Embracing the Imposter Within

“What are you working on these days?” the President asks.  The setting is a professional meeting.  I am on the Board of Directors of my professional society and I am at my first meeting.  I discover that we begin each meeting with this same question.  Everyone goes around the room to talk about the book, the essay, the project they are working on.  Then, it is my turn.  I change the focus away from my own work to the work I do for the society.  I am brief, and then the person next to me picks up the question.

The others at the table don’t know me; don’t know the angst I am feeling.  Given all the work that these professors have published, many I had read, a few I regarded as superstars, I wondered what I was doing in this room.  How did I get on this board in the first place?  I have no brilliant book that is a must read for anyone in the field.  I have not garnered a prestigious NEH grant worth thousands to my institution.  I am just one of the worker bees—chairing a committee that people often ask, “What is it your committee does?”

I am a poor kid from the projects who went to a small, little known church-related college with an open admissions process, not Harvard (although I did live just up the street—a “townie” I am told, often with an air of condescension).  My neighborhood was where the Harvard students would come when they wanted to “give back” to feel good about themselves; noblesse oblige I later learned.  I was a charity case; I needed their help to succeed—at least that’s what I was told.  I did appreciate the free meals, the bus pass, and the few bucks which I stole occasionally from their pocketbooks or wallets when they weren’t looking.  But I can’t say I learned much from them.

Now, here I sit with them steering the future of the academy or at least our part in it.  Who am I to be giving suggestions?  What the hell do I know?  So at first I don’t say much for fear that I would be found out for the imposter I was.

I remember completing coursework in grad school and had the obligatory meeting with my advisor.  Apparently, the department had conversations about me and my performance to date.  My Ivy league bred advisor began the conversation, “In truth, we were not too sure what we would be getting with you given your background.  We decided to take a chance and we have been pleased with your performance.”  Did they really think that poorly of the preparation I received in my previous schools?  I wondered if he had the same conversation with my peers, all of whom had graduated from prestigious schools, one of whom had already had a Fulbright.  I knew I wasn’t as polished as they were.  Did they think I even belonged in the program with them?  Perhaps not.

           

After I graduated, I was not sure I wanted to go into academia, into a profession where I felt—where I was made to feel—inferior.  I had been working as a community organizer in public housing projects like the one I had grown up in.  I felt at home here; I knew their struggles and they appreciated the work I was doing.

I taught part-time in prisons and in the historically black colleges in the area.  Most of my students came from similar backgrounds as me and I found joy in teaching them, which was the reason I pursued a Ph.D. in the first place.

I ultimately decided to go on the academic job market and surprisingly landed a job as a “teacher-scholar” at a small, church-related college, much like the one I had attended.  My department welcomed me, offered me help as I started my teaching career.  This too felt like home, but I was still nervous.  The research and publishing requirements were not overly burdensome but research and writing were not my passion, at least not in a joyful sense; writing was torture save for those times when I could write on behalf of the poor, the unemployed, or about baseball. 

I poured myself into teaching.  I spent countless hours researching and conversing with colleagues at the college and the academy about pedagogy and the best ways to engage students who were in my classes because it was required.  I experimented with and developed some competence in active learning and non-traditional adult learning theories and practices even though I knew it limited time for other research.  My students appreciated my efforts, nominating me for a teaching award.  Had I “made it”?  Did I now belong in the academy?  

My confidence was bolstered by invitations to write about my classroom experiences, to engage in what became the scholarship of teaching and learning.  My peers welcomed my contributions at presentations at professional societies and eventually through the nascent peer-reviewed publications that were emerging in the field.  I added a teaching professorate, staff positions on faculty development programs, and several other teaching awards to my resume, including an academy wide excellence in teaching award. 

The highest achievements in the profession, however, were still measured by and given to scholarship.  I could work for my professional society but could never be nominated for its presidency.  My contributions to my field of religious ethics have been much less successful.  My rejections outnumber my acceptances 4-1 both for presentations and for publications.  Was I really a teacher “scholar”?  I had earned a place at the teacher table.  But I was still a stranger at the table of scholars who gathered at the board meeting.  Would this ever change?  Does it really matter?

After 20 years, definitive answers to these questions elude me.  The imposter syndrome still feeds on my soul, periodically eating away my confidence every time a student writes he didn’t learn a thing in my class (even though he was only 1 of 35); or my proposal or paper is rejected.   But its meals are less frequent now:  in part because I am a tenured full professor; mostly because I have embraced the imposter within.  I have learned to use the angst it generates to propel me forward, to become the best teacher-scholar I can be however limited, just like so many of my imposter colleagues, who I have discovered make up the vast majority of the professorate. 

I still feel uncomfortable at times sitting at the boardroom table, especially with the superstars of my field.  But I am no longer quiet.  My experiences, my insights into the world in which we work, the struggles most of us endure, are valuable, perhaps even the norm.  Imposter or not I would be irresponsible if I kept quiet.  After all, most of the higher education world is filled with “townies” like me.