Hi there folks!
I hope you’re doing well this week, although I have a feeling you might just be trying to keep your head above water right now.
Although I’m no longer on an academic calendar, my clients are!
So I know you probably feel like you’ve got way too many balls in the air, and it’s just a matter of time before they come crashing down.
Burnout was always pervasive, but it really seems like it’s ramped up even more.
I’ve been seeing a lot of anonymous posts on social media from scholars seeking advice and insight about leaving academia.
Here’s an example of one I just saw.
This person wrote:
“Has anyone successfully left academia? I am exhausted and experiencing burnout to the point I haven’t even touched my own research in years.
For context, I am tenured and just completed a sabbatical where I worked on teaching and started to explore a new research area (but in all honesty spent most of my time in therapy trying to overcome my depression and burnout from my workplace).
I have several young children and work at a service-heavy institution with a lot of fighting between faculty members and between faculty and admin.
I have thought about leaving academia as I feel that the amount of time and energy I invest is draining and a 9 to 5 seems very appealing right now.
My pay at a public university is very low in an expensive area. If anyone has navigated this successfully, could you share your experience of the main differences you noticed between the two worlds?”
There are two main things I tend to notice about these types of posts:
The first is that they are always—and I mean always—posted anonymously.
There can be a lot of shame and fear of judgment because academics are always assessing each other’s seeming dedication to the field.
This reflects the notion of teaching and research as a higher calling that justifies significant self-sacrifice that I critiqued in the last episode.
The second thing I notice is that people never seem to know where to start when it comes to thinking about non-academic positions or the general process of leaving academia.
This speaks to the insularity of folks in the higher ed space, which is structured along clear in-group and out-group lines.
So if you don’t know where to start, please join the Facebook group The Professor is Out to locate useful free resources and support from a like-minded community.
I also recommend that you join LinkedIn and start reading some of the posts that appear under the hashtags “leaving academia” or “recovering academics.”
Today I’m going to offer the third installment of my series on leaving academia. The first two episodes really struck a nerve with people, so if you haven’t listened to them yet, please do!
They are Episode #45: Leaving Academia, Part 1: Assess Your Situation and Episode #50: Leaving Academia, Part 2: Challenge Your Beliefs.
When I was writing the last installment, I ended up with way too many beliefs that academics need to question and unlearn to fit into one episode.
Therefore, this time I’m going to share five more powerful, commonly accepted beliefs or assumptions that I think keep academics stuck in place.
When I say stuck, I mean stuck in certain dysfunctional behavior patterns around work and/or stuck in difficult or toxic workplace situations.
I’ll call them out so you can start considering ways to free yourself of them and putting your own needs and priorities first.
The Top 5 Beliefs That Keep People Stuck
So let’s talk about the top 5 beliefs I think keep people stuck in academia even when they’re really unhappy.
Essentially, these are the ideas that keep people from exploring other options that might greatly improve their lives.
#1: Academic jobs are immensely flexible.
The first one is often lauded as the biggest benefit to being an academic, and it is that academic jobs are immensely flexible.
The idea is that you can work whenever you want and set your own hours in ways that are impossible in typical 9-5 jobs.
You can drop off and pick your kids up from school and take them to medical appointments.
You can teach from home or show students a movie when you’re traveling to a conference.
I know you’ve heard it, and it is invoked all the time as a primary reason to stay in the academy.
However, I think there is a “flexibility fallacy” going on here that benefits higher ed institutions far more than workers.
As I’ve talked about, framing research and teaching as a calling promotes a culture of overwork that is justified as providing service to others.
When it’s about helping others, this eliminates the need for workers to place any mental, physical or time-based boundaries around their work.
People who do so may be thought of as less committed.
Although people may have flexibility in their schedules, they also often end up working at night or on weekends to make up for it.
For many of my clients, the very first coaching challenge I give them is to stop working at night, at least some of the time.
There’s a joke I’ve seen online that in academia, you have to work 18 hours a day, but at least you get to choose which 18!
The flexibility of work, combined with no boundaries and the constant pressure to be productive, means people tend to feel guilty when they’re on vacation or doing things for themselves (like self-care, investing in relationships, and hobbies).
Due to the lack of boundaries, people constantly feel like they’re falling behind.
In my opinion, academics carry so much mental and emotional tension about their work that it completely counteracts the benefits that a flexible schedule is supposed to bring.
#2: Academics are only trained to teach and do research (AKA they don’t have transferable skills.)
Now let’s get to the second belief that keeps academics from exploring their options, which is that they are only trained to teach and do research.
In other words, academics have a hard time seeing their own skills as being transferable to other lines of work.
