I posted something about time management for graduate students and assistant professors, and so now I should write something about associate professors, and that means writing about imposter syndrome.
The presumption, not always true, is that associate professors are oriented toward promotion to full. The advice I’m giving here is oriented toward finding a manageable and sustainable career–whether it’s to get promoted, or to remain at the associate level.
My crank theory is that people who developed a sustainable set of work practices (that is, ones not driven by panic or binge writing) as a graduate student or assistant professor just need to keep doing what they were doing once they get tenure. They’ll face many the same decisions—whether to take on a leadership position in the department, college, or discipline, what the next set of scholarly projects should be, how many new courses to develop—but, if they negotiated those shoals well as an assistant professor, things should be okay.
There is a lot of shaming rhetoric about people who remain at the level of associate professor, and that shaming makes me ragey. An awful lot of departments (not my current one, btw—the full profs have heavy service responsibilities) enable full professors to focus on scholarship because the whole department is functioning on the backs of those “stalled” associate professors. There are lots of reasons that people lose the thread of their scholarly life, many of which I’m not talking about here (ranging from bad, such as a family health crisis, to good, such as deciding that promotion isn’t desirable), but one of them is that there are some very toxic narratives about writing and scholarly productivity.
A lot of people say our world is oriented toward extraverts, but it really isn’t; it’s oriented toward narcissists. A lot of narcissists flame out in grad school; a lot of flame out as assistant professors. But, in my experience, narcissists who make it to associate make it to full.
So, this leaves us with non-narcissists, and why so many really good and smart people who have produced enough good writing to get where they are have trouble producing enough to get any further. One common explanation is imposter syndrome, but I don’t think that’s the problem; I think the problem is how people try to get past it.
Every reasonable accomplished person I have met has imposter syndrome—feeling that they have gotten more rewards and praise than their work actually merits, that they only got where they were through luck. The only people I have ever met who don’t have imposter syndrome are narcissistic fucks. So, there is no “getting over” imposter syndrome. In fact, we are always pretending to be more sure than we are; we fling ourselves into new projects when we don’t know what we’re doing; we make claims we aren’t entirely sure are accurate; we decide we can make a contribution to a field even when we haven’t actually read everything in that field. And people who succeed haven’t done so entirely on merit—only narcissists think that—hard work is necessary but not sufficient for success. People with imposter syndrome are honest about the intellectual precarity of our work; narcissists don’t know they’re imposters, but they are. They don’t know they’re imposters because narcissists can never really look at themselves from the position of a reasonably skeptical group of people who know things they don’t; they dismiss those people as fools. People with imposter syndrome know there is that group, although we don’t always know who they are.
One way that people manage imposter syndrome is through perfectionism. Some people refuse to submit anything for publication unless it’s perfect—that way, no one will expose them as an imposter. These are people who spend years working on things that they refuse to submit until perfect—that is, beyond criticism–, and so they don’t submit it. Or they don’t write at all, and just imagine the perfect thing they would write if they weren’t so swamped by obligations that they keep taking on.
Another way that people manage imposter syndrome (and fear of failure, and various other related issues) is by letting panic take the wheel. People who have succeeded in writing through high school, college, and coursework often have a truncated writing process: they are faced with an assignment, and they first decide on their argument, and then they decide on the organization for that argument, and then they write it out. (A lot of writing teachers think they’re teaching “the writing process” by teaching this linear method. They aren’t.) If you’re not a narcissist, and you’re trying to follow the “process” you’ve been taught, then, when you sit down to write, you’re trying to write, critique, and revise all at the same time.
And that’s how you get a writing block.
One of my crank theories is that some people have gotten to associate professor through generating enough sheer panic to make it past the crunch points. But that doesn’t mean the solution for either associate professors or people who want to mentor them is to panic them. (I’ve had full professors tell me that the reason that associates can’t publish is that they aren’t panicked enough—a sweet example of how Strict Father Morality is a pond into which supposedly lefty academics dip their toes from time to time). People who let panic take the wheel seem to think that people should spend their entire career in a panic in order to produce enough.
A lot of “stalled” associate professors are people who have been given that advice, and told that narrative, and have said, “Fuck that shit.”
And so they should. So should we all. It makes sense to reject a toxic narrative about productivity.
If you’ve never developed a long-term sustainable work practice—if your only method of motivating yourself to write is to be in a white-hot panic about your situation (and it appears that the only other method is to be an asshole narcissist) then the decision to remain a permanent associate professor seems not only sensible, but compassionate to the people in your life.
The problem isn’t that associate professors are insufficiently panicked—the problem is that far too many people promote a writing process dependent on panic and valorize a toxic narrative about success.
Once you get tenure, you get committee assignments. It looks different from the challenges of being assistant, but it really isn’t—you still have to figure out what scholarly projects to pursue, what committee assignments to take, what new classes to develop. The difference is one I have a hard time describing. Despite academics’ reputations for being lefty, far too many academics (including several department chairs I’ve known) have thoroughly embraced the neoliberal narrative of what it means to be a good worker—you throw yourself on the pyre of your own career to meet the standards of “good work” of your institution. You live and breathe in a world of panic, 60-hour work weeks, and self-congratulation for having no boundaries about work.
There is another option. It’s about creating a sustainable relationship to work.
And the first step in that creation of a sustainable relationship to work is stepping away from a writing process that relies on panic. A responsible graduate program would ensure that first step happens in graduate school, but we aren’t in that world (although there are many graduate advisors who are trying to do exactly that).
The best way to respond to imposter syndrome is to stop approaching every step in the writing and publication process as the moment we might be exposed to the world, but to be comfortable with writing shitty stuff, submitting things that someone might slam, and to know that we will never reach a point in our career when we are not being told that what we wrote is shitty by someone. And they may be right. So?
That response involves a lot of possible moves— most of them involve abandoning thinking about each publication process as risking everything, and they mean working because you want the outcomes the work will get, you’re interested in the crafting of the work, you want others to know about these insights you have. It also involves breaking the writing process into at least three different kinds of work that don’t happen all at once—creating, critiquing, revising. It involves walking away from perfectionism. It involves rejecting (and getting help rejecting) toxic narratives about how much we should be working; it involves finding allies and mentors. It doesn’t necessitate giving up on scholarship, although that might be a viable and joyful choice (some people decide they really love administration, for instance), and it certainly doesn’t necessitate living life in a state of panic.