She’d had to do dinners with them, fund-raisers, spent hundreds of hours engaged in high-stakes small talk, under her department head’s watchful eye. They weren’t unpleasant to talk to—many were witty conversationalists. But there was something … off about them. It wasn’t until she’d had her crisis of conscience and walked away from Cornell that she’d been able to name it: they had no impostor syndrome. There wasn’t a hint of doubt that every privilege they enjoyed was deserved. The world was correctly stacked. The important people were at the top. The unimportant were at the bottom.