This couldn’t be further from the truth!
But people think this because they have been trained to view their skills as relating only to their very narrow subfields of scholarly expertise, rather than as a broadly applicable set of skills.
So people who study 18th century British poetry, for example, or, as in my case, transnational adoptions of Chinese children, may find it hard to imagine how they can use their training in other ways.
The problem ultimately lies with graduate school, which prepares students for one very specific kind of job—that of research and teaching.
Well, as I’m sure you know, these jobs are no longer plentiful and the vast majority of PhDs do not end up in tenure-track positions.
In grad school you learn a wide range of skills that you can apply in a diverse array of non-academic positions.
Oftentimes it’s more about your skills than your specialized subject knowledge.
The key is to think broadly and holistically about what you have learned and what you bring to the table.
Are you a researcher? Then you’re skilled in collecting and analyzing data and synthesizing information to figure out larger implications.
You probably also are skilled in project management as well as collaboration, if you’ve worked on a team. You have experience with project design, planning, and management.
If you’ve taught and mentored, then you know how to convey information effectively and support the intellectual and social development of others.
You also know how to manage a group!
And perhaps the greatest skill we learn in grad school is critical thinking. Academics are adept at critically evaluating information, identifying logical flaws, and forming well-reasoned arguments.
This skill is essential in problem-solving and decision-making roles across various industries.
It’s important to get away from the idea that you need to be working in your tiny field of scholarly expertise for your work to be meaningful.
Take a look at my own situation.
I utilize most of the skills I honed from decades in the academy on a daily basis.
I provide comments and detailed feedback on my clients’ writing, which utilizes skills I honed as a journal reviewer and mentor for hundreds of students who wrote papers for my classes as well as masters’ theses and dissertations.
I still write all the time for my newsletter and podcasts. It’s gratifying because the results happen much more quickly and reach many more people.
When academics don’t believe they have transferable skills, the often dive into trying to master new fields.
Because they’re in a deficit-mindset, they automatically assume that taking a course in coding or user experience research is the key to getting employed beyond the academy.
Instead, I encourage you to really review the skills you already have and figure out creative ways to apply them more broadly.
I recommend you go to the website Imagine PhD, which is a free online career exploration and planning tool for PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It has a number of guided assessments and resources for thinking beyond the academy.
It’s really not necessary to get more degrees or become experts in new fields before you can make the jump.
So just a reminder: your skills are in great demand and you offer so much to the world with what you already have.
And, what you don’t know, you can still learn and figure out along the way.
#3: The work of teaching and research is somehow separate from capitalism.
So now we get to the third belief that can keep unhappy people stuck in higher ed, which has to do with a moralistic view of money.
And it is that the work of teaching and research is somehow separate from capitalism.
By this I mean that the work of education is often seen as being somehow more noble than work performed in the private sector.
As a sociologist for two decades, I saw how deeply entrenched this ideology was amongst my advisors, peers and colleagues.
But, if we stop to consider it, the logics that undergird academia derive directly from capitalism.
Publish or perish culture. Never feeling like you are enough or are doing enough.
The scarcity of resources and jobs that cause people to make huge sacrifices to their finances, where they live, and their relationships.
As I’ve talked about, time flexibility is an illusion due to the constant pressure to be productive, to be thinking about work, and to feel guilty when you’re not working.
These are all symptoms of the neoliberal university.
Like everything else in fully capitalist societies, universities are increasingly operating like businesses.
Instead of centering the needs of students and fulfilling their mission of providing a high-quality education, they utilize a market logic that prioritizes financial profit above all else.
Think about the fact that the highest-paid workers on campuses are typically football coaches and university presidents who are often former CEOs.
So faculty and staff workloads go up as individualized attention and services for students are reduced.
This is also happening in a broader context where student enrollment is going way down, at least in the United States, so institutions are asking more of their workers without giving more.
And, as a result, the demands keep getting higher!
I’ve been seeing lots of discussion in various academic social media groups about workload increases.
One person stated that her college’s administration just unilaterally shifted the faculty teaching load from a 3-2 to a 4-4 or even to a 5-5 if faculty can’t demonstrate enough research productivity!
These kinds of tactics undermine the mission and purpose of higher ed and devalue the contributions of the people who keep it running.
My point here is that academia, as a system, is just as imbued with capitalist practices as any other and therefore shouldn’t be a primary reason to stay.
#4: I’ve invested so much in becoming an academic, how could I leave now??
So I realize that my fourth and fifth beliefs are completely intertwined and have to do with the sunk cost fallacy of academia.
The two beliefs are, “I’ve invested so much in becoming an academic, so how could I leave now?” and “If I leave academia, I’ve somehow failed.”
