Artificial intelligence, academic identity and the uncomfortable business of discovering who we are without our titles
Paul Morrill | 9 October 2026
There is a particular irony in watching universities grapple with artificial intelligence. For decades, we have encouraged academics to build their careers around publications, research funding, professional recognition, institutional standing and an increasingly elaborate collection of measurable achievements. We have constructed systems to reward these activities, promoted people who perform well within them and, perhaps inevitably, encouraged individuals to regard their success as evidence of their personal worth.
Now along comes artificial intelligence, threatening to make some of those achievements rather less distinctive than they once appeared.
I suspect the consequences will extend considerably beyond academic employment, teaching practices or research productivity. There is a psychological dimension to this that interests me far more than whether ChatGPT can produce a passable literature review.
What happens when someone has spent thirty years constructing an identity around being an accomplished academic, only to discover that some of the activities through which they established that identity are becoming increasingly easy to reproduce? What happens when the professor, stripped of the institutional recognition, publication record, funding history and professional titles that have provided reassurance about their place in the world, is left to confront a rather more personal question?
Who am I without all this?
There is a further irony. Universities employ considerable numbers of people whose professional interests include mental health, wellbeing, identity, resilience and psychological adjustment. They have spent careers studying how other people respond to uncertainty, loss and threats to their sense of self.
Perhaps some of those lenses will eventually need turning inwards.
I don't mean that unkindly. Indeed, I suspect the experience could be profoundly uncomfortable.
The academic self
Work provides more than an income. It offers structure, purpose, relationships, social recognition and, for many people, an important part of their identity. There is nothing particularly unusual about this. We introduce ourselves through our occupations, derive satisfaction from professional accomplishments and often measure our progress through the recognition of others.
Academia, however, offers an unusually elaborate system through which professional identity can be constructed and reinforced.
There are titles, promotions, citations, journal rankings, grant awards, editorial appointments, conference invitations, professional fellowships and institutional distinctions. Each provides another opportunity to establish one's position within a professional hierarchy.
Some of these distinctions recognise genuinely exceptional contributions. Others are less reliable indicators of intellectual or educational value. The difficulty is that, over time, the distinction between professional achievement and personal worth can become rather blurred.
Social identity theory provides one way of understanding this. Tajfel and Turner (1979) argued that membership of social groups contributes to an individual's self-concept. Academic status can therefore become more than a description of employment. It may form part of how someone understands their place among colleagues and within society.
There is also the question of contingent self-worth. Crocker and Wolfe (2001) examined how individuals invest their self-esteem in particular domains, making their sense of personal worth dependent upon success or failure within those domains.
Applied to academia, the implications are interesting.
For someone whose self-worth is heavily invested in professional achievement, a changing reward system may threaten considerably more than their career prospects. It may challenge the psychological foundations upon which their identity has been constructed.
Petriglieri (2011) describes identity threat in terms of perceived potential harm to the value, meaning or enactment of an identity. This provides a useful way of understanding why a change in professional circumstances might provoke a response that appears disproportionate when viewed solely in economic or practical terms.
The individual may not be losing their job. They may not even be losing status in any formal sense. What they perceive as threatened is the meaning attached to that status.
That is not to suggest that accomplished academics are necessarily insecure, narcissistic or incapable of adapting. Such generalisations would be both unfair and unsupported. But it raises a question that deserves rather more attention than it currently receives.
What happens when the things through which someone has learned to recognise their own value begin to lose their significance?
The Emperor's New Clothes
I keep returning to Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes. Not because I believe academia is populated by impostors, but because the story illustrates something rather uncomfortable about institutions. Once enough people have invested their reputations in a particular account of reality, questioning it becomes increasingly difficult.
The Emperor wasn't the only person with something to lose. His advisers, courtiers and subjects had all become participants in maintaining the illusion. Admitting that the magnificent clothes didn't exist meant acknowledging that they had either been deceived or had chosen not to challenge what everyone else appeared to believe.
