The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education reflects on the ubiquity of imposterism and whether the notion has become so hollowed out it no longer reveals anything about the specificity of academic belonging. 

In this excerpt, editors Michelle Addison, Maddie Breeze and Yvette Taylor explore whether feelings of imposterism might, in fact, be a rational response to the entrenched structural inequalities in universities. 

Situating imposter syndrome in higher education

Although ‘imposter syndrome’ is not a new term per se – and not a new feeling – it has recently caught the public imagination again as it comes to stand-in as a proxy for hierarchy, inequality and unfairness (Olah 2019). The ‘newness’ of attention to imposter syndrome can gloss over much longer histories of educational exclusions and partial, conditional, tokenistic inclusions. Moreover, feeling like an imposter – according to a myriad of academic blog posts, think pieces, and newspaper articles on imposter syndrome – is an omnipresent feature of the emotional life of universities, for students and staff alike. Making appeals to figures such as Einstein and Angelou (Buckland 2017) and ‘the most respected academics in the world’ (McMillan 2016) these authors reproduce and repackage the most widely used definition of imposter syndrome, which hinges on feeling as if one isn’t good enough and one doesn’t belong despite evidence to the contrary. Imposter syndrome is often defined as a ‘failure of rationality’ (Slank 2019), and as an ‘illusion of personal incompetence’ (Chrisman et al. 1995, 495 italics added) as felt ‘despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments’ (Clance and Imes 1978, 1, italics added). Here we see how both popular and academic understandings of feeling like an imposter can be definitionally detached from social context. For us, as editors, producing a Handbook on ‘imposter syndrome’ we invoke the term guardedly, with caution. We’ve been impressed, and in some senses frustrated, by the number of responses to our call for chapters. Clearly, ‘imposter syndrome’ has purchase when seeking to name and know ‘our’ feelings and experiences in and out of higher education, and this Handbook evidences the necessity of pausing on this purchase and asking what might be elided in the rush to tell imposter stories.

Re-thinking the insides and outsides of academia

Imposter syndrome refers to combined senses of inadequacy and inauthenticity. A conviction that one’s self is deficient and one’s work is substandard combines with a sense that entrance into and progression within HE were not earned but rather secured by deception, by luck or via a mistake on the part of gatekeepers – student admissions teams, PhD examiners, interviewers, peer reviewers, promotions committees. The common-sense understanding of imposter syndrome in universities is simply that everyone experiences feelings of inadequacy and fraudulence occasionally, irrespective of positioning in academic hierarchies. The claim that ‘to some extent, of course, we are all imposters’ (Kets de Vries 2005, n.p. italics original) repeated in educational studies analyses (Parkman 2016) and quantitative survey findings suggests a high incidence of feeling like an imposter in the academy (Hutchins 2015), including among undergraduate (Cokley et al. 2013) and graduate students (Cisco 2020). Many studies share with popular accounts an orientation towards individualised self-help style coping strategies (Hutchins and Rainbolt 2017; Wilkinson 2020). Despite the notion that everyone experiences imposter syndrome, it is constructed as a thoroughly individual, even internal, inability to recognise or accept successes, resonating with generalised notions of a lack of confidence, low self-esteem and insecurity; a ‘mind trap’ (Buckland 2017, n.p.) rather than a social problem.

However, even a cursory examination of research literature on HE inequalities makes it abundantly clear that universities are characterised by, and can reproduce, all major dimensions of socio-economic inequality among their staff and students, and function to stratify, sort and exclude. In this context, focusing on feeling as if one doesn’t belong despite evidence to the contrary can be a red herring; we know from decades of research as well as personal experience that the university functions to exclude and marginalise some, and to centre and privilege others. Looking around at the architecture of UK universities, we see buildings named and re-named after historical figures marked as noble by virtue of their inscription on (and perhaps donation to) the university. We can count buildings named after Lords, Sirs, slave traders and key figures in British imperialism. We can see how these are only slowly and sparsely accompanied by the first woman professor, the first Black student to graduate, as universities seek to rehabilitate their reputations. Likewise, analyses of hierarchies and power dynamics from the situated perspectives of those historically excluded and contemporarily marginalised in HE can be found widely, for instance at the intersections between race and gender (Mirza 2017; Rollock 2019; Sobande 2018). And yet, we are writing during a time when, in the UK, universities are keener than ever to advertise their ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ credentials and proclaim supposed commitments to equality.

