Are you interested in comments about leaving graduate school, or are you defining “leaving academia” solely as having left employment? I haven’t read the other parts of this series yet so I apologize you’ve already addressed this.
Jun 11, 2023·edited Jun 11, 2023Liked by Liz Haswell
Thank you for your quick reply. I apologize that mine is not as equally quick. I have been trying to compose something succinct rather than my usual emotionally charged rambling on this subject. Though I do not doubt that quitting after one MA in another department and parts of a few chapters into my PhD dissertation was right for me, I’m still not always at peace with having had to quit. I don’t like quitting things, ever.
I yearn for our academic culture to embrace transitions as moving towards something new that better nurtures our interests, instead of moving away from academia, i.e., quitting.
Well, I mean I _WAS_ moving toward something new that better nurtured me, and I’m happier because I did, but I definitely had to stop pursuing an academic career in order to do so. I had been told that I could have both, and had seen people who seemed to have both. I resent the lie that I was told. I resent having to choose, though I know I made the right choice for myself.
I think resentment is understandable. The challenge, as Mary says above, is to think of time in academia the way you'd think about time trying out a new way of cooking or a type of workout at the gym. You get something out of it, and maybe you stick with it or maybe you don't. Either way, no judgement. But we make that so hard by the way we valorize staying! I am definitely still working through it.
I left as an assistant professor straight out of graduate school, hired at the same time as another department member (associate professor) with the intention to form a research team. The other person left suddenly the year I was up for tenure and my situation was judged as insufficient to maintain the research side of things on my own. Talk about stress. The teaching side was not enough to make up for this (I don't think I was a stellar instructor), so I had to leave. In retrospect, my life turned out better for my having left academe.
I held a grudge against my counterpart for a long time, but recently learned they were no longer living so I'm letting it go.
Very unfortunate. When i was in undergrad, I knew of a talented lecturer who committed suicide, a semester after teaching us. Its completely not an employment category that is inducive to a balanced and happy life.
Unfortunately, most universities siphon alot of the student fees into wasteful areas, and charge exorbitantly, I think with the recent news about how student debt has been crippling the younger generation, and leaving them without high paying skills or career opportunities, many of the younger generation are challenging the idea of attending university at all. Hopefully this trend continues, and governments will hold a candle to these corrupt institutions. Unfortunately these things take a long time.
That sounds . . . Awful. There is already so much going on during tenure, then to have yours attached to the presence of someone else, something you truly have no control over . .. ugh. I’m glad you are moving past that experience and onto bigger and better things!
Liz, I just discovered a podcast and thought you and the readers here my be interested. It is called Going Through It, and basically is a series of interviews about big life decisions, how does one get there, go through it, and what it looks like afterwards. I've only listened to one episode and very much enjoyed it so far.
A lot of the issues that are referenced stem from the foundation that the university system is broken from an economic perspective. Until we can fix these economic issues, we will continue to have a poor experiences for graduates and lecturers.
1. In a private market, companies that produce poor product and service are defunded in real-time through 'no sales'. This doesn't occur in universities, bad teachers are employed, and their salaries are maintained based on research output rather than teaching and educational excellence.
2. Highschool graduates are unknowing duped into funding and financially supporting study programs that have no connection or economic return in the real job market. There is no due diligence or market efficiency here. Just 16, 17yo's getting duped.
3. Research output at a university is a pyramid scheme that relies on professors or group leaders that recruit feepaying, masters, phd students that produce a lot of the research output, so that the professor can apply for more grants to do future research. Take away this large supporting base of labour and the groupleader is unlikely to be able to produce the preliminary data to support a competitive grant application.
4. The funding success rate of many major grant programs sits at around 10-15% annually. Which means 90-85% of academics miss out on funding each year. After successively missing out on funding 2-3 years in a row, your career is pretty much over, as your CV and track record is also taken into account for future grant applications.
In summary the economics of academia is totally broke. Until its fixed there will be alot of pain, and history repeats itself.
Fantastic!! I'd be very very interested in what the evidence, financial reports, and other data suggests about this. I can't imagine there is a lot of reporting on this, or if the information is out there, it might be obscured due to its incriminating nature.
