How I “Failed” at Academia

The idea of failure is hard for me. I was a straight-A student who was eager to please my teachers and do everything right. So, naturally, academia was a great fit for me. I bought into all the cultish ideas: that you get a PhD, secure a tenure-track job, write a book, and get tenure, and along the way, you have to sacrifice yourself, your family, where you want to live, your personal life and mental health—all for the sake of the job.

My mentors all told me that if you don’t like where you live, you’ll get used to it. If you don’t like the job, you’ll build up your CV and eventually move somewhere else. If your spouse is unhappy, they’ll get over it. Wanna have kids? You’ll have to wait! Reading this now, five years after I left the academy, I can’t believe how disturbing these thought processes are—and how many of us simply accept them as fact.

I found success as an academic editor and I’m now teaching other current and former faculty to do the same. During a recent group coaching session, we were discussing the transition from academia to editing and the process of developing a new identity as an “editor” or a “business owner” rather than a “professor.” One student shared that she feels guilty for leaving and like there must be something wrong with her because she “couldn’t hack it” in academia.

I thought a lot about this and asked her the following question: Did you fail by leaving academia, or did academia fail you?

Based solely on my own observations and conversations with others, I think the people who are truly happy in academia are so because they’re able to detach themselves from the job. They have personalities that are less emotional and less anxious, and they don’t feel a pressing need to constantly please people—their students, their colleagues, or even their department chair or administrators. They’re content to do the required amount of work and no more, and they don’t feel guilty about, for example, not answering student emails on the weekend, not delivering the “perfect” lecture, or receiving repeated rejections from journals.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing people like this. This sort of even-keeled ability to remain unexcitable or to avoid getting agitated is a quality I’ve often wished I had! Sadly, I don’t. Rather, I’ve learned that I am quite anxious, I do get irritated (particularly by people who don’t respect others), and as a professor I constantly strove (unreasonably) to write lectures that would inspire my students to see the world in a new light—as one of my first students once told me, “Not every class has to be like Robin Williams delivering an impassioned speech while standing on a desk in Dead Poets Society.”

In contrast to these level-headed masters of mood, I think that those of us who struggle in academia do so because we are, by nature, emotional and passionate people. We love academia (or at least the traditional idea of it) and the pursuit of knowledge, and this fire runs deep into our bones. We yearn to inspire and excite our students. We would do anything to help a struggling student succeed (including sacrifice our personal and family time). And we are genuinely hurt when students commit academic dishonesty, or when administrators abandon us, or when colleagues show their true colors, because we feel like it’s a personal offense or somehow means that we’ve done something wrong. In short, we’re unable to detach ourselves, compartmentalize, or embrace the stoicism that’s required to prevent the institution and all of its problems from completely stressing us out.

To return to the question I posed, is this a personal failing or is it systemic? I think it’s normal when you consider leaving academia to initially feel that “there must be something wrong with me” since I can’t handle it, or to wonder, “Why are all my colleagues fine when I’m so miserable?” First, let me be clear: Your colleagues are not fine. They may appear on the outside to be fine, but if that were the case then faculty, especially women, wouldn’t be leaving academia in droves.

Second, the insulated nature of academia means that we can get a kind of Stockholm syndrome—from the inside, everything looks rosy and delightful, because we’ve convinced ourselves that it is. But in reality, it’s a torture chamber. Let’s step outside our identity as professors for a moment and look objectively at the working conditions for faculty:

• No matter how “flexible” people claim that academia is, you work long hours, you’ve probably never had a true vacation that didn’t involve work, and you feel guilty whenever you aren’t working.
• Pay is either stagnant or decreasing. If you’ve been at your institution for a while, you may make less now (in real dollars) than when you started.
• As noted earlier, you’re expected to sacrifice your personal needs and well-being for the “greater good” of the institution and your students, but when the time comes for your administrators to return the favor, you’re left out in the cold (remember during the pandemic when you were expected to move your classes online, practically overnight, and then you were forced to return to the classroom, putting your and your family’s health at risk?).

This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg and says nothing about the abuse, microaggressions, racism, misogyny, and downright misery that so many of us are subjected to on the daily in our academic jobs.

So, let me inquire again: Are you “failing” by leaving academia, or has the system failed you?

It’s so easy to get caught up in the fantasy of living our dream of being a professor, inspiring students, and changing the world. But, very sadly, that is not reality. The academia of today, for many very complex reasons, is not what it was (at least for white men) 50 years ago. If you are a passionate, eager, and emotional person (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), then academia and all of its problems are going to continue to be difficult to bear.

So, rather than continually trying to fit a beautiful, intelligent, talented, inspiring “square peg” into a toxic, abusive, dysfunctional “round hole,” why not take all you have to offer and apply it where it will be truly respected and appreciated? There are so many options out there for you—what you’ve been told about not being able to survive outside academia is yet another cult lie. From “industry” to entrepreneurship, the world is wide open and waiting for you to find the role that will let you take all that passion and energy and care and use it to your full potential.

In the words of Robin Williams in DPS, “I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.” So here I am, a fellow “failure” of academia, standing on my desk, desperately hoping to inspire you to look at the world differently. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

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