Impostor Syndrome: Between Humility and Humiliation

I want to use this blog space to expand a bit on some things I mentioned at the end of last week's blog post on the tension between humility and impostor syndrome, especially in grad school, but also applicable to many including early career researchers (ECRs), and non tenure track academics and staff. This post will also be a bit more straight to the point, because I will admit that I am incredibly distracted by the book I am reading at the moment and my mind is filled with thoughts from it and not necessarily this topic.

Last week I emphasized that academe, and life in general, would be a lot better to be honest, if there was a bit more humility and trying to learn within community as opposed to imposing an "I am an expert and your input doesn't matter" framing to the way we engage with ideas. There's a perfect example of this happening on Twitter right now where someone has posted a non-alt texted picture of a rainbow flag covered staircase at their school that they called an "inclusion staircase" and where many from the disability community have noted to the original poster that there is absolutely nothing inclusive about a staircase, and yet the retort was something like well this is much more inclusive than it was when I was in school. Sure, however there are other contexts to take into account (contexts that sadly time and again are forgotten).

In that instance a response with humility would have been, "oh I had not thought of that and the many ways inclusion plays out, thank you for sharing your lived experience with me." When that humility was not evoked the next stop on the train on Twitter is often humiliation. I note now on searching that the person has now locked down their account. This is what happens when humility goes wrong, it leads to being humilitated, and it is not coincidental that those words have the same etymological root down the line. It is also important to note that humility is a noun (a quality one possesses) and humilitated is a verb (an action that is done). This is important to what I will frame next.

In graduate school, grad students are told that this is an exciting time to learn and delve deeper into a topic of interest surrounded by experts and peers. Even the regalia you wear when you graduate with your Master's comes with some sort of urban legend thing that the sleeves are that way to hold books (clothes historians please help me here because I am genuinely curious about this) so that you should still always be learning and reading, even when you graduate. Graduate students should be humble (they should embody the noun humility), grateful for opportunities to be in those spaces. This framing is continued to conferences where it is not rare to see graduate students and ECRs being piled on during question period, where their lack of humility for daring to be in that space and sharing their ideas and research leads to being publicly humiliated. I know that this seems like a lot, but sadly we all know this happens, and you may have actually witnessed it happening. This is not the unicorn situation we wish it was, and this often one of the root causes of impostor syndrome; not being in an inclusive knowledge sharing community. 

The point is humility needs to be shared, it is not something that graduate students, ECRs, and staff should have, but others should not. Ideally it is a quality we should all strive for if we want to make our institutions one of sharing and inclusion. Basically grad students, ECRs and staff aren't the only ones who should hold the keys to the humility office, though sometimes where these folks are given offices in institutions (or not) would suggest otherwise, but I digress. This belief is why so many grad students, ECRs and staff have impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is entrenched when humility leads to being humiliated, an action of excluding a person, their knowledge, and their positionality. There's certainly a lot more to impostor syndrome and a lot of research has been done on this. However, being humiliated privately in meetings, or publicly at a conference or even on Twitter is not how learning happens, it in fact is how you stop learning from happening. 

There's been many threads on Twitter reminding folk to not go on social media to punch down on their students for whatever thing that happened. The recent one was a dissertation committee member who took to Twitter to rant against the 700 page thesis they had to read. There's nothing pedagogically constructive from a tweet like that. In fact it demonstrates both the sort of gall of lack of humility of the student to write so much that directly leads to being humiliated in a public venue (even if not named directly). (Without may I add, the self-reflection required to realize they may have been part of the reason the student wrote so much and may have not felt supported in their work). 

These are complicated issues. There's so much more to be said about this, but this is a start. Maybe we all try to be the noun as opposed to acting with the verb. I know I am guilty of this too, especially when someone who should know better has done something very ableist (which sadly happens a lot). But we could try right? In the interest of education and sharing knowledge maybe this is how we move towards a community of learners and not siloed experts.