#133: Academia is just a job!
Do you ever worry that you're not serious enough for academia? That you're constantly playing whack-a-mole with hiding your many frivolous and unimpressive traits as you try to convince everyone that you deserve your place at the table? That you're a big old fake because you need to curate yourself so much in order to seem like you belong? If so, you're not alone - and it's not because you're flawed. It's because you're yet to uncover academia's dirty little secret: that it's just a job. If you can get your head around that, life will be much less stressful.
References
Goffman, Erving. 1956: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre).
Guignon, Charles. 2004: On Being Authentic (London: Routledge). (Bernard Williams quotation on page viii.)
Hawley, Katherine. 2019: 'What is impostor syndrome?', Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93/1: 203–226.
Kelsky, Karen. 2021: 'Academia is a cult', TEDx Talks.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1770: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lester Crocker (ed.) (New York: Pocket Books, 1957).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943: Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992).
Episode transcript:
Are you authentic? Or a bit of a fake?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, my friends. Nice to be here chatting to you again. Allow me to share with you the exciting news that, here at Imperfectionist Towers, we’re considering opening our doors to another cat. Admittedly, that’s not really news, because we are in a constant state of openness to another cat. I happened to observe to my son a few days ago that we have had most colours of cat except orange. Never, ever had an orange cat. Then, the very next day, my Facebook feed - which has been correctly curated by the algorithms to consist almost entirely of posts about cats needing homes - showed me an orange cat needing a home locally. The Universe was speaking to me. (I don’t really believe The Universe does this, but on this occasion, and especially since I’ve been doing so much essay-marking lately, I indulged myself, as a special treat.) I filled in the application form. It turned out that Rory, the cat in question, who was depicted in his profile photo reclining on a tasteful William Morris print cushion, is already on his way to his new home. Yay for Rory and his new family. But the seed has been sown. The lady from the charity asked me if I wanted to be placed on the ‘kitten list’ - which is a waiting list to get a kitten, and therefore the closest thing to the Platonic Form of a waiting list that we can hope to encounter in our imperfect world. Even so, I said no thanks to the kitten list, and asked instead for my application to be kept on file for the unglamorous cats that nobody else wants. Naturally, if an unglamorous cat comes our way, you will be the first to know. So, if you’ve been prevaricating over whether to hit that ‘subscribe’ button, now is the time.
Okay, with the cats out of the way, shall we get down to business? Let me ask you something. Are you showing up as your true, authentic self to this podcast? Don’t answer that. It’s actually not the answer that I’m interested in. What I’m interested in is your response when you hear the word ‘authentic’. We hear about this a lot, don’t we? The importance of being authentic. Being true to ourselves. Speaking our truth. And I’ve come to realise that it makes a lot of you a bit nervous. For a start, what does it even mean? I’ll get on to that. And for another thing, perhaps you worry that you’re not authentic, and that that’s bad. Perhaps you worry that you’re a bit of a fake. A bit deceptive. A sell-out. A shame-faced impostor. If I’ve hit a nerve here, you’re really not alone, and as I hope to convince you, you’re actually not any of those nasty, shameful things. So, why do you think otherwise? I think that academic culture - and the efforts and compromises we often need to make in order to be part of it - are to blame. If you’re looking for some peace of mind amid these sorts of worries, stick the kettle on, make yourself a cup of tea (or your comforting refreshment of choice), and keep listening.
I can remember, over ten years ago, seeing a poster for a philosophy talk that included the term ‘impostor syndrome’ in the title. I’d never encountered it before, and I had to look it up. None of us would need to do that now, would we? Everyone knows what impostor syndrome is. It’s a concept that originates from psychology, but these days it’s embedded in popular culture. That’s a positive thing, I think. It’s good that there’s wider awareness of the possibility that we might be taking a skewed view of ourselves when we think of ourselves as impostors, even if it’s an uphill struggle to think well of ourselves. And, even when we incorrectly think of ourselves as impostors, we often have good reason for thinking that way - as the late Katherine Hawley argued in her wonderful, lucid paper on impostor syndrome, which I summarised way back in episode #11 of this podcast.
Now, impostor syndrome is - to paraphrase the first sentence of Hawley’s article - a sense that your external markers of success (degrees, awards, publications, and so on) are unwarranted, which means you think you’re at risk of being unmasked as an unworthy impostor. It’s not exactly this that I want to talk about in this episode, but something related. What I want to talk about is a sense of being an impostor because the way in which we present ourselves to others - especially professionally - does not reflect how we really are. That might include the sense that our external markers of success are unwarranted - impostor syndrome, in other words - but it includes other things too. It might include, for example, the feeling that we’re misrepresenting how interested or enthusiastic or well-read we are about certain topics. It might include a feeling that we misrepresent the way we conduct ourselves outside of work - perhaps, for example, you’re very happy to talk with fellow academics about your love of Jane Austen’s novels, but you keep quiet about the fact that you were up until 2:30am last night reading Pokemon fan fiction. (Yes, Pokemon fan fiction really is a thing - I just Googled it. That’s your next procrastination resource sorted.) Or perhaps, when a colleague mentions a particular piece of classical music, you’re pleased to be able to share, truthfully, that you know and enjoy it - but you’re less keen to share that your experience of it is limited to a sample in a banging Eurodance track from the late 90s. These things aren’t about impostor syndrome, strictly speaking. They’re not about achievements or success. Instead, they’re about the way in which we present ourselves to others, and - like impostor syndrome - they may leave you feeling ashamed of your dishonesty, and at risk of being unmasked. They may leave you feeling inauthentic.
