TORONTO, December 13, 2005 -- Many accomplished academics have secret fears of being inadequate and incompetent according to York University’s Diane Zorn, who offers workshops on how to beat this “imposter phenomenon.” 

Zorn, a course director in Philosophy in the Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies at York, has been researching the problem through workshops and interviews. The “imposter phenomenon” – defined as an internal experience of intellectual phoniness common among high-achieving people – is surprisingly common in universities, she says.

“At one workshop, a professor who was just two years away from retirement admitted she still lived in fear that a student or colleague would discover she didn’t know what she was talking about,” says Zorn. “Many young faculty members have similar feelings. They’re afraid they’re going to be found out, not only in their research, but in the classroom. They’re afraid they will be asked a question they can’t answer.”

Faculty members often feel like intellectual imposters when they move from teaching undergraduates to teaching graduates and PhD students experience similar doubts, says Zorn, who became interested in the phenomenon when she experienced those feelings herself.

The “imposter phenomenon” is not just psychological, but is rooted in university culture, she says, where five main factors perpetuate it: scholarly isolation, disciplinary nationalism, aggressive competitiveness, the valuation of product over process and lack of mentoring.

The solution, Zorn suggests, is to change the university experience. Mentoring for PhD students would be a step in the right direction: currently only 17 percent of humanities and 48 percent of science students in Canada actually finish their degrees. The higher rate for sciences is attributed to their mentoring programs.

For new faculty or tutorial assistants, York’s Centre for the Support of Teaching offers a variety of programs to enhance teaching and learning, ranging from an institute on course design to Zorn’s workshops on overcoming the “imposter phenomenon.” Zorn’s workshops, which are very popular with tutorial assistants, offer them strategies for addressing these feelings in the classroom – for example, actively seeking teaching mentors or setting up an informal support network of fellow tutorial assistants.

Zorn has done a presentation on “imposter phenomenon” at Harvard, “where nobody would talk about it,” and at a number of other universities where the response has been overwhelming. In one fairly typical case, a graduate student who was suffering from the “imposter phenomenon” took rejection personally when he was sent a bad review by one of the people who review articles for journals, she said.

“He didn’t know it’s normal to get an aggressive review and still have the article published. So he lost out on publication and he lost out on a letter of recommendation from his professor,” says Zorn.

The “imposter phenomenon” can affect teaching, learning and the professional development of the academic, says Zorn, and it is being recognized as a problem that is linked to the culture of an institution.

“People want to talk about it. They’re not enjoying their success and they’re not living up to their potential.”

York University is the leading interdisciplinary research and teaching university in Canada. York offers a modern, academic experience at the undergraduate and graduate level in Toronto, Canada’s most international city.  The third largest university in the country, York is host to a dynamic academic community of 50,000 students and 7,000 faculty and staff, as well as 190,000 alumni worldwide. York’s 10 faculties and 21 research centres conduct ambitious, groundbreaking research that is interdisciplinary, cutting across traditional academic boundaries.  This distinctive and collaborative approach is preparing students for the future and bringing fresh insights and solutions to real-world challenges. York University is an autonomous, not-for-profit corporation.

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For more information, contact:
Janice Walls, Media Relations, York University, 416-736-2100 x22101 / wallsj@yorku.ca