How Ego Negatively Impacts Passion

Strong people don’t put others down. They lift them up.

Yesterday night, while catching up with a dear friend (we’ll call her Abby), I was once again reminded of the caustic ego which so frequently floods university research departments. It has become blindingly apparent that, for some professors / researchers, there comes a point in their careers where they begin to care more about the volume of work associated with their name than they do the actual problems which said careers were predicated on addressing.

While catching me up on her life, she mentioned that two years of diligent work with a multitude of other researchers involved on daily, weekly, and monthly bases was finally coming to a close as she prepared to publish one of her latest papers. But, after finishing a draft of the paper and sharing it with all who were involved, she was greeted by an email from her advisor telling her that one of the senior members of the department (we’ll call him Steve) was unhappy with his author placement and that she needed to update it. The thing is, Steve had been involved in this paper roughly once every 6–12 months and provided minimal input.

Although confronted indirectly through her advisor, Abby took this in stride and went to see Steve, directly. When explaining how the placement of authors was a reflection of their respective work contributions to the paper, she was dismissed by his telling her that the paper was predicated on previous work of his, giving him a right to the secondary author position.

Such an attitude only serves to belittle the work of the various contributors involved in favor of tenure and reputation. And when you’re a PhD candidate who is deeply passionate about what you’re doing, it can be incredibly invalidating to see someone who has little to no involvement in your work getting more credit for it than you.

It’s off-putting that this attitude is pervasive and widely accepted in academia. It is my hope that as Abby and her peers rise through the ranks that they elect to abandon this egotistical mindset in favor of acknowledging, inspiring, and motivating those working below them.