narratives I have heard.
narratives I have heard.
Or, how other academics respond when you tell them you’re leaving academia.
“That’s bold.”
What stories do we tell when people choose to leave academia? What questions do you, personally, feel compelled to ask? And why make such a big deal out of leaving this profession at all?
All of these things swirl in my head as I head down the spiral staircase in the Hilton lobby. I’m in Birmingham—the English one, not the Southern one with good food—and this staircase forms the heart of the British International Studies Association’s 2024 annual meeting (BISA). Linger near it, and you will inevitably run into someone you know. As a result, it also serves as the focal point for many of the “you’re leaving!” conversations I will have over the next few days with my UK and European academic communities.
I had known intellectually that I would have these conversations, especially as I had not seen most people there since the summer before. I’m having one now with Kodili as we move between conference events. “You have a plan for what’s next, right?” he asks. It’s a reasonable assumption. I love planning. I once had a therapist who would interrupt our sessions to let me schedule something if I needed to ground myself. It’s also common to hear leaving announcements from established academics accompanied by “and now I shall be pursuing this shiny industry career.” And so I understand where the idea of a clearly defined next step comes from.
But I don’t have a plan. Not a firm one, anyway. I tell Kodili this.
His eyes widen slightly. “That’s bold,” he says.
His statements recalls for me a conversation I had several years ago at an academic workshop, where I presented some research on white supremacist violence vs. structural white supremacy and why these are, in fact, inseparable parts of the same oppressive continuum. A comrade who is now a friend said: “You’re brave to do this work.” My response was instinctual: “I disagree.” I had trouble articulating why it wasn’t brave because to me, it was just so obviously what needed to be done. There is of course the added layer of my own whiteness, which affords some safety when talking about racism, and with this also in the equation, it was simply unfathomable not to talk about white supremacy in a serious way. Even now, I am struggling to articulate the why. But I still know in the depths of my bones that “brave” is the wrong word.
Is “bold” better? The word shares linguistic roots with the German bald, meaning “soon.” There is a cavalier attitude embedded within “bold,” suggesting perhaps a disregard for narrow windows of time or an insistence that they are irrelevant for the task at hand. This may by brash, but it is not the courage of the Old English bald, with which “bold” also shares roots. (It is, however, its impudence.)
Nevertheless, my response to Kodili is identical. When I was 22, I moved to Washington, DC with no full-time job and no stable living situation to pursue a career in policy. I am over a decade older now, but reshaping my life is now a familiar task; now it is routine. When it was a fresh experience, my father, too, insisted on the narrative of bravery, and I responded equally forcefully in the negative. “Brave” is thought to come from Middle French; its antecedent, braver, means in contemporary French “to defy.” Is it still defiance if the expectations you are defying are not your own?
A narrative I land on to offer in return, as the “you’re leaving!” conversations continue, is “you can leave too, if you want.” I put it simply, without whisper like it’s a secret or fanfare like it’s a revelation. I put it simply because it’s simple, or at least it can be. I don’t discount partners and children, financial implications (I think about these a lot!), the networks of care and support in which we are all embedded, or the uncertainty of the unknown. And I know that the more you say something, the more real it can feel to you.
So, if choosing yourself might mean leaving academia: you can, too. Yes, you.
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“I see myself as a teacher.”
A major reason for my leaving academia, an educational profession, is that I like being a teacher. That sentence may be difficult to parse if you have never worked at a research university, so suffice it to say that teaching is an afterthought in many academic milieus. Finding professional working groups focused on pedagogy has helped make academia more fulfilling for me. The existence of such groups demonstrates that there are people in the profession who care deeply about teaching and put a lot of work into doing it well, but I have still long considered this viewpoint marginal within the academy as a whole, at least in terms of institutional signals and messaging.
Yet when I share that my love of teaching is a key reason I have to leave this profession that is (ostensibly) about teaching, I find so many people who feel similarly. One night at BISA, I get Thai food with Luise and a friend of hers I hadn’t met before. This other woman doesn’t know I’m leaving academia, which is refreshing. Organically, however, our conversation turns to caring about teaching and how exhausting academia can make that feel. Emily is on a casual contract that will soon be up, and while she likes her research and wishes she had more time for it, she also identifies strongly with her teaching. Even as it consumes her time, I get the sense that it matters to her deeply.
Numerous strangers reached out to me across multiple platforms after I wrote about my leaving for the first time. The most common thing they shared? “What you said about teaching really resonated.” “I also think of myself as a teacher.” “I’m a grad student and I’m worried about what my life in this profession will be like since I value teaching.” That they say these things to me in private messages may simply be a byproduct of how online communication can sometimes work, and I also suspect it replicates how we tend to talk about teaching, especially in PhD programs: as an afterthought. As a secondary task after our research. As something it is possible to “spend too much time on,” with research never discussed in the same way. As something we should be good at, but not as something worthy of training or support and certainly not as something that might merit us getting an academic job (however out of touch with reality this narrative is).
