancement.
“The idea is all of us have gotten things wrong at some point,” De Brigard said in introducing the discussion. “But we almost never hear from other people telling us how they have learned from things that they have gotten wrong. That’s what tonight is about.”
Below are several of the stories:
Alec D. Gallimore, Provost and Alfred J. Hooks E ’68 Distinguished Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science
Gallimore recalled how his early success as a rocket scientist at the University of Michigan put his lab among the world’s best in developing and deploying advanced spacecraft plasma thrusters. Then he placed a bet on a speculative plasma thruster technology.
There was significant interest in his proposal, and the project received financial support, in part because of Gallimore’s past success and reputation as a rising star.
But this time, the project was a bust and had to be abandoned.
The result was disappointing, Gallimore said, but it wasn’t until later – at a 2011 scholarly conference – when he realized the lesson of where he went wrong. At the conference, in a conversation with a junior researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Gallimore mentioned the project. He was taken back by the response: “Yeah, I always thought that idea was dumb.”
Reflecting later, Gallimore decided the researcher’s unfiltered comment had pointed to where the project went wrong: Gallimore hadn’t practiced intellectual humility. He failed to ask the tough questions or seek broad input that would have helped him see through the hype of his lab’s previous achievements.
“I learned from that young researcher. In fact, I ended up hiring him a few years later as an assistant professor,” Gallimore said. “He now runs my former lab at Michigan, which I left behind when I moved to Duke. Because the other thing that I've learned is, ‘Don't shoot the messenger!’ We need more messengers.”
Katherine Brading, Chair and Professor of Philosophy
Brading is among the modern scholars bringing renewed attention to pioneering 18th century mathematician and physicist Émilie Du Châtelet. Discovering the work of a pioneering woman scientist who was at the center of French intellectual circles for much of her own life was exciting, but Brading said at first she had one large problem with du Châtelet work that bothered her.
“Du Châtelet wrote an amazing book on the foundations of physics, a book that was very popular at the time. I am a big fan of the book. But when I first read it, there was one problem: her chapter on motion seemed to me to be really bad, hopelessly confused,” Brading said. “When I was teaching about this chapter, I told the class, ‘This is just a place where she goes badly wrong.’”
I thought I knew the context of interpreting this woman's work. I had good reasons to believe that I knew that context, and it turned out I was wrong.
Katherine Brading
But after teaching Du Châtelet for several years, Brading realized that the error in fact belonged to herself. She had misunderstood the terms of the debate on motion at the particular moment Du Châtelet was writing. In fact, Du Châtelet’s work was an important contribution to the history of the absolute versus relative motion debate that continued up through Einstein.
“Once I understood this, I could understand what she was doing, and how she was doing was super important and interesting and creative. So, I thought I knew the context of interpreting this woman's work. I had good reasons to believe that I knew that context, and it turned out I was wrong. It took me about six to eight years to discover that.”
Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History
Glymph has spent much of her career finding ways of telling the stories of people who have not been heard in traditional historical texts, particularly in the period she studies – the American Civil War and Reconstruction period. For example, she said the failure to get accurate tallies on the number of enslaved people who ran to freedom during the Civil War distorted a significant part of the war’s historical narrative.
“What I did wrong that is really, really important ... is that I assumed that when someone came to take the names of these women and children that most people would willingly give their names. I assumed that the record was pure. It was so very wrong of an assumption for me to make.”
Thavolia Glymph
To try to get an accurate count, Glymph spent two years searching records from the National Archives and painstakingly taking counts from camp censuses, rations reports, and hospital and other military records..
In the end, she came up with 55,000 names of people who escaped to Union camps, well short of the 500,000 traditionally believed to have become refugees and which she believes is an underestimate.
One mistake she made, she stated, was thinking that she could count all of the people by herself. “I wanted to do this by myself, and I ended up with just reams of paper with names and data that I didn’t know what to do with.”
She began to sort this out with the help of colleagues at Duke in economics. demography, and sociology but realized that there was another problem, her imperfect source base.
“But what I did wrong that is really, really important ... is that I assumed that when someone came to take the names of these women and children that most people would willingly give their names. I assumed that the record was pure. It was so very wrong of an assumption for me to make. There are all kinds of reasons that these women and children would not want to give their names, would not want to say where they were from. Because the war was still going on. Because slaveholders were still coming to the camps trying to get them. Because some soldiers still did give them up. They were still vulnerable to re-enslavement.
“I had not even thought about that until I walked away from the project while working on other book projects. I have now returned to this project with greater insight about the weaknesses of the documentary record and hope to complete it next year.”
Frank Bruni, Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, Sanford School of Public Policy
As a writer and columnist at the New York Times, Frank Bruni joked, “I was pretty much wrong every hour.” He said as a journalist, he was forced to think regularly about why reporters got things wrong. More often it was less than a matter of erring on facts than a “pattern of thinking” of relying on one’s own beliefs rather than “seeing the world around us as it is.”
Bruni gave an example of that pattern of thinking. It came from in 2016 when at dinner the day before the election he told friends that Hillary Clinton had the presidency in the bag. On election night, he went into the Times office, where the paper was preparing a special section commemorating the election of the first woman president in U.S. history and watched as the results proved him wrong.
“I think the reason for this special section, the reason I felt so calm, the reason everybody around me felt so very sure, was because we couldn't believe [Donald Trump would win] based on how we saw the world. It was our job, if not to be right about the world all the time, to at least see the world clearly. And we had not done that. And that was the function of solipsism and narcissism and arrogance, which is what I think we're almost always talking about when we're talking about being wrong. It was very unhumble of us, and we continue as a society and certainly as a media, we continue to be unhumble.”
The students at the event picked up the thread of these stories and shared similar narratives from their own experience.
Making challenging conversations more common on campus is one of the charges of the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry and Belonging. Provost Gallimore said he wanted the initiative to create spaces for students and faculty to listen and be open to shifting their perspectives.
“The point of this initiative [to ask] how do we equip more members of the Duke community to break that cycle by having intellectual humility,” Gallimore said.