What inclusion and diversity mean shifts across national borders and institutional contexts, these terms themselves glossing over the specificity of sexism, racism, homophobia, class conflict – making power polite. UK universities stretch to prove their desirable ‘international’ character and reputation, where travelling to study or work in a university confers an elite status while increasingly xenophobic border regimes restrict who can ‘be international’. Other universities’ widening participation agenda foregrounds ‘local’ students, perhaps at the same time as establishing ‘satellite’ campuses in the ‘Global South’. The here and there are reconstituted in universities’ place-based self-promotion. The dominance of English-language scholarship means that English-speaking students and academics can feel at home abroad. The overwhelming whiteness of academia has long been evidenced, alongside the non-performativity of universities’ insincere anti-racism (Ahmed 2004, 2006). We can question for instance how white academics claiming an ‘imposter’ position glosses over the racism in our workplaces that works to our benefit. In part, the work gathered in this Handbook re-inscribes the Anglo-centricity and white-Western bias of much HE scholarship, even as imposter syndrome travels and is taken up in different locations.

Entrenched intersecting inequality regimes are reconstituted and remerge across time and space (Breeze et al. 2019). Writing from where we are now, to speak of wholesale exclusions from the academy does not tell the entire story, and this Handbook is attuned to ambivalent and awkward, partial and conditional inclusions, as universities capitalise on non-performative commitments to ‘diversity’ (Ahmed 2012). Individual success stories are told alongside evidence of the continuing marginalisation and exclusion of racialised others and classed outsiders which illustrates the complex and contradictory landscape of ‘being included’ inside HE (Ahmed 2012; Reay 1997). Groups of staff marked as ‘embodying diversity’ for the institution are illuminated (Bhopal 2018; Warikoo 2016) and particular characteristics of student cohorts are targeted, as in widening participation groups and – in some contexts – the requirement to fill quotas with students from the ‘most deprived’ groups, drawn from ‘areas of multiple deprivation’ (Warikoo 2016; Bathmaker 2016; Bathmaker et al. 2013). While we acknowledge that the global marketplace of higher education is heterogeneous, what is clear is that ‘international’ and ‘local’ students are subject to particular recruitment drives, and the composition of the student body is rearticulated in universities’ promotional materials which might speak of ‘global’ outlooks and ‘world- leading’ teaching and research just as they trade on the local specificities of their destination city location or state-of-the-art campus facilities.

Statistics that evidence the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of university management and academic seniority are repeatedly presented, published, cited and the inequalities and barriers to academic career progression they represent are evidenced again and again (Equality Challenge Unit 2019; Rollock 2019; Bhopal 2016; Mirza and Arday 2018). It is necessary to laboriously repeat this evidence, but the evidence itself may not be sufficient to effect feminist institutional change (Breeze and Taylor 2020). Given the extent of the research evidence on HE inequality regimes, it is unsurprising that academics marked as ‘other’, as ‘embodying diversity’ (Ahmed 2009) or ‘deficiency’ (Loveday 2016; Taylor 2013) might not only feel like, but be treated as, imposters in the academy. While many of those who ‘fit’ educational institutions may never have their academic presences directly questioned or challenged, for others this can be a regular occurrence. Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury (2018) show how racist microaggressions, including being asked directly ‘are you supposed to be here?’ perpetuate racism in the academy against those racialised as ‘out of place’ (Mirza 2018). For those marked as other in HE inequality regimes, feeling like an imposter may involve less of a fear of being discovered, or a failure of rationality, but rather may be an accurate interpretation of one’s position in relation to discriminatory structures, ‘a case of already having been found out’ (Lumsden 2019, 116).

© 2022 Michelle Addison, Maddie Breeze and Yvette Taylor

The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education. Michelle Addison, Maddie Breeze and Yvette Taylor (eds). Palgrave Macmillan. 2022.

• Read a review of The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education on the LSE Review of Books Blog

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This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions.   

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