“highly salaried administrators are the class of people getting almost all the spoils of the contemporary higher ed system, because that happens to be true, and in the most extreme sort of way. While full-time faculty salaries have barely budged from where they were a half century ago — they have risen one-quarter as fast as the wages of the average American worker over this time frame — university presidents are paid on average three times as much now as they were then”
The professors don’t necessarily have to rely on graduate students for research production - in fact, I would have been thrilled to have had the chance to produce any of that research because it would have meant someone was examining and helping me improve and practice how I did research, but anyway- they can just rely on them to teach the bulk of introductory and other pre-requisite-for-something-else classes for them and do all the grading and email answering and office-hours keeping that goes along with that for the typically larger class sizes (and thus more of those types of work and time and energy suckage) that those types of classes usually have, so that the professors are more free to focus on their own research and publishing and teaching the more advanced courses (and telling graduate students that “it’s all about time management” and that graduate students shouldn’t abandon “work-life balance”- bitter? Me? Oh, never. Hahahahahaha.)
This is a terrific article! It resonated with my experience as a tenure-track professor who left academia for start-ups then corporate, and now (while riding out an aggressive non-compete) goes back to locum at multiple universities. I've seen academia from both the inside and outside perspective, and agree with the ambivalence between "Yes, its your fault" and "No, its not your fault."
Some stray thoughts:
* In my narrow niche (faculty at veterinary medical schools), we don't have some of the familiar problems that plague wider academia, such as near impossibility of attaining a FTE, let alone tenured, job after grad school. In fact, most of the vet schools are constantly losing faculty and opportunities abound for those with the right skills interested in higher ed.
* The problem is most DVM academics can be paid multiples of their university salary in the private sector, where money is based on case fees, often working fewer hours. I imagine this is similar to the dynamic in human medicine. This dynamic intersects with the next trend...
* Like human medicine, vets are often saddled with 6-figure educational debt that rivals a mortgage ($250k+ is common). Unlike human medicine, the pay is not commensurate. While some specialties in some niches will do very well, most vets earn less than family practice physicians (who notoriously protest how underpaid they are). As individual rational actors, they are going to do what they can to maximize their income for the amount of effort expended.
* The old paradigm of research-heavy faculty that offset some or all of their salary (and ideally departmental indirect costs) with large federal grants is crumbling. Very few DVMs with any significant amount of teaching or clinic commitment (which is necessary to keep the CVM running) will have a real shot at substantial grants when evaluated by panels, even with the requisite graduate training, post-docs, and FTE%, and resources. DVMs simply aren't taken seriously the way MDs--even without a PhD!--are. And of course, its a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby people who have previously obtained funding are presumed to know what they're doing, and have an easier time getting more, while those who were denied grants have an increasingly hard time convincing agencies to fund them
* As the loss of grant dollars manifests, state revenues are drying up. The vast majority of US vet schools are public and tend to be associated with land grant universities. Decades ago, state legislatures subsidized the massive blood red balance sheets under the idea that it was a public service to train vets who protect the food supply, contribute to research, and work in public health. However, >75% of vets now practice in small animal medicine, which has arguably less public impact than those other sectors. As state budgets have become crunched, vet schools are often on the chopping block, viewed as a luxury
* Vet schools have responded by increasing tuition to make up for shortfalls (again, $50-65k a year without living expenses is not uncommon), which fuels the points above about debt load and salary demands.
* Academic governance remains as dysfunctional as ever. Despite the fact that grants are few and far between, many are pushed into higher research FTEs and unattainable publication quotas. Vets frequently have to teach dozens of hours of lecture a semester plus smaller group seminars, while also frequently contributing clinical and committee service. Many department heads and deans are unable or unwilling to listen to faculty who feel torn in 20 directions without any prioritization.
* Budgeting is often dysfunctional. Basic supplies might go unpurchased, but huge sums of money will be spent foolishly. I have worked at schools where I was locuming (at top $) to cover a faculty member who was ALSO out earning $ to locum at the institution I had just come from. Totally bananas.
