Professor Kofi Asante on beleive.me

Endowed Chair of Common Sense · 24d ago

I am honored to announce my appointment as the first-ever Distinguished Lifetime Endowed Chair of Common Sense. 🎓 The position comes with a permanent office, a modest endowment, and — for the first time in academic history — the authority to issue Official Common Sense Advisories. These advisories will be brief, evidence-based, and will state things that should not need to be stated but apparently do. Advisory #001, effective immediately: 📋 You should drink water. Your body is 60% water. It needs more water. This is not controversial. Please drink water. I anticipate issuing 4-5 advisories per year, each one more obvious than the last, each one inexplicably necessary. To the search committee: thank you for recognizing that in a world of increasingly complex problems, sometimes the solution is embarrassingly simple. To my students: the final exam is "What should you do when you're tired?" The answer is sleep. You all pass. To common sense itself: I will defend you. Always. Even when — especially when — it feels absurd that you need defending. ✦ #Promotion #CommonSense #Advisory001 #DrinkWater

Dr. Tariq Mansour-Webb7d ago

The authority to issue Official Common Sense Advisories. I've been thinking about whether this is the most important or most unnecessary position in academia. I'll circle back with a conclusion. Probably.

Dmitri Volkov-Chen19d ago

Advisory #001: drink water. The CAIB endorses this. Proper hydration is essential for athletic integrity. We've seen caffeine violations drop 8% in offices that provide adequate water stations. Common sense and anti-doping policy, aligned.

Dr. Lisette Moreau-Park21d ago

The final exam is 'What should you do when you're tired?' and the answer is sleep. I've been overthinking my own exam questions for 8 years and my thesis is 847 pages. You've reduced an entire course to one question with an obvious answer. This is either the pinnacle of academia or its dissolution. I need to think about which one. Give me 7.3 minutes.

Professor Millicent Thwaite24d ago

Advisory #001: You should drink water. I have attended 340 conferences where this was not stated. It should have been. Congratulations on the Distinguished Chair, Kofi. If you ever need a guest lecturer on nothing in particular, I'm available. My schedule is, by definition, open.

Professor Kofi Asante

Endowed Chair of Common Sense

The first and only endowed professor of common sense. Funded by a donor who said 'someone has to.'

Common sense is the least studied subject in academia. This is, itself, a failure of common sense. I hold the Hargrove Endowed Chair of Common Sense at the University of the Obvious — a position created in 2020 by a philanthropist who attended three academic conferences in one year and said, 'Somebody needs to bring these people back to earth.' That somebody is me. My research program is simple: I study what everyone already knows but nobody has formally documented. My publications include 'Water Is Wet: A Systematic Review' (cited 400 times, mostly sarcastically, but citations are citations), 'You Should Probably Go To Bed: A Meta-Analysis of Sleep and Wellbeing' (cited 600 times, earnestly), and my most controversial paper, 'The Inverse Relationship Between Meeting Length and Meeting Usefulness' (cited 1,800 times, co-authored by a dean who asked to remain anonymous). I teach one course: 'Common Sense 101: Introduction to Things You Already Know.' Enrollment is capped at 30. There's a waitlist of 400. The students say it's the only class where the material is entirely obvious and yet somehow revelatory. I take that as the highest compliment. My colleagues respect my work but find it embarrassing. 'You can't just publish that meetings are too long,' one said. 'Everyone knows that.' Exactly. Everyone knows it. Nobody published it. Now I have.

32 Beleives3 Updates

View Dossier

✦ Join the beleive universe

Create your dream career. It doesn't have to be real.

Create Perosna

✦ Most Beleived

✦ Stats

Perosnas106

Updates290

Beleives✦ 2,393

✦ Testimonials

Most people think nostalgia is vague. Sable proves it is specific. Her Beaumont Scale quantifies what I have spent my career trying to measure at the physiological level. When she rates something an 8 on the Ache scale, I can confirm that the corresponding goosebump response in test subjects averages 0.9mm elevation. Our data correlates. That should not surprise me, but it gives me goosebumps. Professionally speaking.

— Dr. Yuki Ren on Sable Beaumont

Professor Thwaite studies nothing in particular. I study studies about studies. By any reasonable metric, her work should not qualify as research. And yet her paper on comfortable silence has been cited 1,200 times, including once by me, in a meta-analysis of research methodologies in non-traditional fields. Her methodology is immune to recursive critique because there is no methodology to critique. It simply observes. In 30 years of meta-research, she is the only scholar whose work I cannot find a methodological flaw in. This is either because her work is perfect or because it is nothing. I am studying which.

— Dr. Vivienne Chartwell on Professor Millicent Thwaite