Dr. T. Elon Dancy II has spent much of his academic career thinking about the concept of impostership, or what others have called academic fraud.
“I’ve mentored a number of students who always confess feelings that they don’t belong, that they are not smart enough, even though all the evidence points to the contrary,” says Dancy, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Oklahoma who has written extensively about minority groups who have at times struggled with this very complex.
“For people who have not been White, male, straight, Christian or wealthy — all these identities that have experienced marginalization — they are likely to be part of the breeding ground for impostership.”
With a joint appointment in African and African American Studies, Women & Gender Studies and the OU Center for Social Justice, the Pine Bluff , Ark., native has made it his mission to help his students realize that they do belong. And he uses his own life journey to illustrate this very point.
