"Assume You Don't Belong": A Mindset for Academic Survival

I won the academic lottery, such as it is. I have tenure at a small, elite liberal arts college with good benefits. I do not use the term lottery in an entirely facetious way; nothing I might have said to my younger self could have ensured I would get the job I have now. There was simply too much luck involved. But I wish I had known certain things that I do know now that could have helped me psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually as I coped both with my own struggle to survive and with how this profession has affected so many of my good friends, many of whom never secured a tenure-track job or tenure. So, while I want in this essay to share resources I have found helpful in my own struggle for survival and sanity, I also recognize that my experience is quite specific to the lucky path my journey followed.

First, I would like to mention the work of American Studies Association president and queer-of-color critic Roderick Ferguson; his books The Reorder of Things and especially We Demand: The University and Student Protests provide compelling histories of how universities have managed to diffuse dissent over the past few decades. Ferguson depicts an academy that is a site of both ethical peril and radical potential. He concludes We Demand with a set of "rules for [academic] radicals." I found the entire book helpful and that chapter inspirational, but his sixth rule is one in particular I wish I had grasped from the moment I started graduate school: "Assume you don't belong."¹

Those of us who identify in some variegated way as "feminist" know that US universities were not built for us or with us in mind, although that has different implications for each of us. In clarifying what he means by "assume you don't belong," Ferguson draws on a perhaps problematic old Christian articulation—one can be in the university without being of it. But there are several layers to this. The first step serves as a reminder that if you feel like you don't belong—what we might classically call the impostor syndrome—it's not you, it's them; the overall structure of the institution is the problem.

In a roundtable on the underrepresentation of Latinx scholars in the professoriate, Lena Palacios referenced a similar sentiment, drawing upon the work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney on the "undercommons."² Palacios claims that "we need to throw away our impostor syndrome and embrace a newly defined infiltrator syndrome." Okay, so we don't belong, but if we have a foothold in the academy, how can we use that foothold to work for the justice that matters to us? And how can we build the networks of infiltrators, the allies with whom we work to transform the academy?

Remembering we don't belong thus has another valence; through the help of trusted allies, we can try to hold on to our own reasons for being in the academy and thereby measure goals and successes by our own standards. As my former Williams College colleague Ji-Young Um described in her essay, "On Being a Failed Professor," oftentimes failure is simply that site that refuses the recognition of the neoliberal academy.³ As Ferguson might warn, when I am not failing, when the academy recognizes me and rewards me, it is a moment of peril that requires introspection and self-reflection. What has the academy recognized in me that it has rewarded me for? Perhaps the academy has found in me something usable for furthering hierarchal structures of colonization, exploitation, gender oppression, and white supremacy. I don't want to say this is always the case. Maybe the academy has found something that challenges those dynamics, but I owe myself and my loved ones to always ask about what the academy has found in me when it recognizes and rewards me.

Assuming I don't belong allows me to approach the academy through the lens...