The Inheritance of Ideas
A university inherits academic tradition just as a family inherits customs, values, and relationships. Every scholar belongs to an intellectual family, whether they recognise or not. We inherit theories, methods, and ways of seeing the world from those who came before us. Our academic supervisors inherited theirs from another generation, forming an elaborate genealogy of knowledge that stretches across institutions, disciplines, and sometimes centuries.
As much as it’s an honour to carry the academic DNA of those before us today, inheritance also raises uncomfortable questions. If the purpose of scholarship is to advance knowledge, how much of our success depends on our ability to depart from the very traditions that gave us our intellectual foundations?
In 2023, I explored this question through the academic genealogies of economists. Several years later, as the circumstances surrounding academic careers continue to evolve, I find myself returning to the same problem from a different perspective. The European University Association’s May 2025 report calls attention to academic career precarity, funding pressures, and the challenge of balancing institutional competition with collegiality. Meanwhile, the OECD’s 2025 analysis argues that employment insecurity can discourage researchers from pursuing high-risk topics with uncertain outcomes. Adding to this discussion, the OECD’s Research and Innovation Careers Observatory 2026 discusses the growing need to understand doctoral career pathways beyond traditional university appointments. While mentorship still matters, the question may no longer be which configuration produce the most successful academics, but whether our institutions preparing young researchers to become independent thinkers, or to simply reproduce the intellectual and professional structures they inherited.
The Paradox of New Knowledge
University remains one of the most important hubs of creativity, innovation, and knowledge creation. In this institution, every generation of researchers is encouraged to foster innovation through interdisciplinary knowledge recombination. However, much like other institutions dealing with knowledge production, university often faces a constant conundrum. On the hand hand, while the right dose of divergence from the pre-existing knowledge is valued, a highly novel knowledge may raise skepticism among the evaluating audience. This paradoxical dual implications for scientists, particularly the early stage ones. From one stand point, producing new knowledge is essential for securing academic positions. However, it could be a risky move as not all young scientists have equally established cultural and social capitals to arbitrate their entrance into academia.
Generating an unconventional knowledge and obtaining institutional recognition are different challenges. Doctorate training is simultaneously an intellectual apprenticeship and a profession. However the purpose don’t always lead towards the same destination. Training someone to produce original knowledge is not necessarily the same as preparing that person to secure a stable career. For researchers, their field of study and publications are the signals how their future institutions would categorise them. Creating a radically novel category may risk the candidates of not being able to be classified properly, therefore, affecting their future employment prospects.
In recent decades, we have witnessed how research is increasingly moving towards multi-disciplinary endeavours. Effective knowledge recombination from various disciplines is not only desired but also required to innovate faster. Several studies, particularly in STEM fields, generally support this argument. Scientists are more likely to succeed in academia when they study under the guidance of multiple mentors with different competences. In addition to generating legibility, having mentors with disparate knowledge is expected to accumulate intellectual influences so that young scientists can generate new knowledge. However, mentorship in social sciences tends to be less structured. In the absence of a structured mentorship framework, fostering this kind of interdisciplinary creativity can become more challenging. Without a proper guidance, early stage researchers may feel lost or unsure of their career paths.
What Surprised Me
Parallel to biological evolution, academic skills, best practices, cutting-edge methodology, and social networks are often passed down from one generation to the others via training at the highest level. This scientific heritage is transferred from the mentor to a protégé , and then they would transfer it to the next generation of scientists when the protégé obtain professorship. The academic genealogy itself is a form of a network that represents the medium of knowledge transmission.
Once my research on academic genealogy among economists concluded, the most unexpected result was not that some of my hypotheses failed, but which relationships mattered. I had assumed that a larger academic ancestry — more mentors, more grand-mentors, more intellectual inputs — would improve the chances of later success.
Yet the data showed no robust effect of simply having more mentors. Nor did greater cognitive diversity among one’s academic ancestors consistently translate into better outcomes. In other words, accumulating distinguished or intellectually distant influences was not, by itself, enough.
What did matter was far more horizontal.