* At the same time, I don't think a lot of vets in academia who have never left really realize the perks of what they do have. At least in my world of pathology (and a lot of the other specialties), the daily workload in a university hospital is a tiny fraction of what it would be in a corporate lab or private specialty hospital. They also usually have <50% clinic FTE. They confuse "I'm stressed because of dysfunction and poor leadership/governance" with "I can't believe how hard I work on clinics," then leave for the private sector (where they inevitably get disillusioned).
Some of these problems are deeply structural and won't be solved short of big changes in state budgets, federal loan policy, and norms/mores in academia. However, some solutions I think would be incredibly helpful would include:
- Let people pick one or two areas to excel in, rather than demand everyone be a triple threat contributing large amounts to teaching, research, and service that greatly exceed 100%
- A focus on flexibility in where, how and when people work. Perhaps hybrid faculty positions shared between institutions may become a thing.
- Admit that at most vet schools, NIH and NSF grants are not going to pay the bills. Stop judging promotion and tenure on that unrealistic metric.
- Find new business models and sustainable ways to pay faculty better, more competitive wages. In the medical sector, this would require a better focus on the basics of running a business, instead of hemorrhaging money on waste and poor scheduling.
- Work on improvements in really basic logistics. I have seen 9-12 month delays in basic procurement requests. My locum pay has been screwed up about half the time because admin assistants are just sloppy and there are no guardrails. These are unacceptable "self-owns" that reduce the efficiency of a university and don't cost much money to improve
Your paragraph that begins “Academic governance remains as dysfunctional as ever” made mw think that being DVM faculty sounded much like being a Humanities grad student.
Thanks for linking to my article :). That joke about the business cards is golden (and a fantastic hook for this post, by the way!). So much of this resonates. I began to feel, near the end of my tenure, like I was turning into a bad person -- a troublemaker, someone who always focusing on the negative. But when you pour heart and soul into your work and the institution ignores you, or even explicitly devalues you or your discipline, I think anger can be a sign of self-respect. It would be far worse to internalize someone else's narrative about you or your expertise being unimportant, right?
One example: after winning a major grant to launch an oral history podcast, I wrote a press release about the project. While discussing revisions with colleagues in the communications office, I bristled at the boilerplate language about the college that typically runs at the bottom of every press release. This was a story about excellence in the arts and humanities, but the college was going to run a press release touting its excellence in STEM. That really bothered me, and I think it should have.
I remember someone telling me about her divorce years ago, how she at one point told her then-husband, "You're turning me into an angry person!" This is an interesting twist on assigning blame, because sometimes it's true that we behave badly in an unhealthy relationship or a toxic work environment. But that anger or negativity isn't always who we really are, and it isn't always possible to go fix something within ourselves to make the situation better. I think this can be really hard to separate out when thinking about personal responsibility for uncoupling. Are we simply stuck in our own shit? Victims of our own cognitive distortions (personalization, black-and-white thinking, mind-reading, magnification and minimization)? Or are we miserable because our gut is telling us that something is not right at the core, that we cannot rely on mutual trust or affection, and that it will always be difficult to maintain our self-respect if we stay? As far as my relationship with my former employer goes, I'm confident that the latter was true.
Sorry to keep going on, but one thing that might add an interesting wrinkle to your analysis is peer influence. Sometimes there are epidemics of workplace ailments because people keep reading about it or keeping hearing about it from peers. I think COVID has been a powerful influence on all of us. So many people were starting over, questioning everything, making major life changes -- impossible to ignore that as part of the decision-making scale?
This is so interesting to me. I was not a good person as a professor, especially in the year before tenure. I actually have said before that everyone gets a pass for weird/bad behavior during that pre-tenure year because it’s so stressful--maybe in the hopes that I could give myself a pass for the same. I think there are several parts of my relationship to that job that were replaying family dynamics, and I just turned into a child again, and I didn’t behave well. But I’ve always blamed myself entirely, so I like thinking about the situation in other ways and about how the whole thing is so dehumanizing.
Are you interested in comments about leaving graduate school, or are you defining “leaving academia” solely as having left employment? I haven’t read the other parts of this series yet so I apologize you’ve already addressed this.
I'm interested in all comments! I left very late, so would be extra interested in this perspective.