So let’s start with the first one.
Few other career paths so completely conflate the work with the self or require such immense personal investment of time, financial resources, and emotional energy.
Giving up the academic dream is so hard in part because it can feel like you’re throwing all of this effort away, even when the situation has become unsustainable.
That’s a big part of the grief people feel when they work so hard only to find themselves miserable in their job or program.
And they often feel extra guilty because they’ve sacrificed so much and asked others to do so as well, such as moving partners and children out to the middle of nowhere.
Last year I talked to a postdoctoral fellow who was really unhappy in her position.
She told me that the pressure of grad school had caused her to undergo a series of mental health crises, which had also destroyed her marriage.
She was now a single mom of two making low wages in an incredibly high cost-of-living area.
Throughout our conversation she expressed how as a first-gen Black working-class student, she was made to feel like she didn’t belong at her elite university.
She didn’t believe her work was respected and she rejected the lack of work-life balance of her famous advisors.
Despite this, she was unwilling to leave because she was afraid she could never return and that it all would have been a waste.
So sadly, this young woman with so much promise to make an impact on society was staying within an unfriendly system she had committed to long ago before she knew anything about it.
I think a lot of folks can probably relate to her story.
I want to start normalizing the idea that people should feel like they have the option to leave at any stage.
This is including—and perhaps, especially—during grad school if you’re unhappy or you just want to do something else.
For example, there was one woman in my graduate cohort who was a few years older than most of us so she had more life experience.
Within three months she realized that grad school was not what she wanted to do with her life, and she walked away from the program.
At the time I didn’t really get it, but now I applaud her for knowing herself so well and valuing her own needs above things like external expectations, social status or fear of judgment.
#5: If you don’t stay in academia, you’ve somehow failed.
So this relates to the fifth and final belief, which I’ve already shared: “If you don’t stay in academia, you’ve somehow failed.”
I think that this is the main reason why people don’t share about their desires to leave very openly.
There can be a distinct feeling from others that you’ve sold out, that you weren’t dedicated enough, you weren’t productive enough or you didn’t want it enough.
One person I talked to who left her faculty position for personal reasons was worried that people would think she left because she wasn’t going to get tenure, which was untrue.
Let me just say that once you’re out of academia, it doesn’t really matter what academics think of you.
What matters is what YOU think of you! And your job is to take care of yourself.
But I’ve seen first-hand how tough it is for die-hard academics to relate to the idea that someone would not want this career anymore.
It can make many folks deeply uncomfortable because it can cause them to take a look at their own life choices.
When I quit my job, I emailed pretty much everyone in my department personally to let them know I was leaving.
And I was surprised that two people I was very friendly with for years never responded. I never heard from them again, and I assume that they just didn’t know what to say.
I do think it’s telling that the only person on my campus who congratulated me and wished me well in the future was the HR person!
Summing Everything Up
I’ve given five of the most commonly-accepted beliefs that keep unhappy folks from exploring their options outside of the academy. They are:
#1: Academic jobs are immensely flexible.
#2: Academics don’t have transferable skills
#3: The work of teaching and research is separate from capitalism.
#4: I’ve invested so much in becoming an academic, so how could I leave now?
#5: If you don’t stay in academia, you’ve somehow failed.
If you’re listening to this, you may have the nagging suspicion that there must be a better way.
But these beliefs make it easy to justify staying in a bad situation.
You might be telling yourself that it’s too late to change direction or that you wouldn’t be able to find another, more compatible professional path.
I’m living proof that that’s not true!
AND, I’m also proof that it’s possible to find meaningful work that uses my academic skillset while having greater impact than what I could do as a professor.
I’m not someone who encourages people to start taking the perspective of “a job is just a job” unless that’s what you really want.
We really have put so much blood, sweat and tears into our training.
So my current mission statement about work is: “I want to do meaningful work aligned with my core values that enhances, but doesn’t define, my identity or self-worth.”
And I do believe I’ve achieved that.
Finally, you may have heard of the Harvard Study on Happiness, which the longest ongoing research study of what makes for a happy and meaningful life.
There’s a lot to this study, but basically, researchers have concluded that it’s not career achievement that determines happiness—although of course that helps.
Instead, THE most important determinant of happiness is the quality of your relationships.
So if you are currently in a professional situation that is robbing you of the ability to enjoy healthy, strong relationships with yourself and others, that’s something you should not ignore.
And, luckily, that’s also something within your power to change.
I’ll be back in a future episode to talk about how to manage the tough emotions and identity crisis that many people struggle with when they decide to leave academia.
I’ll talk to you next time!