Academic siblings — researchers who shared the same mentor — were positively associated with later academic fecundity. This surprised me because I had initially expected the opposite. Sharing supervisors, research space, intellectual territory, and eventually the same job market seemed likely to intensify competition. Instead, these close peers appeared to function as collaborators, information channels, and sources of professional support.
That finding has stayed with me.
It suggests that academic development may depend less on accumulating prestigious connections and more on the quality of the community immediately around us. The people sitting beside us in seminars, sharing drafts, discussing failed ideas, circulating job openings, or quietly helping us make sense of institutional life may matter more than we realise.
Looking back, I find that oddly reassuring. Careers are often narrated vertically — through mentors, institutions, and lineage. But some of the most consequential forms of intellectual inheritance may travel sideways.
The Changing Academic Bargain
Looking at today’s academic environment, the system seems to struggle to accommodate the scientists they have been training. Universities continue to encourage innovation and are expected to reward original thinking. Yet scholars who venture furthest from established intellectual traditions may still struggle to find a place within them. If academia values originality, why are researchers so often assessed through categories built around familiar ideas?
This brings us to a difficult set of choices facing young scholars: specialisation versus interdisciplinarity, intellectual ambition versus institutional security, and academic prestige versus professional autonomy.
Specialisation remains essential because it signals to evaluating audiences where a researcher belongs. Too much specialisation, however, can lead to cognitive lock-in. Interdisciplinary research may be where knowledge production is heading, yet the infrastructure required to accommodate truly interdisciplinary scholars is still unevenly developed.
For early-stage researchers, radical novelty can therefore blur the signal. A scholar may produce interesting work precisely because it crosses categories, but that same quality can make the scholar harder to categorise. It is a high-risk strategy with uncertain returns.
Young researchers have long been encouraged to follow their intellectual ambitions. Yet increasing pressure in the academic job market may create stronger incentives to remain within safer research territories — areas that are easier to fund, publish, evaluate, and place.
There is a bittersweet irony here.
One may earn prestige by securing tenure, publishing in reputable journals, or winning competitive grants, but potentially at the expense of professional autonomy.
It would be disheartening if the goal posts simply moved again once certain fashionable topics became oversaturated, forcing scholars to postpone — yet again — the exploration of breakthrough ideas because the system could not accommodate the risk.
The cycle then becomes self-reinforcing. Scientists reproduce ideas that remain recognisable to the institutions evaluating them, and intellectual novelty stays close enough to existing knowledge to remain legible.
Novelty survives, but perhaps only within carefully negotiated boundaries.
Beyond The Family Tree
For early-stage researchers, implementing interdisciplinarity from the very beginning may therefore be costly.
This creates another contradiction. Early careers should ideally offer room for exploration, experimentation, and capacity-building. Researchers are expected to acquire new skills, test ideas, and develop intellectual independence. Yet the institutional infrastructure required to absorb scholars who genuinely cross disciplinary boundaries may not always be ready for them.
The answer is not to retreat from interdisciplinarity, nor to romanticise intellectual rebellion for its own sake. Novelty requires foundations. Young scholars still need disciplinary competence, methodological credibility, and enough intellectual coherence for others to understand what they are trying to do.
But academic training should not exist merely to reproduce the previous generation.
Its purpose should be to equip scholars to develop ideas, institutions, and careers of their own.
That may require us to think differently about mentorship as well. Intellectual inheritance matters, but inheritance should provide a foundation rather than a boundary. The most valuable mentors and institutions may not be those that produce replicas of themselves, but those capable of preparing researchers to move beyond them.
Intellectual independence, after all, is not simply the freedom to think differently.
It also requires an environment in which different thinking has a chance to survive.
A note on this essay
This reflection revisits ideas first explored in my research article, “Risk-Reward in Economics: Academic Career Genealogy,” published in the Yearbook of UNWE (2023). The original study uses genealogical network analysis to examine mentorship, intellectual diversity, peer communities, and academic career outcomes among economists.
Read the original research: https://doi.org/10.37075/YB.2023.1.08
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