So, what is authenticity? The 20th century philosopher Bernard Williams expressed it as ‘the idea that some things are in some sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t’. In the examples I just mentioned, there’s an obvious sense in which reading Jane Austen (and only Jane Austen) and listening to classical music are not really you, although that’s how you try to represent them to others, which leaves you feeling inauthentic. The significance of authenticity is linked to ideas about what sort of people we should be and what sort of lives we should live. A couple of hundred years before Williams, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about how our choices should be guided from within, from central aspects of the self rather than peripheral ones. This actually chimes well with modern ideas about authenticity. Living authentically, we tend to think, is about acting in accordance with our fundamental values, and trying not to be led off-course by less important considerations. You’ve perhaps had the experience of losing respect for someone when you see them begin to behave in a way that you deem inauthentic, like when a public figure you admire for pushing back against harmful standards of beauty starts to endorse a weight-loss product in return for cash.
Ok, that’s a very, very brief guide to what we mean when we talk about authenticity. Let’s hit pause on that for a moment while we consider something else. I’ve talked before on this podcast, in episode #111, about Erving Goffman’s views about how we relate to others, and I want to talk about them again here, for different reasons. Goffman was a sociologist, although I think he qualifies as a philosopher too. He took the view that, whenever we’re interacting with other people, we’re playing a role, like an actor in a play. We each have various roles we play, depending on who we’re interacting with. Perhaps you start your day as the Frazzled Parent as you get your kids ready for school, slip into the Concerned Neighbour as you stop to chat to someone on your street about how difficult you’re all finding it these days to park near your homes, before arriving at work and wearing your Firm But Fair Human Resources Manager hat until 11am, when you visit your favourite coffee shop and play the Friendly Bantering Customer role with the barista. At the end of the day, when you’re finally home and the children are in bed, you can relax and discard your roles. You’re backstage. Nobody’s watching. You can change into your comfortable-but-hideous loungewear, eat without worrying about your table manners, and read your Pokemon fanfic, safe in the knowledge that nobody is watching and you therefore don’t need to think about how you’re presenting yourself.
Does the fact that, according to Goffman’s view, we play roles whenever we’re with other people make us fake, or inauthentic, or impostors? Well, no. If you were to bring your Pokemon fanfic to work with you and read it instead of doing your job, there wouldn’t be anything particularly authentic about this. None of us is tempted to view those people who go to the supermarket wearing their slippers and pyjamas - backstage outfits - as living more authentically than the rest of us. Playing roles in the way that Goffman describes is a fundamental part of our social interaction, not an add-on that gets in the way of our connections with one another. These roles aren’t about authenticity (or the lack of it) at all. Suppose that it’s really important to you to be very conscientious at work, but that you’re more slap-dash at home. That doesn’t make you fake-conscientious. Conscientious might well be one of your core values, even if you don’t exhibit it in every area of your life. In fact, conscientiousness is one of what psychologists call the ‘big 5’ core personality traits, which makes it pretty fundamental to your personality, if you have it. So, there you go. Playing a role when you’re in public, and keeping your backstage self for when nobody else is around, doesn’t make you a fake.
However. There is a tension here, at least for academics, and perhaps also for people in certain other lines of work too. Ignoring academics, most of the time it’s pretty obvious that, when someone is at work, they’re playing a role. That customer service agent who patiently wishes even their rudest customers a nice day would - let’s hope - not smile through that rudeness if it wasn’t part of their job. That lawyer who is trying to help you avoid being sent to prison for your latest crime spree is - well, duh - only helping you because you’re paying them. Your personal trainer is standing there shouting things like ‘one more rep!’ and ‘smashing it!’ while you’re doing deadlifts at the gym because, and only because, you have hired them as your personal trainer. People have jobs, they go to work, behave in a way conducive to doing their job for the hours that they’re being paid, then they stop behaving like that and go home. So far, so very obvious.
It’s not obvious if you’re an academic, though, is it? We have this culture of passion about discovery, of doing the research because it’s an inner calling rather than something we’re paid (or hope to be paid) to do, of living and breathing the discipline we study or work in. It’s not a job, it’s a way of life. Some people - notably Karen Kelsky in a TEDx talk - have even compared academia to a cult. You may or may not think it’s a cult, but it’s certainly a vocation for a great many of us: work we do because it is personally meaningful to us, not simply because we’re being paid. Academia is not the only vocation, of course, and perhaps much of what I say here will resonate with people in other vocational lines of work too.
