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Intellectual humility is understood as the attentiveness to and owning of intellectual limitations and operates as an Aristotelian golden mean along a spectrum of its absence (i.e., intellectual arrogance) and excess (i.e., intellectual servility). This study investigates the nature and formation of intellectual humility contextualized to an undergraduate, liberal arts and sciences education. A grounded theory approach was employed to conceptualize and develop two models of intellectual humility: a process for unlearning as an appropriate response to owning intellectual limitations and a way to cultivate intellectual humility in undergraduate students. This qualitative study comprised of tenured faculty from a highly selective, public, liberal arts and sciences research university by first examining responses to 90 descriptive survey submissions. From these entries, a total of 33 semi-structured interviews—11 Arts and Humanities, 10 Business, and 12 Sciences participants—were conducted, transcribed, coded, categorized, and member checked with each individual. Faculty identified a process of unlearning that took place in students who owned their intellectual limitations. Intellectually humble students were described as able to unlearn old, forced, or narrow mental mindsets. Examples of these mindsets included study habits developed in high school, mental models of receiving feedback, or prior ways of thinking that no longer proved successful or were prohibitive to further learning. Students who rejected, owned, or stressed their intellectual limitations followed a bi-directional path of growth or stagnation in how they responded to feedback and displayed intellectual arrogance, humility, or servility. Regardless of academic community, faculty described students who had intellectual humility owned their intellectual limitations, operated with a tolerance for discomfort, and developed a love of learning. In some cases, that love of learning was renewed. When displayed, intellectual humility was described by faculty members as a mixture of confidence and empathy and was instilled by counterbalancing for the quality students lacked. Undergraduates who responded to their intellectual limitations by denying, rejecting, or remaining ignorant of them (i.e., displayed intellectual arrogance) lacked empathy to consider the position of the professor or a peer providing the feedback. Nearly all of my participants, however, shared that they more often experienced the converse: students who—when receiving feedback—stressed their limitations as too great and needed confidence. Professors also confirmed their own attentiveness to and owning of intellectual limitations. Implications for pedagogy are offered that include fostering a tolerance for discomfort and multiple strategies to build the intellectual confidence and empathy of undergraduates.

There are several universities in the US that are highly selective and attended by students from very wealthy backgrounds. In recent years, many of these selective, wealthy universities have faced public pressure to enroll higher numbers of poor and working-class students. Not much is known, however, about the experiences of poor and working-class students who attend these universities. My research sought to shed light on this by asking, “What are the lived experiences of poor and working-class students who attend a wealthy university?” I answered this question with a hermeneutic phenomenological study of poor and working-class students who attended a university composed mostly of students from wealthy backgrounds. I gathered data from 20 poor and working-class students by conducting in-depth interviews and collecting essays written by the students about their backgrounds and experiences at the university. I found that poor and working-class students are much more agentic and capable of self-advocacy than indicated by previous research. Students saw themselves as in control of the trajectories they were on and as responsible for achieving their goals. No one else could be relied upon to initiate movement toward a goal. This agency came at a cost, however, as the students described difficulty in managing their responsibilities and experiences of mental health issues. I conclude that wealthy universities have a moral obligation to better support their poor and working-class students and make several recommendations that were informed by this study.

This research study served to examine casual inferences within the relationships between social connectedness, drinking, resilience, and loneliness for both LGBTQ+ and heterosexual-identifying college students. The literature reviewed identified there is likely a relationship between these constructs whereby social connectedness was expected to significantly predict drinking (in a negative direction), and the relationship was mediated by the presence of resilience or loneliness. A total of 253 full-time college students between the ages of 18 and 28 were surveyed , 135 of which identified as LGBTQ+. The participants completed the Social Connectedness Revised (SCS-R), revised version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale (UCLA-R), the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), and a subscale of the COVID-19 Phobia Scale. An SEM was used to suggest that social connectedness was predictive of drinking for only a subset of the original drinking scale and that neither resilience nor loneliness mediated the relationship. Differences in mean scores for the scales were also reviewed in addition to correlations between the constructs. Limitations, implications for professionals, and suggestions for future research are also discussed.