Did you also watch other students in your grad program get told off if they chose to devote much energy to TAing, despite it being a condition of their employment and a substantial component of the future jobs for which their department claimed to be preparing them? Did you also watch teaching get waved about as a punishment, with advanced students being told their funding would be pulled if they didn’t lecture a class the department had decided needed to be offered? Did you then witness faculty on teaching-only contracts get told they could only apply for a sabbatical if they could propose a project that would result in a textbook or pedagogy publication—that is, if they could turn their teaching into research? Do you still wonder why conversations about viewing oneself as a teacher happen quietly?
My vitriol aside, I feel both a profound sense of gratitude that I am judged a safe space for vocalizing a love of teaching and a misplaced sense of surprise that so many people still try to care about teaching despite all the incentives not to. It’s as though I’ve stumbled across a scattered clandestine community. My response to their narratives is thus directed not at the mostly early-career folks who reached out to me, but to those who are more established. To them, I plead: be loud! Share your teaching successes like you share your publications. Let others witness your joy when a new classroom activity goes well. Make the parts of your job for which you may not be rewarded more visible. We owe it to others like us to change the narrative. What academia looks like is a story that we write together.
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“This is a loss for the discipline.”
As the “you’re leaving!” conversations continue, most narratives have socially acceptable scripts attached to them for how I can respond. As someone who finds social interaction difficult and the conventions of conversation entirely unintuitive, I appreciate when statements have a range of pre-selected responses from which to choose. These don’t usually have emotional valence attached. If anything, having a script means I don’t have to process any feelings whatsoever—it is important to process, but it takes time, and meanwhile the other person is standing there waiting for you to respond to a relatively innocuous question about your weekend. I digress.
When it comes to “this is a loss for the discipline,” however, I feel a fire build immediately between my shoulder blades. This narrative I hate. It usually comes from people who do not know me well, or who may have read my academic work and think they know me accordingly. I hate it because what is a discipline, really, other than an artificially bounded and institutionally implicated thing? Why have I allowed a collection of academic writings to contribute to my sense of self? What does it mean to belong to an idea? Let me be indebted to people.
I suppose my point is that “the discipline” is a collection of communities, but that is not what people usually mean when they invoke it. I bristle similarly whenever someone talks about my contribution to “the literature,” as though a selection of thematically similar articles care whether I have situated another article amongst them. Implicated in these critiques is the question of what our research is for. For some, it does indeed seem to be “the literature”: a traditionally white, traditionally male audience of elites who have granted themselves the power to decide whose ideas get to matter.
For me, it is an instrument. At the BISA reception, in an alcove ringed with books at the Birmingham Library, one of my PhD students corners me. He says many kind things, but what sticks with me is: “We [the PhD students in my department] were hoping you might be the next PGR director.” “PGR” is a UK acronym for “postgraduate researcher,” which is roughly synonymous with “PhD students.” The PGR director runs professionalization courses, manages internal funding, and is generally the liaison between PhD students and department leadership.
The hope in his voice when he suggests I might fill this role brings me close to tears, because I actually do want to help early-career folks. This is a degree of desire I do not experience in relation to my research—and yet it is the fact that I have a research agenda that allows me to be in a position to conceivably be PGR director in the first place. If there is anything bittersweet about leaving academia, it is leaving behind the opportunity to work with this incredible group of early-career scholars. If there is anything that affirms my decision in spite of this, it is the casting of my research as the primary loss.
In a more generous reading, an assumption underlies the narrative of loss: that academia could have or should have been otherwise in order to retain me. This is a disregard of my own agency I find off-putting, even though I am sure this is not the speaker’s intention. I do believe academia can be otherwise—I would not speak so loudly about my experiences if I did not. And, there are employment relations that simply do not suit some people, or that are not right for them at particular times and places. Separating that fact out from the structural problems inherent to any employment relation is challenging, and I won’t pretend I’ve untangled it fully for myself. I’ll come back to this.
For now, I offer caution. If you too like or need scripts to make conversation manageable, I urge you to find another one besides “this is a loss for the discipline” for any “you’re leaving!” conversations you might encounter. After all, someone leaving by choice is not really about the discipline, however conceived; it is about what is right for them. If you will miss the person, say so, and say why if you feel comfortable doing so. Let their leaving be about these personal relationships, rather than letting the institution continue to reign supreme.
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[insert something to do with health]
About that untangling.
When I went on the academic job market for the second time, I decided to keep a journal about the experience. I thought it would be a useful way to track what the experience was like in real time, as well as a potential source of future insight into a practice—going on the market again as an assistant professor—for which I couldn’t find any resources beyond a few friends’ stories. Upon deciding to leave academia, I went back and read my early entries. I thought perhaps there might be something there worth sharing.