I wonder whether AI is beginning to play the part of Andersen's child. Not because it possesses some superior wisdom, but because its existence allows us to ask questions that previously seemed almost impolite.
If AI can produce an impressive reflective teaching portfolio, what does that tell us about the validity of portfolios as evidence of teaching competence? If it can generate sophisticated academic prose, how much of the distinction we have traditionally attached to academic writing reflects intellectual contribution, and how much reflects the ability to produce a particular kind of document?
And if someone outside academia can use these technologies to engage competently with sophisticated research questions, what does that tell us about the relationship between institutional status and intellectual authority?
None of this makes academic expertise redundant. There remains an enormous difference between producing convincing material and understanding whether it is correct. A plausible scientific explanation is not necessarily a valid one, and a beautifully written research paper is no substitute for sound evidence.
But perhaps that is precisely the problem. We have become rather good at rewarding the visible products of academic work, sometimes without adequately examining the intellectual contribution behind them.
Concerns about the limitations of research assessment are hardly new. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, widely known as DORA, challenged the inappropriate use of journal-based metrics in evaluating individual researchers (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, 2013). More recently, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA, 2022) has called for greater recognition of the diverse contributions that support research quality, with qualitative judgement playing a central role. These initiatives demonstrate that dissatisfaction with conventional academic metrics predates the current enthusiasm for generative AI.
AI may simply make some of the weaknesses more difficult to ignore.
The Emperor's clothes may not have disappeared. We may be discovering that some of the garments were rather more transparent than advertised.
When the professional self begins to unravel
One of the more interesting aspects of this potential disruption concerns the relationship between identity and psychological resilience.
Linville (1987) proposed that self-complexity, broadly understood as the extent to which individuals represent themselves through multiple differentiated aspects of identity, may buffer some of the psychological consequences of stressful experiences. Her findings supported this possibility, although subsequent applications require attention to context, measurement and the nature of the stressor.
The implications for academic identity are worth considering, even if the specific relationship between self-complexity and responses to AI has yet to be established.
Imagine two academics with similarly distinguished careers. Both have published extensively, supervised doctoral students and acquired considerable professional recognition.
One has a sense of identity extending comfortably beyond the university. Their work matters enormously, but so do their relationships, interests and activities outside it.
The other has gradually come to understand almost everything about themselves through their professional achievements. Their publications, status and institutional standing have become the principal sources of personal validation.
Now imagine that the value attached to some of those achievements begins to change.
Both individuals may experience professional uncertainty. But the second may face something more difficult: the possibility that the foundations of their self-worth are becoming unstable.
The threat need not involve redundancy, retirement or even a reduction in salary. It might simply involve the gradual realisation that activities once considered distinctive are no longer particularly scarce.
I wonder whether this could produce something resembling occupational identity loss without the individual actually leaving their occupation.
The academic remains employed. Their office remains where it was. Their title still appears beneath their name, accompanied by the usual assortment of letters.
Yet something has changed.
The professional distinction that once provided reassurance about their place in the world no longer carries quite the same psychological weight.
There is a temptation to dismiss this as wounded vanity. I think that would be a mistake.
For someone whose identity has developed around a particular professional role over several decades, changes to that role can be genuinely unsettling. The psychological consequences deserve consideration, irrespective of whether we agree with the system that originally conferred the status.
Perhaps the psychologists should examine themselves
There is another irony here, and I confess I find it difficult to resist.
Universities employ academics who have devoted considerable portions of their careers to understanding mental health, wellbeing, occupational stress, identity, resilience and psychological adjustment.
They have examined how people respond to uncertainty, loss, diminished social status and threats to their sense of self. They have written papers, delivered lectures, supervised research and advised institutions about the importance of psychological wellbeing.
Now some of those same questions may become rather more personal.
How does someone respond when the professional environment that has sustained their identity begins to change? What happens when established forms of recognition lose some of their significance? How do people reconstruct a sense of purpose when activities that previously distinguished them become increasingly accessible to others?
Perhaps the lens through which we have spent so much time examining other people will need turning inwards.
