Tag: academia

Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Reasons for quitting academia:

  • Consistently have to apologize to white men who are themselves assholes and in the wrong
  • White men are expected to do less service or teaching, and get rewarded when they jump the gun or behave inappropriately
  • Women must be twice as good to get the same opportunities as men, and this is particularly true of people of color
  • Women and people of color in positions of power buy into the system and do not do the work to protect people low on the hierarchy, pushing the burden of success and safety onto them
  • Faculty participate in diversity initiatives supposedly to improve diversity in the field, but then continue to behave in unjust ways
  • Endless push to get more underrepresented groups and women into the field, but without fixing the conditions that make them quit in the first place
  • Academia values productivity, measured as number of publications, at the expense of quality and depth
  • Faculty positions require teaching, administrative duties, student mentoring, and research for promotions and tenure, but the dearth of faculty positions and the dwindling amount of grant money means that junior faculty are pushed into overwork (60-80 hours per week) to meet the basic expectations of university administrations
  • Overproduction of PhDs means that getting a PhD only qualifies you for more training, requiring multiple moves and extended periods of instability
  • Overproduction of PhDs also means that extremely qualified academics end up going to ‘low-tier’ schools to teach, pushing research expectations up everywhere regardless of course-load or financial support
  • Academic work is undervalued so that both postdoctoral work and the majority of faculty positions are severely underpaid, especially as they require much more than 40 hours a week to fulfill all expectations
  • Postdoctoral trainees are often considered little more than indentured servants, and are treated neither as employees nor as students
  • Most academic positions are in geographical locations that are undesirable for most academics
  • Getting a job, getting tenure, and getting promotions depends as much on politics as on your quality as a researcher or teacher
  • Pervasive belief that academia, more than a job, is a vocation, to which you must sacrifice everything or be considered unworthy or undeserving, to the extent that looking for better opportunities is considered immoral or questionable

But there’s no room at all for free spirits in modern academia, with its speech codes and humorless moralizing. So she makes two lives for herself, or three for all we know, or four, and in the end there’s no satisfaction in being multiple Solange St. Croixs instead of one.

Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

Lately, however, the routine had begun to pall. Coprolites and Jurassic snails no longer held the fascination they once did, and the incessant backbiting and political manoeuvring endemic in upper echelon academia—which she had always known and accepted as part of the scholastic landscape—was proving more and more of an irksome distraction. The further she travelled into darkest PhD territory, the more the fossilised remains of extinct creatures dwindled in fascination; she was rapidly specialising herself beyond caring about her subject. Whether or not the world learned what the latest new megasaurus ate for lunch sixty million years ago, what difference did it make?

Stephen R. Lawhead, The Bright Empires Collection

Maybe this (leaving academia for a chance at something else) is just a story I want to tell myself about who I am and who I could be. But I guess at the end of the day I’d rather tell my own story and let it fail than follow the plot of someone else’s.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

The problem is not that I don’t love my science. The problem is that I love a lot of other things too. Academia leaves no time for love of things, or for breadth, or even for actually reading about your own, narrow specialization. Academia favors single-minded fanaticism, and I am not a single-minded fanatic.

It is ok to decide that’s not what you want. It is ok to make another choice. There is life outside of academia. But academia is a kind of cult, and deviation from the normative values of the group is not permitted or accepted within its walls. You will be judged harshly by others and, to the extent you’ve been properly socialized into the cult during graduate school, by your own inner voices. Making the decision to leave involves confronting that judgment, working through it, and coming out the other side. It is long and hard and involves confronting profound shame. I went through this. I know.

Dr. Karen Kelsky, It’s OK to Quit, The Professor is In