Within university hallways and faculty development workshops, one hears the same confession whispered with both shame and relief: “I feel like an impostor.” What was once a niche clinical observation has become the dominant framing for academic self-doubt. New professors are told that their uncertainty is a syndrome—a psychological malfunction that obscures their true capability. They need only believe in themselves more. The problem, we are assured, lies in their self-perception, not their competence.

This comforting narrative has achieved widespread cultural saturation, but its empirical foundation is remarkably fragile. For many faculty members, the feeling of being an impostor is not a cognitive distortion at all. It is a valid and accurate recognition of a meaningful gap between the prestige bestowed by the title of “professor” and the far less developed skill set that actually equips someone to succeed in modern academia.

The structure of academic training ensures that new professors emerge from doctoral programs as specialists in a narrow slice of research while remaining novices in nearly every other domain their job demands. They have been evaluated for years on a single dimension: the ability to generate knowledge within a narrow field, yet upon hiring, they are expected to excel simultaneously in teaching, advising, mentoring, curriculum design, service obligations, grant writing, public scholarship, conflict mediation, and often crisis counseling as higher education increasingly absorbs students’ psychological distress. Certainty and fluency are impossible under such conditions, and recognizing one’s underpreparedness is not a pathology. It is reality-based metacognition.

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This reality is even more apparent for those hired through “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives, where institutions are so eager to increase representation that they downplay or shortcut rigorous evaluation of the full set of competencies required for success in the professorial role. In those cases, the process creates conditions for impostor feelings rooted in truth rather than distortion. When hiring decisions place disproportionate weight on identity characteristics as markers of institutional progress, they fail to adequately assess teaching readiness, scholarly independence, or the professional versatility demanded by academia. The result is that some faculty enter positions where their symbolic value has been carefully vetted, but their preparedness for the multi-dimensional professoriate has not.

The original conceptualization of the impostor phenomenon by Clance and Imes (1978) emphasized an irrational belief of incompetence despite clear evidence of success. However, decades of research on self-regulated learning contradict the assumption that self-doubt is inherently irrational. Research has shown that effective learners can identify and acknowledge their own weaknesses in real time. Feeling like one does not yet know what one is doing is a hallmark of early skill development, not a syndrome.

This developmental framing aligns with research on expertise. Psychologists have demonstrated that mastery emerges through deliberate practice, a process that depends on the explicit recognition of what one cannot yet do. The professor who feels entirely at ease in their role from the start may not be well-adjusted; they may simply be blind to their own deficits. Overconfidence is far more strongly supported by empirical research as a common human bias. Yet, we express far less cultural concern about the professor who feels entitled to authority than the one who responsibly questions their readiness for it.

Interestingly, the seminal paper on imposter syndrome lacks apparent academic rigor, offering description and speculation based on experiences with therapy clients or those whom the authors supervised in working groups or classes. No quantitative data are presented, and there is little systematic review of qualitative material to substantiate the phenomenon fully or to provide meaningful comparisons with non-imposter groups. Given that almost nothing benefits a clinician more than coining a label to create a novel pathology, especially when they can build a career on it and it provides “sufferers” with a way to outsource the responsibility for their feelings, it is perhaps unsurprising that the idea took hold.

Like much of the modern extension of clinical psychology into everyday life, the message offered by proponents of imposter syndrome reverses the developmental sequence in profoundly unhelpful ways. Confidence is earned through repeated competent performance and reinforced over time. To demand confidence without competence is to encourage a kind of professional performance art that places the appearance of authority above the pursuit of mastery.

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A striking irony emerges from this discussion: the professor who never feels like an impostor is the one we should worry about. If they believe they have nothing left to learn, nothing left to improve, and nothing left to question, then they have ceased to be scholars in the most fundamental sense. Intellectual humility, the recognition of one’s cognitive limitations, is the lifeblood of academic progress. It should shock no one familiar with modern higher education, however, that academia endorses confidence over competence when the professorate is filled with leftist intent on canceling merit in favor of feelings and prioritizing identity.

Instead of asking how to rid professors of impostor feelings, we should ask what those feelings signal about the training pipeline and the professional expectations imposed on early-career scholars. The appropriate response is not universal reassurance but targeted development.

We should stop rebranding inadequacy as “impostor syndrome” and start acknowledging it for what it often is: evidence that you’re not yet as competent as you need to be—and that the solution is improvement, not therapy-speak.

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