I don't mean that as an accusation of hypocrisy. Understanding psychological processes does not confer immunity from experiencing them. A psychologist can experience depression, a physician can become ill and an expert in occupational stress can find their own working life overwhelming.
Indeed, the assumption that professional knowledge should protect someone from psychological difficulty would be rather poor psychology.
But there is a distinction between understanding a phenomenon intellectually and recognising it in oneself.
It may be relatively straightforward to discuss identity threat in a lecture theatre. It could be considerably more uncomfortable to recognise that one's own professional identity is threatened.
Petriglieri's (2011) account is useful here because it does not assume that responses to identity threat are uniform. Individuals may attempt to preserve, revise or otherwise negotiate threatened identities, depending upon the circumstances and their interpretation of the threat.
For academics, these responses might include embracing AI as an extension of their expertise, questioning the legitimacy of AI-assisted work, defending established professional distinctions or reconsidering the sources of satisfaction they derive from academic life.
None of these responses should automatically be interpreted as evidence of psychological defensiveness. Concerns about AI reliability, intellectual integrity and the commercialisation of knowledge are legitimate matters for debate.
The interesting question is whether some reactions also reflect a perceived loss of professional distinction.
I wonder how many academics have considered that possibility.
Time, eh?
I have followed computing and machine learning for many years, although largely from outside the communities developing these technologies. My own interests have occasionally taken me into areas that did not sit particularly comfortably within conventional conversations in psychology departments.
I remember mentioning machine learning and ideas associated with what I called PsychoDarwinism, and receiving the sort of looks usually reserved for someone who has arrived at a departmental meeting carrying a homemade perpetual motion machine.
Perhaps some of that scepticism was justified. I certainly wouldn't claim that every idea I entertained was correct, or that subsequent developments in AI somehow vindicate them. That would be rather too convenient.
But I do wonder about the intellectual habits of institutions that are supposed to encourage curiosity.
There is a difference between asking someone to provide evidence for an unconventional idea and dismissing it because it falls outside the familiar boundaries of a discipline.
Computational approaches to cognition are hardly new. Psychology has a substantial intellectual history involving information processing, connectionism, computational modelling and artificial neural networks. Rumelhart et al. (1986), for example, helped establish parallel distributed processing as an influential approach to understanding cognition.
Yet the relationship between established disciplinary practices and emerging technologies has not always been comfortable.
Now, of course, we find ourselves discussing machine learning in almost every corner of higher education.
The same institutions that might once have regarded certain computational ideas as peripheral are developing AI strategies, establishing working groups and encouraging staff to demonstrate their engagement with the technology.
No doubt there will soon be a fellowship for it.
Time, eh?
The problem with defending the familiar
I have written previously about what I call the transactionists: those who became particularly adept at operating within the increasingly managerial culture of higher education.
The people who understood the importance of measurable outputs, institutional visibility, funding success and the language of strategic achievement.
I don't suggest that these individuals were necessarily poor academics. Many undoubtedly made important contributions. The problem was never measurement itself, but the gradual confusion of what could be measured with what was valuable.
AI now introduces an awkward possibility.
Some of the activities that universities have spent decades rewarding may become substantially easier to produce, while other activities that have historically received less recognition may become relatively more important.
Consider the experienced lecturer who recognises that a student hasn't understood something and spends another twenty minutes helping them. Or the technician who notices a flaw in an experimental procedure because they have watched similar experiments fail over many years.
These contributions may not generate impressive performance indicators. They may never feature prominently in institutional strategies or promotion applications.
Yet their educational value can be considerable.
Meanwhile, the production of polished reports, teaching documentation, research summaries and strategic proposals is becoming increasingly accessible through AI.
It would be a mistake to assume that AI can replace the expertise required to evaluate such material. But it may make the production of the material itself a less useful indicator of professional distinction.
How will universities respond?
They might reconsider the relationship between academic rewards and genuine intellectual or educational contribution.