Thank you for your quick reply. I apologize that mine is not as equally quick. I have been trying to compose something succinct rather than my usual emotionally charged rambling on this subject. Though I do not doubt that quitting after one MA in another department and parts of a few chapters into my PhD dissertation was right for me, I’m still not always at peace with having had to quit. I don’t like quitting things, ever.
I yearn for our academic culture to embrace transitions as moving towards something new that better nurtures our interests, instead of moving away from academia, i.e., quitting.
Well, I mean I _WAS_ moving toward something new that better nurtured me, and I’m happier because I did, but I definitely had to stop pursuing an academic career in order to do so. I had been told that I could have both, and had seen people who seemed to have both. I resent the lie that I was told. I resent having to choose, though I know I made the right choice for myself.
I think resentment is understandable. The challenge, as Mary says above, is to think of time in academia the way you'd think about time trying out a new way of cooking or a type of workout at the gym. You get something out of it, and maybe you stick with it or maybe you don't. Either way, no judgement. But we make that so hard by the way we valorize staying! I am definitely still working through it.
I love this framing, and I feel like youngsters are embracing it more and more. It's hard for me to think this way, though!
I left as an assistant professor straight out of graduate school, hired at the same time as another department member (associate professor) with the intention to form a research team. The other person left suddenly the year I was up for tenure and my situation was judged as insufficient to maintain the research side of things on my own. Talk about stress. The teaching side was not enough to make up for this (I don't think I was a stellar instructor), so I had to leave. In retrospect, my life turned out better for my having left academe.
I held a grudge against my counterpart for a long time, but recently learned they were no longer living so I'm letting it go.
Very unfortunate. When i was in undergrad, I knew of a talented lecturer who committed suicide, a semester after teaching us. Its completely not an employment category that is inducive to a balanced and happy life.
Unfortunately, most universities siphon alot of the student fees into wasteful areas, and charge exorbitantly, I think with the recent news about how student debt has been crippling the younger generation, and leaving them without high paying skills or career opportunities, many of the younger generation are challenging the idea of attending university at all. Hopefully this trend continues, and governments will hold a candle to these corrupt institutions. Unfortunately these things take a long time.
NGL, watching where the money goes at a university can make you throw up in your mouth a little bit.
That sounds . . . Awful. There is already so much going on during tenure, then to have yours attached to the presence of someone else, something you truly have no control over . .. ugh. I’m glad you are moving past that experience and onto bigger and better things!
Liz, I just discovered a podcast and thought you and the readers here my be interested. It is called Going Through It, and basically is a series of interviews about big life decisions, how does one get there, go through it, and what it looks like afterwards. I've only listened to one episode and very much enjoyed it so far.
That sounds very apropro! Thank you for the suggestion.
I did listen to a few episodes of "Quitted", which held a lot of meaning for me. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/quitted/id1607194395.
A lot of the issues that are referenced stem from the foundation that the university system is broken from an economic perspective. Until we can fix these economic issues, we will continue to have a poor experiences for graduates and lecturers.
1. In a private market, companies that produce poor product and service are defunded in real-time through 'no sales'. This doesn't occur in universities, bad teachers are employed, and their salaries are maintained based on research output rather than teaching and educational excellence.
2. Highschool graduates are unknowing duped into funding and financially supporting study programs that have no connection or economic return in the real job market. There is no due diligence or market efficiency here. Just 16, 17yo's getting duped.
3. Research output at a university is a pyramid scheme that relies on professors or group leaders that recruit feepaying, masters, phd students that produce a lot of the research output, so that the professor can apply for more grants to do future research. Take away this large supporting base of labour and the groupleader is unlikely to be able to produce the preliminary data to support a competitive grant application.
4. The funding success rate of many major grant programs sits at around 10-15% annually. Which means 90-85% of academics miss out on funding each year. After successively missing out on funding 2-3 years in a row, your career is pretty much over, as your CV and track record is also taken into account for future grant applications.
In summary the economics of academia is totally broke. Until its fixed there will be alot of pain, and history repeats itself.
"Research output at a university is a pyramid scheme" . . . I'm writing a post about this right now!
Fantastic!! I'd be very very interested in what the evidence, financial reports, and other data suggests about this. I can't imagine there is a lot of reporting on this, or if the information is out there, it might be obscured due to its incriminating nature.
