If “mediocre” seems unkind, how about “ordinary”? I’m not special, but I live in a culture that designates people who look like me as the standard. My quip wasn’t the result of a lack of self-confidence I was simply suggesting that an honest self-assessment helps one do useful work.
Rather than being satisfied with being competent-a hard enough standard to meet-professors too often puff themselves up, a weakness to which White guys are especially vulnerable. But most of us aren’t big thinkers, and original ideas are rare.
In universities, the coin of the realm is being a big thinker with original ideas. That comment came in conversations with students about inflated faculty egos, partly as a caution to myself. I am White, male, American, and when I taught at the University of Texas at Austin, I routinely joked that “the secret to my success is that I’m mediocre, and I know it.” I’m a natural to review Ijeoma Oluo’s new book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (Seal Press, 2020).
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