The Kind Academic

I love podcasts very much. I truly believe that the (mostly free) access to entertainment/education/current affairs/professional development that podcasts afford us is one of the best things about being alive in 2026.

I have a steady rotation of some faves. I never miss an episode of The Rest is History and I’ve learnt a lot about living healthy from The Wellness Scoop. But every now and then I venture out of my algorithm. A couple of days ago some Podcast App meandering landed me at the Mel Robbins Podcast and, specifically, this episode featuring Dr. Tina Seelig, a Stanford professor who researches the science of luck.

In the episode, Dr. Seelig says something that’s been playing on my mind ever since: that luck isn’t just something that happens to you. Instead, she explains, it’s something you create, by staying open to opportunities, saying yes, making connections, and being willing to act even without guarantees.

What does this have to do with kindness in higher education?

Think about the practices we associate with kindness in academia, like: building genuine relationships with students and colleagues; creating psychologically safe spaces; mentoring others; making connections across disciplines and departments; and showing up consistently and with care. I assume that most reading this blog would agree that these are small actions that we can do to make our lives and those around us in academia a little bit better.

But Dr. Seelig offers us another way of seeing these acts of kindness. According to her research, these can be seen as luck-generating behaviours.

When we take the time to know our students as people, we build the kind of trust that makes them more likely to reach out, take intellectual risks, and stay engaged with their learning. When we invest in collegial relationships, we create networks that open unexpected doors for collaborations, opportunities, ideas we wouldn’t have encountered alone. When we mentor junior colleagues, we’re building communities of practice that feed back into all of us.

The conditions created by kindness, connection, openness, trust and reciprocity happen to be exactly the conditions in which luck, as Dr. Seelig defines it, tends to flourish.

But let’s not get carried away

The idea that we “make our own luck” in academia can slide very quickly into a narrative that ignores structural inequality. This is a sector where not everyone has equal access to the networks, time, or psychological safety that kindness-based luck-building requires. For example, casualised staff working across three institutions may not have the bandwidth to take a new colleague for coffee. First-generation students navigating an unfamiliar system may not feel they have agency to speak to the student next to them.

So while I find Dr. Seelig’s framework compelling, I think it comes with a caveat for the academic context: the luck-generating conditions she describes aren’t equally available to everyone. We can’t just luck ourselves into permanent, secure, non-toxic employment in a sector that’s facing precarity.

And yet, it’s worth thinking about

Those of us who practice kindness in academia, whether to students, colleagues, or ourselves, often describe that by giving kindness, we get it back. And maybe this is where kindness and luck intersect.

By exhibiting kind behaviours, by creating safe spaces for our students to share ideas, by introducing amazing academics who you just know are going to do beautiful things together, you open the door to something new – something potentially beautiful and, dare I say, lucky.

So, despite the challenges, let’s keep practicing kindness because, one day, the good luck may just circle back to us.