Alternatively, they might introduce additional frameworks, reporting requirements and committees to demonstrate that they have successfully adapted.
I have a suspicion which option will prove more immediately attractive.
Retirement without leaving
Retirement has long raised questions about identity and purpose. For someone whose life has been organised around professional achievement, leaving work can involve much more than surrendering an office key.
It can mean losing a familiar source of structure, recognition and belonging.
Research on retirement adjustment suggests that the transition is shaped by a combination of personal, social and contextual factors rather than following a single predictable psychological trajectory (Wang et al., 2011). The importance attached to work, the availability of alternative roles and the resources individuals can draw upon all matter.
But AI introduces the possibility of something psychologically similar occurring while an individual remains employed.
An academic may continue teaching, researching and attending meetings while gradually experiencing a loss of the professional distinctiveness upon which their identity depends.
I would describe this provisionally as anticipatory occupational identity loss. I use the phrase descriptively, not as an established diagnostic category or a claim to have identified a new psychological construct.
Might technological change produce some of the psychological experiences associated with retirement or professional displacement without the individual actually leaving their occupation?
And might those experiences be particularly difficult for people whose self-worth has been built around academic distinction rather than around a more varied sense of identity?
That question matters because universities are unlikely to experience this transition evenly. Some people will adapt quickly, some will adapt reluctantly and some will insist that the old forms of recognition remain the only serious ones. The argument here is not that the latter group is foolish. It is that they may be defending more than a professional standard. They may also be defending a way of knowing who they are.
What remains when the title is taken away?
I would like to return to the question with which this essay began.
What happens when the professional framework through which someone has learned to recognise their own worth begins to lose its authority?
Psychologically, the answer is not necessarily nothing.
But someone may experience it as nothing.
That distinction is important. The loss of professional identity does not mean the loss of personal worth. It means the individual may no longer possess the framework through which they have learned to recognise that worth.
This is not a problem that universities can solve simply by offering retraining, adding another performance framework or inviting staff to attend a webinar on resilience. Indeed, the webinar would almost certainly have a feedback form, a certificate of attendance and a strategic alignment statement. There are traditions to maintain.
The more serious point is that academia has encouraged people to construct identities around a reward system whose assumptions are now being challenged. Publication records, institutional titles, professional fellowships and the ability to produce impressive academic prose may continue to matter. But they may not mean quite what they once meant.
I suspect the greatest difficulty for some academics will not be learning to use artificial intelligence. Many will manage that perfectly well. The more difficult task may be learning to live in a world where some of the things that once made them feel professionally exceptional are no longer particularly exceptional.
That is not something I take pleasure in contemplating. A lifetime's work deserves respect, even when the system that rewarded it deserves criticism.
But perhaps we should have been asking different questions all along. Not how many papers someone published, how much funding they attracted or how impressive their professional title became, but what they actually contributed to the intellectual and personal development of others.
I have known people with relatively modest academic positions whose influence upon students and colleagues was extraordinary. I have also encountered people with impressive titles whose contributions were rather more difficult to discern.
Perhaps artificial intelligence will finally oblige us to examine that distinction.
Or perhaps we will simply invent another set of metrics, establish a committee to oversee them and congratulate ourselves on adapting to the future.
I would not rule out the latter.
After all, the Emperor had an entire court to reassure him that his clothes were magnificent.
References
Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. (2022). Agreement on reforming research assessment. https://www.coara.org/agreement/the-agreement-full-text/
Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593-623. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.593
Linville, P. W. (1987). Self-complexity as a cognitive buffer against stress-related illness and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(4), 663-676. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.4.663
Petriglieri, J. L. (2011). Under threat: Responses to and the consequences of threats to individuals' identities. Academy of Management Review, 36(4), 641-662. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0087
Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L., & the PDP Research Group. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. MIT Press.
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. (2013). San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. https://sfdora.org/read/
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.
Wang, M., Henkens, K., & van Solinge, H. (2011). Retirement adjustment: A review of theoretical and empirical advancements. American Psychologist, 66(3), 204-213. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022414