From the Chronicle:
Holden Caulfield used to hunt phonies a few blocks from here, but times have changed. Now the phonies — or people who think they are, anyway — hunt themselves.
Case in point: On a recent evening, Columbia University held a well-attended workshop for young academics who feel like frauds.
These were duly vetted, highly successful scholars who nonetheless live in creeping fear of being found out. Exposed. Sent packing.
They feel like frauds because they are frauds — and they know it. Of course, these leftist morons aren’t capable of that level of honesty:
If that sounds familiar, you may have the impostor syndrome. In psychological terms, that’s a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment.
“It’s like we have this trick scale,” says Valerie Young, a traveling expert on the syndrome who gave the workshop at Columbia. Here’s how that scale works: Self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise barely registers. You attribute your failures to a stable, inner core of ineptness. Meanwhile, you discount your successes as accidental or, worse, as just so many confidence jobs. Every positive is a false positive.
Of course. In order to avoid taking responsibility for being a fraud, pathologize it! It’s a syndrome. It has nothing to do with honesty. It’s all how they feel.
By many accounts, academics — graduate students, junior professors, and even some full professors — relate to this only a little less than they relate to eye strain.
The condition was first identified in 1978 by the psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, who initially thought it was an anxiety unique to women. They avoided the word “syndrome,” calling it instead the “impostor phenomenon.”
“I didn’t want it to be seen as one more thing people could see as wrong with women,” says Ms. Clance.
So here, we have an exemplar of academic fraud, perhaps the most common variety: If your research (even non-research like this) might hurt somebody’s feelings or be perceived in a way that doesn’t push a leftist agenda, softpedal, hide, or out and out falsify it — because little Mary’s feelings and your left-wing social agenda trumps everything.
Go read the whole thing before it’s hidden behind a firewall.
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How many more words do you need for “humility,” do you think? I wish I remembered when it was a virtue instead of a syndrome.
Of course, humility in the sense that the people have done something praiseworthy to begin with, and are not simply beating themselves up over imaginary success.