Authenticity Is Wrong Standard for Faculty Hiring (opinion)

Academic hiring has never been free of interpretive judgment. Search committees routinely weigh intangibles (e.g., “fit,” “potential” and “collegiality”) alongside more concrete indicators such as publications and teaching experience. Recently, however, one term has begun to carry disproportionate evaluative weight in faculty searches: authenticity. Merriam-Webster chose “authentic” as its 2023 word of the year, and advocating for authenticity has been on the rise, reflecting our anxiety about presenting the self and how it is perceived and judged by others.

Both the word and the sentiment it conveys are pervasive in the advice literature on job applications, which often encourages applicants to “get personal” and “embrace your true self.” In professional academic settings, reflecting the larger societal trend, candidates are also praised for sounding “genuine,” faulted for seeming “performative” and assessed on whether their teaching or research statements feel like expressions of a “true” intellectual self. This shift may appear benign, even ethically motivated, but in practice, it is deeply flawed. As a tacit criterion in professional evaluation, authenticity can distort academic judgment, as it is neither stable nor accountable.

It is a perception, filtered through the cultural biases and institutional norms of those doing the judging. What reads as authentic to one committee member may register as evasive or calculated to another. What one committee member reads as warmth or conviction might read to another as artifice or affectation. And what feels “authentic” in one discipline can feel out of place in another. The result is that authenticity judgments risk favoring familiarity over fairness. As they don’t always rest on evidence, these judgments emerge from unexamined expectations about tone, narrative and self-presentation strategies, but such expectations are unevenly distributed across class, culture, language background and academic training.

Under these conditions, authenticity becomes paradoxical. Candidates are told to be themselves, but only in institutionally legible ways. Those who write cautiously or defensively (often international scholars, first-generation academics or those from underrepresented groups) may be read as withholding or insincere. These candidates may favor different discursive and rhetorical strategies and thus be disproportionately judged as “inauthentic” simply because they do not mirror the committee’s aesthetics.

Faculty hiring already struggles with opaque standards that give informal criteria and implicit biases an outsized role in shaping outcomes. Terms like “fit” and “cultural alignment” have long been criticized for masking exclusionary practices under the guise of collegial language. Authenticity contributes to this problem by adding an appealing cover and a moral gloss to subjective judgment. A candidate is not simply “less aligned”; they are implicitly less genuine and less real. When a candidate is dismissed as “inauthentic,” these personal judgments appear principled rather than impressionistic.

The growing emphasis on authenticity seems related to the shift toward vulnerability and relational ethics and mirrors debates surrounding other narrative-based hiring requirements, particularly diversity, equity and inclusion statements. Regardless of where one stands on DEI statements specifically, the broader lesson for academic hiring is clear: When hiring criteria rely heavily on subjective interpretation of values, voice or perceived sincerity, committees drift away from accountable evaluation and fairness erodes.

Operating in a similar register, authenticity may substitute feeling for argument and conflate affective resonance with professional merit. It may also risk valuing style and identity narratives over substance. While consequences are particularly visible in the DEI statements, they are also present in the evaluation of teaching and research statements. A teaching statement that narrates a compelling personal journey may be read more favorably than one that carefully documents course design, assessment strategies or student outcomes. A research statement that foregrounds motivation and identity can overshadow one that rigorously explains methodology and contribution.

Job application documents are not spontaneous acts of self-revelation or confessional diaries; they are highly conventionalized genres of curated statements that reflect carefully crafted image management. They are not simply about who the applicants are, but also what they could be. Not only are they statements of the actual self, but also of the aspirational self. It is all part of the interactional stagecraft, to use Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor of self-presentation. There is always a blurring of lines between authentic selves and constructed personas when applicants articulate personal values, teaching philosophies and research agendas.

Higher education cannot claim a commitment to fairness while elevating an evaluative standard that depends on how familiar, comfortable or emotionally resonant a candidate appears. Authenticity is an appealing ideal and a desirable quality, but it is a slippery concept. In faculty hiring, it can function more as an unexamined bias than as a useful judgment. If search committees aim to recruit effectively and equitably in an increasingly challenging academic labor market, they should resist the temptation to appeal to authenticity as a hiring standard.