The short version of how this activity went is that I won’t be sharing most of those entries, or in fact anything substantial from that journal. The short version is that I found a person in my writing who was experiencing something like despair. I have been a prolific journaler all my life and so am used to encountering different, sometimes uncomfortable versions of myself from times past. Typically I try to honor that person and appreciate who she was, what she was learning, and how she was changing. I am a firm believer that self-hatred is unproductive, however warranted it may seem.
And also: it is one thing to know, intellectually, that academia has exacerbated every mental health condition I’ve ever had and given me some new ones besides. It is another to bear witness.
This is the longer version. I chose part of this entry because it is representative without being too painful. By “painful” I mean only that I want to hold this younger version of myself and telegraph her the strength to get out sooner. I debated sharing it at all, but I think it is important to be honest with myself about where I was mentally and emotionally, and the way I do that is via a manufactured sense of accountability to an online audience. I have excerpted for length and removed some proper nouns.
July 25, 2023
Last Friday a close friend told me that he too was going back on the market, which surprised me only a little, but the depth of his moroseness caught me off guard. And it triggered my own, and I was hit with a fatigue so profound I had no choice but to immediately strip off my clothes and go to bed. It was 8 pm and I was so tired, so deeply physically tired, that there was nothing else to do. … I’m already so tired of this.
The mental and the physical are, of course, not nearly as separate as medical science sometimes constructs them to be. When I was in high school, I was diagnosed with intestinal migraines because I would often have such severe abdominal pain that I would throw up. I understand these now as a manifestation of anxiety, but that doesn’t mean the diagnosis was wrong; it was just incomplete. During the autumn of my second year in the UK, I went through a period where I had a minor panic attack every time I left the house, no matter where I was going. The migraines and panic attacks have both stopped, but I do wonder what my brain will come up with next if I do not give it the attention it deserves. The intense fatigue has not repeated itself either, but I wonder.
One of the first themes to emerge in responses to my leaving announcement was health. I may no longer be an academic, but I have always been an incurable discourse analyst, and so I started to pay attention. In the moment when I started telling people, I wasn’t thinking about my decision as health-related. Yet sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones we tell without meaning to. “I hope you can look after your health,” said people who barely know me. “I’m glad you chose your health,” said strangers who nevertheless identified a key aspect of who I am. I tried it myself: “Personal health reasons,” I told a coworker who asked why I was leaving. He accepted this without further questioning—maybe because this narrative is socially acceptable, or maybe because it resonated as true.
Choosing to leave academia didn’t cure my mental health, because that’s not how mental health works and academia is an exacerbator rather than a root cause. Yet I do feel lighter. I do not have days where all I can do is despair. The “you’re leaving!” conversations at BISA take place about a month after my initial announcement, and so “how are you doing?” seems a reasonable place for them to start. My answer is the same as it was in early May: excited. Exhilarated. And yes, light. It is not singular or constant, and honeymoon phases after major life decisions are definitely things. But I allow myself to cautiously believe that this can be a permanent change.
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“You should become a writer.”
When I announced I was leaving academia, someone on Bluesky recommended to me Kelly J. Baker’s Grace Period. A self-described “memoir in pieces,” Baker’s book is a collection of essays she wrote over several years about her choice to take a year off from the academic job market and then, eventually, to leave academia altogether.
Many people from different areas of my life have suggested to me that my next step should be a writing career. Baker is refreshingly candid about how difficult this is. Writing in 2014, she explains that she would need to sell about four pieces a month to match the income she had earned as an adjunct—which, needless to say, was not a lot of money. She stresses the advantages afforded by having a partner with a more stable, well-paying job. When she’s offered an editorial position that comes with a salary, she lets her excitement shine uninhibited on the page, alongside her relief about no longer having to rely so heavily on the cycle of pitches and rejections.
One does not simply become a professional writer. It is hard, hard, hard work. I know this. And I let myself imagine: it is something I want. I know it is not something I can have instantaneously, at least not in a financially lucrative form. But I get a large sheet of paper and smooth it out on the wooden floor of my living room. I am tempted to use a single 8x11” piece pulled from my printer, but I have already spent too much time making myself smaller to fit within what academia says I can be. If you think I am a lot now, just imagine all of me.
I fetch a purple marker—purple for abundance; purple for inner wisdom—and a bag of tealights. The window is open to let in the night air. I think about what I need in order to write; I think about what I can do to make it a practice. As I draw out my dreams in a map of intentions and tasks, I place a tealight by each and light them in sequence. I let them burn.
(Maia Toll writes, “Science is simply daytime’s version of nighttime’s magic.” She writes, “Pay attention to the things that are drawing your attention.”)
If you’re reading this, you are part of the dream I want to realize next—however long it takes, however difficult it proves to be. Let me be indebted to people: thank you for being my weird sense of online accountability as I take a narrative I have always known and choose to tell it. Thank you for believing this dream is something I can be.
