Not quite right

If academia were just out and out exploitative, abusing people with no reward whatsoever, leaving would be easy.

If the work were completely unbearable, leaving would be easy.

If the administration were uniformly awful and crazy, leaving would be easy.

If academia’s sense of itself were unrelated to what we really want from our lives, leaving would be easy.

If the purpose of higher education didn’t matter, leaving would be easy.

But leaving is not easy, and it’s not easy partially because, for many people, their experience of academia is so very close to being right.

The work is meaningful at the big-picture level — but too often at the everyday level, it’s rote and repetitive and soul-sucking.

There’s a lot of freedom in research and teaching — but sometimes, depending on the institution, the discipline, the needs of the students, not enough.

There’s plenty of room to challenge ourselves, to engage our own needs for mastery and improvement — but often not enough time in between the things that “have to get done.”

Often, our experience of academia is so close to being right that we can go along for years telling ourselves that it is right. And when we realize that it’s not, part of the pain is how very, very close we came to having what would have fed us.