I recently relayed that I experienced anxiety before presenting.
A friend asked how that was possible; given some years, I give two talks a month.
I honestly didn’t have a good answer.
Many faculty feel anxious about academic presentations, submitting papers, or working on revisions.
I know award-winning teachers who report feeling tremendous anxiety the first day of the semester & who do not feel comfortable until they know the students.
So if you feel anxiety about your academic life, don’t despair; you are alone.
What is puzzling is that so many smart people struggle with anxiety & mental health.
Some suggest it’s because of imposter syndrome - which refers to doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud - which apparently is common among high achieving people - which describes some academics.
I suspect it’s more than that - I think it is how we have built academic culture.
Consider three illustrations
We tell young people that the price of failure on exams is dismissal or failure to publish is unemployment.
We subject each other to peer review processes, where sometimes brutal anonymous reviewers castigate projects that are years in the making.
We support a growing ecosystem of journal lists and rankings, where we name ‘top scholars’ & implicitly derogate the less productive.
Illustrations like these, which seem to demand merit to navigate, also tell many of us, for years, that we simply are not good enough to join the academic club.
Frankly, it should be no surprise to anyone that many academics see a therapist, report imposter syndrome, or simply opt-out of the industry.
There just isn’t much positive feedback built into the system.
So what can we all do? To make academe more navigable? And to stop damaging each other?
First, we need to offer clear rubrics for how to train & evaluate early career scholars.
We need to balance harsh comments with positive feedback.
N+1 for tenure needs to go!
We should be building efficacy & not encouraging fear.
Second, we need to encourage more professional peer review.
Editors need to evaluate reviews & scrub out the Grinch-like comments that make a negative review personal.
If a reviewer goes too far, we need to provide feedback to cut it out or be sanctioned.
There is no merit in writing that a paper is fatally flawed.
It’s not ok to be needlessly mean to authors, esp early career scholars.
Third, we need to actively question the push to quantify academe.
Quantification has nothing to do with quality.
For example, let’s do away with rankings.
Why? Because it creates a ‘what have you done for me lately’ mindset & inordinate pressure to keep producing.
Rankings encourage unhealthy social comparisons. Let’s find a better way to signal quality.
No one needs to live on an anxiety-driven treadmill.
I’m sure we can find ways to build quality virtuous circles that don’t evoke anxiety.
I’m all ears. We need to build a kinder academy.
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