This week, I am returning to the Conscious Uncoupling series—see my motivation in the first paragraph after the break.
If you are new here, or just want a refresher: In her book Conscious Uncoupling, Katherine Woodward Thomas lays out a program in five steps for going through a divorce in a thoughtful and productive way. I started this newsletter in April 2023by attempting to apply these five steps to my departure from academia. I also hoped to help create some nuanced conversation and community around those struggling with their relationship to academia, whether they are leaving or just ready to re-negotiate terms.
Previous installments in the series include:
CU #1: Getting a Divorce from Academia (intro)
CU #2: Academic Fairytales (chapter 1: shame, blame, and the failure of love)
CU #3: Shame on You (chapter 1: shame, blame, and the failure of love)
CU #4: Eulogy for my Office (step 1: find emotional freedom)
CU #5: Are you my Academic Mother? (step 2: reclaim your power and your life)
CU #6: Who is to Blame When Someone Leaves Academia? (step 2: reclaim your power and your life)
CU #7: Who’s Fault is it if I’m an Asshat? (step 2: reclaim your power and your life)
CU #8: Who am I without the Doing? (step 3: break the pattern, heal your heart)
This week is my last week of my faculty appointment, and as of Sept 1st I’m officially divorced from academia. It is a bittersweet moment, to say the least. We will get to the bitter soon, but the “sweet” part is where I want to linger today.
This instinct to seems to be in accordance with the spirit of Conscious Uncoupling. In step 4: become a love alchemist, Thomas encourages the reader not to forget the love that once was:
You’re invited to purposefully protect the love that brought you and your former partner together and honor all you’ve co-created . . . one or both of you may have made mistakes . . . but that doesn’t mean what you had was untrue or held no value.
Last week I wrote about my love for what academia and I co-created—the discovery and study of a group of proteins. That research project was the outcome of a relationship I already had with academia; what about the love that brought me and academic science together in the first place? I don’t think I’ve written about how I first got into Biology, so let’s dive in.
The meet cute
I fell in love with academia in the blink of an eye. At least, that’s how I remember things, decades later and in the twilight moments of my professorship.
Like many teenagers, I struggled with perfectionism and self-consciousness. I often used books as an escape from my pimpled reality, reading as much as I could get away with, some favorites over and over. Based on my journals at the time, I was also pretty focused on getting good grades. But I don’t recall being especially engaged in any of my classes, and I didn’t see myself as an academic at all. I was planning on a career in interior design until things changed one day in Biology class.
My high school Biology teacher, Mr. Smith, was a stolid, faux-grumpy, man. He was an instructor of the old school, disinclined to encourage anything that caused him to deviate from the lesson plan—including questions. In his picture from my freshman yearbook, he’s stonily looking away from the camera and appears to be smoking. (That does not seem possible. Perhaps he’s holding a pen!) He must have retired within the next few years, as he isn’t mentioned in the faculty section of my senior yearbook.
This unlikely character ended up providing the experience that would turn me onto Biology. Each night, like the dutiful student I was, I would do the assigned reading in our textbook. At this point in the school year, we were learning about the layers of the plant cell. Stacked like the layers of a poorly assembled birthday cake, they create both structural and functional strata of the leaf: epidermis, palisade mesophyll, spongy mesophyll, then epidermis again. The illustration probably looked a lot like this:
This image must have still been in my mind’s eye as class began, and we were instructed to look at the cross-section of actual plant leaves under a microscope. I’m not sure if we made the slides ourselves or if they were pre-made stock histology slides. Honestly, I don’t remember anything about that class up until the instant that I looked through the eyepieces of the microscope. An electrical charge ran through my body as I realized that the magnified image looked just like the illustration I’d studied the night before. There was the solid wall of rectangular palisade cells pressed up against each other at the top of the leaf. There was the lacy arrangement of spongy mesophyll below. There were the flattened cells of epidermis, punctuated by small round guard cells.
