Leaving Academia

Recently, after five years, I decided to leave academia.  I have always been a good student, and I will always consider myself a scholar.  However, for many people, academia is simply not a good fit.  Certainly, a significant portion of the blame falls on my personal shortcomings.  I am impatient.  I have a low tolerance for much of the non-sensical bureaucracy that pervades academia (a point to which I will return momentarily).  I have been a student, at the expense of my personal life, personal sanity, and - more recently - personal happiness, for the last twenty-two years.  I am certain that many of my friends and colleagues feel the same way about academia, but I am also certain that many of them will feel my self-imposed exile is because 'I didn't have what it takes,' 'He didn't work hard enough,' or any other number of equally useless and non-descriptive cliches.  What follows are some of my reasons for leaving academia, and they are both indictments on the process by which graduate students gain their supplementary degrees and some suggestions for how my chosen school and department - which, out of professional respect for my colleagues, who have toiled relentlessly with me in the trenches of academic pursuit - will remain safely anonymous.

1).  No accountability for academic advisors.  I'm a big fan of accountability.  I believe that academia does a wonderful job as a meritocratous institution, where name recognition means little and where the quality of one's research, on a general level, ensures steady progress.  However, there is also a dark side to the meritocracy of academia.  It also means that respected scholars, who lack some of the necessary interpersonal skills to interact with students on both the undergraduate and graduate level, are granted tenure with little oversight from their superiors as to their work with their graduate students and undergraduates.  As a result, graduate advisors are given free reign to indulge in academic sadism, ridiculing students who make an honest effort yet are simply not as familiar with either historiography or the historical background of a particular area.  In fact, if I was to describe academia to an incoming graduate student - at least in my jaded perspective - I would term it progressive sadism.  This was not the whole of my personal experience, but I will never forget nor forgive being ridiculed for honest mistakes in front of my friends, colleagues, and professors.  It seems all graduate advisors recall their time in graduate school as a veritable hell on earth, and are intent on recreating that misery in their graduate students.  Again, perhaps this is only my personal experience, but after many a Friday night of leaving the library with a cohort of frazzled graduate students, I feel comfortable in making the above statement.

*Addendum:  my graduate advisor did do many wonderful things for me, granting me access to respected scholars and great friends.  I have little issue with the personal attention, access, and tutelage the advisor gave me.  The person in question was fantastic to me in several different ways, yet they were also unpredictable and inconsistent, which greatly frustrated my academic pursuits.

2).  Academic bureaucracy.  One of the most frustrating things about graduate school, at least for me, was the amount of bureaucracy required to accomplish anything.  For example, to take qualifying exams, students have to get five signatures from their committee members, which either the department or the college promptly loses.  Academics are busy people, and graduate students are much more so - gathering five signatures took some of us a solid month either because meetings were forgotten or any other such nonsense.  Secondly, at least at my university, qualifying exams can only take place in a certain window of time in the term - a two week period.  Given the hectic lives of graduate students and academics, this is virtually impossible.  I challenge anyone outside academia to get five superiors and try to set a meeting in stone in a two-week period, all which they ostensibly communicate with one another to set the course of action regarding the exams.  Furthermore, the bureaucracy makes no sense in the most basic terms.  Due to a personal emergency, I was forced to take a term off of graduate school.  When I returned in the fall, though I had been enrolled in the school for four years, the bureaucracy had no record of my employment at the school, and required me to re-establish residency in the state, though I had lived there now for five years and had previously established residency with the same department.  Simply put, it was a completely miserable experience even though I had the correct paperwork as I was told by both the college and my own department.

Perhaps this is all bitter invective subconsciously designed to placate my own misgivings, but I am of the opinion that graduate school is the single-worst course of preparation for employment in any field of labour.  I made some wonderful friends, I had some wonderful experiences, and I completed my degree.  However, it is a soul-rendering enterprise, designed to drive personal and professional wedges  between those who should be imbued with the camaraderie of shared experience.  Instead - and particularly in the current job market - friends and colleagues are forced to compete on a very personal level for the same jobs year after year after year.  While I expect that is no different than most job competitions, I cannot help but think that academia encourages personal relationships between colleagues only to tear them asunder on a very basic and visceral level.  All this being said, academics serve the world in very specific and meaningful ways - next time you walk into a classroom, try to recall the vast amount of utter nonsense that your professor, teacher, or colleague went to to get to his or her position.  Never underestimate your teachers and professors, and try to remember the personal sacrifices they made to be in a position to teach you.

*Footnote:  these opinions are my own, and in no way represent the opinion of my university, my college, or my department.  My university taught me many things in many different realms of life and work, and I will always remember it fondly for those reasons.