Posted today, but not really supported by any data. I did come across this blogpost that might interest you, though: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/academia-as-multi-level-marketing-scam. Here's a quote:
“highly salaried administrators are the class of people getting almost all the spoils of the contemporary higher ed system, because that happens to be true, and in the most extreme sort of way. While full-time faculty salaries have barely budged from where they were a half century ago — they have risen one-quarter as fast as the wages of the average American worker over this time frame — university presidents are paid on average three times as much now as they were then”
The professors don’t necessarily have to rely on graduate students for research production - in fact, I would have been thrilled to have had the chance to produce any of that research because it would have meant someone was examining and helping me improve and practice how I did research, but anyway- they can just rely on them to teach the bulk of introductory and other pre-requisite-for-something-else classes for them and do all the grading and email answering and office-hours keeping that goes along with that for the typically larger class sizes (and thus more of those types of work and time and energy suckage) that those types of classes usually have, so that the professors are more free to focus on their own research and publishing and teaching the more advanced courses (and telling graduate students that “it’s all about time management” and that graduate students shouldn’t abandon “work-life balance”- bitter? Me? Oh, never. Hahahahahaha.)
This is a terrific article! It resonated with my experience as a tenure-track professor who left academia for start-ups then corporate, and now (while riding out an aggressive non-compete) goes back to locum at multiple universities. I've seen academia from both the inside and outside perspective, and agree with the ambivalence between "Yes, its your fault" and "No, its not your fault."
Some stray thoughts:
* In my narrow niche (faculty at veterinary medical schools), we don't have some of the familiar problems that plague wider academia, such as near impossibility of attaining a FTE, let alone tenured, job after grad school. In fact, most of the vet schools are constantly losing faculty and opportunities abound for those with the right skills interested in higher ed.
* The problem is most DVM academics can be paid multiples of their university salary in the private sector, where money is based on case fees, often working fewer hours. I imagine this is similar to the dynamic in human medicine. This dynamic intersects with the next trend...
* Like human medicine, vets are often saddled with 6-figure educational debt that rivals a mortgage ($250k+ is common). Unlike human medicine, the pay is not commensurate. While some specialties in some niches will do very well, most vets earn less than family practice physicians (who notoriously protest how underpaid they are). As individual rational actors, they are going to do what they can to maximize their income for the amount of effort expended.
* The old paradigm of research-heavy faculty that offset some or all of their salary (and ideally departmental indirect costs) with large federal grants is crumbling. Very few DVMs with any significant amount of teaching or clinic commitment (which is necessary to keep the CVM running) will have a real shot at substantial grants when evaluated by panels, even with the requisite graduate training, post-docs, and FTE%, and resources. DVMs simply aren't taken seriously the way MDs--even without a PhD!--are. And of course, its a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby people who have previously obtained funding are presumed to know what they're doing, and have an easier time getting more, while those who were denied grants have an increasingly hard time convincing agencies to fund them
* As the loss of grant dollars manifests, state revenues are drying up. The vast majority of US vet schools are public and tend to be associated with land grant universities. Decades ago, state legislatures subsidized the massive blood red balance sheets under the idea that it was a public service to train vets who protect the food supply, contribute to research, and work in public health. However, >75% of vets now practice in small animal medicine, which has arguably less public impact than those other sectors. As state budgets have become crunched, vet schools are often on the chopping block, viewed as a luxury
* Vet schools have responded by increasing tuition to make up for shortfalls (again, $50-65k a year without living expenses is not uncommon), which fuels the points above about debt load and salary demands.
* Academic governance remains as dysfunctional as ever. Despite the fact that grants are few and far between, many are pushed into higher research FTEs and unattainable publication quotas. Vets frequently have to teach dozens of hours of lecture a semester plus smaller group seminars, while also frequently contributing clinical and committee service. Many department heads and deans are unable or unwilling to listen to faculty who feel torn in 20 directions without any prioritization.
* Budgeting is often dysfunctional. Basic supplies might go unpurchased, but huge sums of money will be spent foolishly. I have worked at schools where I was locuming (at top $) to cover a faculty member who was ALSO out earning $ to locum at the institution I had just come from. Totally bananas.