What with this pervasive view of academia as a way of life, that line between frontstage and backstage is much more blurred than in the case of the customer services agent or the lawyer. For many academics, or would-be academics, it’s not enough simply to do the job. We have to be the job. We want to belong. Whatever it is we’re doing while we’re at work, we’re supposed to be doing while we’re not at work too. Don’t believe me? Think about those times when you feel you’re not working hard enough. How do you feel about yourself during those times? Lazy? Ashamed? Like a bad, unworthy, morally corrupt person? Those are incredibly common feelings among academics, in my experience, but outside academia, in plenty of other lines of work, they’re not normal. Plenty of people out there have trouble separating the idea of ‘not working very hard’ from ‘being a bad person’. Not working hard enough might mean you’re going to do a last-minute push before a deadline, or it might mean you miss out on that promotion you’re after, or it might mean getting a telling-off from your manager or not getting a bonus or any number of other work-related things - but it doesn’t reflect negatively on your moral character the way it does for academics. For academics, not working hard enough is a bit like neglecting your kids. It reflects negatively not just on your ability to do your job, but on your moral worth.
I think this is something that is especially difficult for early-career academics, and for students with an eye on an academic career. There’s such a yearning to belong to a community of established academics, an eagerness to be deemed worthy of admittance into the club, and it’s all about being the right sort of person. Not merely someone who puts a reasonable number of hours into their academic pursuits each week before getting back to the rest of their life, but someone who lives and breathes their research. I have very vivid and rather ridiculous memories of being like this myself. I remember being upset once, wondering what was wrong with me, because I quite liked reading crappy magazines and watching soap operas, and I was convinced everyone else was reading Kant during their evenings at home. Those were the real, authentic academics, I thought. I was just a sham.
If we take a lesson from the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, though, I had that backwards. It’s the person who takes their job too seriously, to the extent that they begin to define themselves in terms of it, and to deny other aspects of themselves, who is living inauthentically, not the person who realises they’re playing a role and who knows the difference between the role and the person playing it. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre uses the example of an over-zealous waiter to illustrate this. An authentic person who works as a waiter realises they’re playing a role that they get to drop when they clock off. But the waiter who invests so heavily in being a waiter that they allow themselves to believe that that’s all they are exists in a state of what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’; in other words, they have deceived themselves into believing they have less freedom than they actually have. Defining yourself in terms of your academic job - or in terms of the academic job you hope to get - is inauthentic, on Sartre’s view. Realising this, though, requires recognising that an academic job is just that: a job. Even so, if you want to go home and relax while reading Kant (or Sartre), go right ahead - just as long as it’s what you really want, and not something you think you need to be doing in order to be the right sort of person.
I realise that the idea that it’s a good thing to go home and do non-scholarly things is scary for a lot of people with academic ambitions. You think you need to be ‘on’ all the time, to be an academic through and through, to shun any interests, values, or activities that you wouldn’t be happy to admit to in a job interview. Either it goes on your CV, or it’s a character flaw. There’s no in between. And because, inevitably, there is plenty about you that you wouldn’t want to put on your CV or discuss in a job interview - you’re human, after all - you feel like you’re being dishonest. You feel like you’re deceiving everyone about what sort of person you are. And once you get that PhD position or that academic job you’ve been coveting, there are even more ways in which you can feel like a fraud. Perhaps, in order to impress during an interview, you exaggerate about how interested you are in a particular research topic or how much you enjoy teaching a particular subject, or perhaps you insist, despite your private doubts, that it doesn’t matter at all that you have to move to the middle of nowhere in order to take a job. Instead of viewing things like this as completely normal compromises that most of us need to make sometimes in order to match what we want to what the job wants from us, you view them as further evidence of your flawed character. You view these compromises as evidence that you’re not being true to yourself. You’re supposed to be responding to a calling, led by nothing other than a pursuit of the truth, and yet here you are, selling out, happily changing your scholarly goals as soon as someone dangles a job in front of you. What a fake.
If any of this resonates with you, you’re really not the problem. The problem is a culture that encourages the view that successful academics are born, not made; a culture in which a lot of struggles go underrecognised through lack of support and through people being afraid to ask for help - if you want some examples of what I’m talking about here, go and listen to my interview with Joli Jensen in episode #93, and my interview with Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea in episode #101. You’re not inauthentic or otherwise flawed because you have interests that you wouldn’t want to share with the senior members of your department, or because you sometimes want to spend time not thinking about your academic projects, or because you struggle to write or focus or do other things that you’re sure everyone else has no problems with. Having a backstage self is completely normal, and it’s also completely normal not to want to share it with your colleagues.
If you can bring yourself to accept that an academic job is still just a job, albeit one you might really really want, all of this becomes a lot less complicated, I promise. You’re allowed - encouraged! - to have a life outside of your job. Being different at work than at home, playing roles around other people - all that’s just part of being competent at socialising with fellow species members, and part of knowing how to behave appropriately in different situations. Your job, whatever it is, is something you do, not something you are. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
Now that we’re done here, I’m off for a completely non-academic visit to the gym. Next time, friends!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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