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.
“If you’ve been hired, obviously a scholarly community has deemed what you do to be important,” says Dancy, who recently earned tenure at OU. Dancy always believed that such an accomplishment was within his reach.
As a fourth-generation college graduate, Dancy hails from a long line of teachers who were fierce proponents of education and academic excellence, including his mother, Gwendolyn, who was a prominent teacher and principal in the Pine Bluff public schools before she retired.
When Dancy graduated high school, he enrolled in the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, with the initial idea that he would “pursue a career that [was] going to have promise and a socioeconomic gain,” he says.