* At the same time, I don't think a lot of vets in academia who have never left really realize the perks of what they do have. At least in my world of pathology (and a lot of the other specialties), the daily workload in a university hospital is a tiny fraction of what it would be in a corporate lab or private specialty hospital. They also usually have <50% clinic FTE. They confuse "I'm stressed because of dysfunction and poor leadership/governance" with "I can't believe how hard I work on clinics," then leave for the private sector (where they inevitably get disillusioned).
Some of these problems are deeply structural and won't be solved short of big changes in state budgets, federal loan policy, and norms/mores in academia. However, some solutions I think would be incredibly helpful would include:
- Let people pick one or two areas to excel in, rather than demand everyone be a triple threat contributing large amounts to teaching, research, and service that greatly exceed 100%
- A focus on flexibility in where, how and when people work. Perhaps hybrid faculty positions shared between institutions may become a thing.
- Admit that at most vet schools, NIH and NSF grants are not going to pay the bills. Stop judging promotion and tenure on that unrealistic metric.
- Find new business models and sustainable ways to pay faculty better, more competitive wages. In the medical sector, this would require a better focus on the basics of running a business, instead of hemorrhaging money on waste and poor scheduling.
- Work on improvements in really basic logistics. I have seen 9-12 month delays in basic procurement requests. My locum pay has been screwed up about half the time because admin assistants are just sloppy and there are no guardrails. These are unacceptable "self-owns" that reduce the efficiency of a university and don't cost much money to improve
Yes! What a crazy system we've set up. And it feels so big, so impossible to steer differently. Though I believe we can!
Your paragraph that begins “Academic governance remains as dysfunctional as ever” made mw think that being DVM faculty sounded much like being a Humanities grad student.
I left a tenured full professor position with about 15-20 years of career still ahead of me. Happy to join this group!
Welcome!
Thanks for linking to my article :). That joke about the business cards is golden (and a fantastic hook for this post, by the way!). So much of this resonates. I began to feel, near the end of my tenure, like I was turning into a bad person -- a troublemaker, someone who always focusing on the negative. But when you pour heart and soul into your work and the institution ignores you, or even explicitly devalues you or your discipline, I think anger can be a sign of self-respect. It would be far worse to internalize someone else's narrative about you or your expertise being unimportant, right?
One example: after winning a major grant to launch an oral history podcast, I wrote a press release about the project. While discussing revisions with colleagues in the communications office, I bristled at the boilerplate language about the college that typically runs at the bottom of every press release. This was a story about excellence in the arts and humanities, but the college was going to run a press release touting its excellence in STEM. That really bothered me, and I think it should have.
I remember someone telling me about her divorce years ago, how she at one point told her then-husband, "You're turning me into an angry person!" This is an interesting twist on assigning blame, because sometimes it's true that we behave badly in an unhealthy relationship or a toxic work environment. But that anger or negativity isn't always who we really are, and it isn't always possible to go fix something within ourselves to make the situation better. I think this can be really hard to separate out when thinking about personal responsibility for uncoupling. Are we simply stuck in our own shit? Victims of our own cognitive distortions (personalization, black-and-white thinking, mind-reading, magnification and minimization)? Or are we miserable because our gut is telling us that something is not right at the core, that we cannot rely on mutual trust or affection, and that it will always be difficult to maintain our self-respect if we stay? As far as my relationship with my former employer goes, I'm confident that the latter was true.
Sorry to keep going on, but one thing that might add an interesting wrinkle to your analysis is peer influence. Sometimes there are epidemics of workplace ailments because people keep reading about it or keeping hearing about it from peers. I think COVID has been a powerful influence on all of us. So many people were starting over, questioning everything, making major life changes -- impossible to ignore that as part of the decision-making scale?
This is so interesting to me. I was not a good person as a professor, especially in the year before tenure. I actually have said before that everyone gets a pass for weird/bad behavior during that pre-tenure year because it’s so stressful--maybe in the hopes that I could give myself a pass for the same. I think there are several parts of my relationship to that job that were replaying family dynamics, and I just turned into a child again, and I didn’t behave well. But I’ve always blamed myself entirely, so I like thinking about the situation in other ways and about how the whole thing is so dehumanizing.