And that was really it. After that experience, I knew I wanted to become a scientist. Mr. Smith, crabby as he was, had served as my personal ferryman and guided me across to a new understanding of myself and my purpose.
Academic love
What remains the most memorable about this experience is my excitement and surprise over the coherence between what I’d seen represented in a book and what I was seeing with my own eyes. Even though I recall almost nothing else about that class (or, frankly, much of high school in general), I remember that thrill perfectly, because I have felt it so many times since. But what was so exciting (or surprising) about that?
In high school, I hadn’t fallen in love with plants yet. I never gave a thought to the quiet power of plant roots, strong enough to break concrete. I didn’t appreciate that they spin sunlight into sugar, create food out of thin air. When I got so excited at seeing with my own eyes what someone else had previously recorded, I wasn't applying or analyzing or even asking questions; I was operating at the very bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
I didn’t fall in love with science in Biology class that day in high school, I fell in love with the academic worldview. I’d seen that there is a truth underlying the structure and the function of the world, a universal truth that could be observed and recorded by others—and that I could verify this truth myself. To my mind, this is the academic way of interacting with and understanding the world.
Academic versus applied
Let’s compare this idea, that academics is at its essence comparing our understanding of some aspect of the world to that of others, to these, found online:
1. ADJECTIVE [ADJ n]
Academic is used to describe things that relate to the work done in schools, colleges, and universities, especially work that involves studying and reasoning rather than practical or technical skills.
2. ADJECTIVE [ADJ n]
Academic is used to describe things that relate to schools, colleges, and universities.
3. ADJECTIVE
Academic is used to describe work, or a school, college, or university, that places emphasis on studying and reasoning rather than on practical or technical skills.
4. ADJECTIVE
Someone who is academic is good at studying.
5. ADJECTIVE
You can say that a discussion or situation is academic if you think it is not important because it has no real effect or cannot happen.
6. COUNTABLE NOUN
An academic is a member of a university or college who teaches or does research.
Most of these definitions of academic are fairly circular (yes, something is often academic if it involves an academic institution). But I think it’s helpful to separate the institution of academia from the academic mindset, orientation, or way of seeing the world. I don’t think everything that happens at a university is academic, and I think plenty goes on outside these institutions that fit my definition above.
Also, I had to laugh at “emphasis on studying and reasoning rather than technical or practical skills” and “not important because it has no real effect or cannot happen.” I find this funny-ironic because I’ve always been a basic biologist, asking fundamental questions about how biological systems work, adding to our knowledge of how things already are, rather than bending those systems to human use. I often felt that the more applied a line of inquiry got, the less interested I was in pursuing it. And this deeply academic orientation is actually one part of why I left academia.
I didn’t have too much trouble convincing colleagues or funding agencies that what we were doing had importance; the scientific establishment gets the value of basic science, at least to some degree. But I became less and less able to interest students in the work. Not that they didn’t appreciate basic work—but they were not motivated by it. They wanted to help change the world, to fix things, to cure cancer and feed the world and protect the rain forest. I found this admirable and did my best to teach into that interest. But I could see the writing on the wall. Academic love, or even just academic motivation or interest, was waning.
When I began to suspect that the very world view that attracted me to Biology was losing its power for the next generation of scientists, I also began to suspect that it was time for me to exit. That moment of clarity in my high school Biology class, a moment of true academic delight, carried me so far and for so long. But, in the end, my academic love wasn’t enough to keep me in relationship with the institution of academia.
Discussion Section
How did you come to your academic pursuit?
Do you find students to be more motivated by application recently? How do you think this will affect academia in general?
As someone who dropped biology as soon as I was able at High School, I found this post very interesting. Thank you.
One of my research areas is on public and parental perceptions of higher education and one of things I've looked at is the divide between people who think about higher education in transactional terms (butt in seat=degree=job) and those who think of it in transformational terms (college= become better critical thinker=become more interesting=have a passion=get a job). There is a really sharp divide along political affiliations and I am very certain that influences how students think about the idea of learning for learnings sake.