Academia: A Love Story

It’s time for me to share why I left my tenured professor job. It’s been several months as I get started in my new role, but the onboarding mania has settled a little and I have more bandwidth to think and write about this.

I’m not sure who needs to read this, but if you do, I’m glad you’re here.

I love academia. No, I adore it, revere it, am in awe of it, and I figuratively married it for over 20 years. I made sacrifices in my life to be part of it. I left relationships for it. Left behind friends and communities for it. Went into debt for it. And, my actual wife made sacrifices for my academic career.

Academia loved me back until it didn’t. It nurtured me, challenged me, helped me do things I didn’t think I could do, gave me lifelong friendships, let me be myself, gave me skills, and made me want to be a better person.

The thing is, when you’re in love, you sometimes don’t see what is right in front of you. You see what’s happening to you as a natural part of the experience. What you might see as cruel, demeaning, exploitative, thoughtless, and extractive in any other context, you see as reasonable, ordinary, or the happy sacrifices we make for the object of our love.

One day, you might be talking to a friend, and they tentatively and furtively ask “Um, are you doing okay?” It’s a question you didn’t ask yourself, didn’t even think to ask yourself, and almost seems ridiculous. Of course I’m okay – I’m in love! (But what you actually are is asleep in your relationship, dreaming instead of seeing.)

I fell in love with an idealized version of academia that I experienced – A place of exploring ideas and ideals, a place to learn and grow and connect people and thoughts and places to create new and occasionally revolutionary ways of thinking and acting and being. In the beginning it was like that – as an undergrad and then grad student, and even as a new tenure-track professor.

Wake Up

But I slowly started to wake up. I think the first awakening was realizing that academia created and thrived as a system of exploitation.

It was being in a faculty meeting, and realizing there were no adjunct instructors there. I assumed contingent faculty weren’t there because they didn’t want to be — until I found out they had not even been invited!

It was learning that contingent faculty were paid less than minimum wage after all the hours necessary to prepare, teach, and evaluate that 3-hour class for $2500. It was seeing the quality work post-docs were doing, but being compensated with pennies on the dollar.

It was seeing administrators cutting quality in programs while at the same time focused on filling seats with students, who were then receiving a lower-quality education, and those same administrators were getting raises and accolades.

It was seeing legislators cutting funding for universities, while telling administrators they can’t raise tuition, just so they could get reelected on tax-cutting and saving students money.

It was administrators witholding faculty pay raises for multiple years, despite those faculty serving the institution, their students, and the world with excellence. When we finally did get a raise, it was paltry enough to be an insult. And those same administrators found a way to raise their own salaries year over year.

The second awakening was (belatedly) seeing the racial disparities in academia. I saw my students, who were 24% Black and 17% Latinx, and then looked at the faculty that was 98.5% White. I saw the disparity in retention and graduation rates. I saw administrators willfully ignoring these disparities.

And, I (finally) saw what was plainly in front of me: the curriculum I was teaching that largely ignored anything other than the White, patriarchal, colonialist basis of science and psychology. Paraphrasing Guthrie (1976), even the rats in our experiments were white. These things are bad enough, but especially galling in an institution like academia that prides itself in egalitarian and meritocratic ideals.

But, these egalitarian and meritocratic ideals are enclosed within a colonialist worldview that is so hard for us to escape, given that our curriculum normalizes coloniality. This worldview is one of discovery not just for discovery’s sake, but for reaping and exploiting what you find, whether that’s natural or human resources. That worldview says that we are bringing “civilization” to the “uncivilized.”

In academia this often plays out as espousing Euro-centric notions of science, education, culture, epistemology, ontology, and knowledge as if they are the only true notions. Admittedly, we were espousing these notions because they are the only ones we were taught, without bothering to question them.

The third awakening (and the last straw) was when I saw administrators willfully disregard faculty welfare. These administrators had been faculty themselves, and so one would think they would advocate for our welfare. But instead, when we make plain and document our declining welfare and increasing burnout, we are met with silence, gaslighting, or worse yet, derogating our colleagues.

I saw legislators promise to their constituents to eliminate tenure and to fire anyone teaching ideas the legislators found disagreeable. But where was the administration? Did they stand up for tenure and academic freedom because, after all, one would assume they support those ideals? No, instead they were silent, complicit with the forces that would erode the foundation of liberal inquiry and debate.

Time To Go

When you realize one day that the object of your love is not what you thought, and that your goals and ideals are very different, it’s time to take stock and decide whether you want to keep going. When I realized that academia was not loving me back, fulfilling me, and the idealized version I fell in love with was not the reality I was living, it was time to pivot and head in a different direction.

That will be the topic of another missive. Where did I pivot to, and why? Until then…