CU #1: Getting a Divorce from Academia

Conscious uncoupling from the ivory tower, Part 1

I have been dating, living with, or married to my husband for more than 30 years. We met in college; he was my first serious boyfriend. I don’t have much experience with romantic breakups.

So, I’m feeling especially out of my element as I navigate leaving another one of the most significant relationships in my life. In just a few months I will resign my position as Professor of Biology at a private midwestern university (go ahead and Google it, I’ll wait).

It’s taken a while to get to here. I went public with my plans to quit my job a year ago. I’d made the decision to quit about 6 months before that. And even that decision evolved over many years. Academia and I have been growing apart for a very long time.

Given the time I put into that relationship, I suppose it makes sense that it is also taking some time to leave it. I have been on the tenure track for 15 years. Before that, I spent 7 years training as a postdoctoral fellow, 6 years getting a PhD, and 4 years as an undergraduate. I knew I wanted to be a professor in high school and spent my junior and senior years working on small research projects at a local university. All told, that’s 34 years preparing to be, and then being, a professor.

Any long, deep relationship will shape your worldview and your sense of self. During my three-decade relationship with academia, I developed a lot of ideas about how to be a scientist, an academic, and a professor. I absorbed messages from academics around me about myself, science, universities, and students. I judged other people’s work (and other people, I’m ashamed to say) according to the spoken and unspoken rules of my field.

Of course, the analogy I’m using here (being a professor = having a relationship with academia) only holds up so far—the relationship is entirely one-sided. As Tressie McMillan Cottom reminds us, the institution cannot love us, no matter how much we love it.

But I still think this can be a useful framing.

For example, as I was starting to think about leaving my job as if I was getting a divorce from it, I came upon the idea of “conscious uncoupling.” I’ll dig into the history of this concept in later posts—but to summarize, it is a framework for a thoughtful, gentle, and self-aware divorce. It was popularized in 2014 by Gwyneth Paltrow as she split from her husband Chris Martin. The best-known book on the subject is “Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After” by Katherine Woodward Thomas.

“We aspire to have a life-affirming breakup or divorce characterized by the sincere effort to leave each other and all involved well, healthy, and whole, and enhanced by the love that’s been shared, rather than diminished or damaged by the way the relationship ended.”
—The Conscious Uncoupling Creed, K. W. Thomas.

The GOOPiness of it all notwithstanding, I find the idea of “conscious uncoupling” aspirational with respect to leaving academia. As I begin to process the past few years, it feels right and good to attempt:

1. to understand why I am quitting while also acknowledging why I was drawn to academia in the first place, and why I stayed as long as I did.

2. to make conscious what was unconscious about my relationship with my job, with science, and with the scientific industrial complex.

I see “conscious uncoupling” as a mindset or framework from which to approach the big questions facing me now. How has academia shaped my life, my decision-making, and my understanding of myself? How can I untangle what is me and what I added (or subtracted) because I thought it fit (or didn’t fit) my idea of a professor? Now that I’m leaving—what will my identity be once I’m no longer a professor? How can I continue to serve others without the trifecta of teaching, research, and service?

If these questions sound at all interesting to you, I hope you’ll stick around. Over the next few posts, I’ll be looking at the five steps outlined in “Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to a Happily Even After” and asking how they apply to academics who want to get a divorce from academia.

Also, please note: the goals of this newsletter are broad. I define “unprofessoring” as the deliberate process of dismantling the academic self. This can mean quitting, of course—that’s the fastest route to uncoupling from the ivory tower, and the route that I took. But quitting is a singular privilege, not available or desirable to everyone.

Unprofessoring is not just for those who have quit faculty positions. It can also mean finding ways to focus on aspects of faculty jobs that are compelling, while letting other aspects recede into the background. It can mean taking on leadership or administrative roles that bring joy, or it can mean shedding leadership or administrative roles that destroy your will to get up in the morning and check your email. It can also be something more subtle, something that no one would know from the outside—unhooking yourself, your ego, your sense of mission and accomplishment, and your most essential energies from the racist, patriarchal, capitalistic, industrial complex that is academia—and deciding for yourself how to deploy your power and your energy.

So, in this newsletter, we will discuss what it means to work in a structure built by other people in another time. We will dissect what academia asks of us and what we end up giving it. And we will do all of this without ignoring the enormous passion and love that we have for our subjects, our students, and our communities.

Here is the plan for now:

• Essays will generally come out on Mondays. As mentioned above, the first will be a series of essays that use the book “Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to a Happily Even After” as a jumping off point for a conversation about leaving academia.

• The Compost, a list of links and resources for your own process of unprofessoring, will come out every week or two, on Fridays.

• Eventually, I hope to roll out other features like a book club and discussion threads. Other ideas are welcome!

There is a lot to discuss. I hope you’ll join in!

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Some housekeeping, copied from the welcome email that you’ll get if you subscribe:

• Unprofessoring is for everyone who wants to reconsider or recalibrate their relationship to academia. If you have left, if you are contemplating a departure, if you are staying; if you are deliriously happy, unreservedly miserable, or somewhere in-between; even if you are just beginning to consider graduate school or a faculty position—in all cases, this newsletter is for you.

• Please be as active in comments and discussion threads as you like. Conversation is encouraged—but not required. There are no participation grades!

• Let’s keep it classy.

• Contact me at unprofessoring@substack.com with any questions, concerns, thoughts, and especially with suggestions for topics or books.