The vacuum cleaner and the desk

 

One afternoon, my phone rang at home. A colleague, herself a professor too, had managed to get hold of my number through HR. The message was urgent: I had to come in immediately. There was a guest lecture, and the room wasn’t tidy enough. I was to come and vacuum. That she and I held identical positions seemed, in her view, entirely irrelevant. I remember standing there with the receiver in my hand, wondering whether this was some kind of joke.

This was not the only incident with her. I once visited her at home, where she proudly showed me her study: an enormous room, larger than my living room, dominated by an imposing desk. She then pointed out her husband’s study: a small, cramped closet without a window, tucked half under the stairs. The hierarchy at home followed exactly the same logic she applied at work.

Academia harbours two opposite extremes: those who struggle with feeling like a fraud, and those who seem to thrive on unshakeable self-confidence. Both are fed by the nature of the work, which revolves around a continuous cycle of evaluation – from the PhD track to student evaluations, peer reviews, and grant applications. Every step demands renewed external validation. That system breeds insecurity, but it also allows some to construct an appearance of infallibility.

It’s no surprise, then, that many suffer from so-called impostor syndrome. In my experience, this forms the largest group. A smaller but conspicuous group sits at the other extreme. They seem to have been swept off their feet by their own success and behave like primadonnas. What often characterises them is early, excessive praise. That early affirmation seems to have been mistaken for lasting superiority – the colleague of the vacuum cleaner and the desk is a case in point, but hardly an exception.

For these primadonnas, it seems essential to constantly put their presumed superiority on display. This rarely happens subtly. “I've just placed the most fantastic publication in a leading international journal.” Or the colleague who, at every opportunity – often in front of young female students – proclaimed himself “the youngest professor ever appointed in his field.”

These two extremes don’t just mirror each other; they sustain each other. The loud confidence of one enlarges the room for doubt in the other. Those who already feel insecure grow quieter; those who receive applause learn to speak louder. In this way, the system feeds insecurity and narcissism at once.

Perhaps the problem, then, lies not with individuals but with what gets rewarded. In an environment where visibility, bravado, and self-promotion outweigh substantive calm or restraint, a distortion takes hold. Not because everyone is narcissistic, but because the system gives it room to grow. And as long as that remains true, those who shout loudest will often be heard the most.

What helps against this is rarely confrontation. Primadonnas thrive on an audience and on reaction. What constrains them instead is documentation, repetition, and silence: recording agreements, letting claims stand unconfirmed, letting achievements speak without constantly narrating them.

At the system level, this calls for something else: not less attention to output or quality, but less reliance on self-presentation as a measure of it. Whoever shouts loudest about their fantastic publications doesn’t necessarily have the best ones. In fact, colleagues with impostor syndrome often have a track record that is just as impressive, if not better – they simply don’t brag about it. That raises a simple but difficult question: is the bragging actually grounded in reality? It’s no dramatic intervention, but it makes a difference. Not because it eliminates narcissism, but because it makes loud self-promotion pay off less, and quiet quality less invisible.