Although every story of academic struggle and leaving is intensely personal, in my experience those stories fall into three categories: structural reasons to leave, myth-related reasons to live, and leaving because of a lack of fit.
In other words, people don’t leave because they can’t hack it — they leave because somewhere there is a mismatch between the reality of academia and their lives as they have lived them and as they want to live them.
I know I hammer this point all the time, but I think it’s an important one: when you struggle with academia, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you. One way or another, it’s a mismatch. So let’s talk about the most common ones.
Structure
Some structural mismatches are really obvious: You graduate in the teeth of the worst job market in history, and there are no jobs to be had. The jobs that are available want a different theoretical grounding than you have. Your partner has a good job right here (paying better than yours likely ever will), but the only jobs available for you are 1,500 miles away and you don’t want a long-distance relationship.
But structural mismatches go beyond the problems of getting a job. Women who are overloaded with service as assistant professors — which is not uncommon, if not necessarily ever consciously intended — and then who don’t get tenure because they didn’t have enough time to write — that’s a structural problem. A system that requires the most intensive career focus during the prime child-bearing years for professionals — that’s a structural problem too, and one that falls disproportionately on women. Higher education in the humanities doesn’t pay particularly well, leading many academics to take on extra teaching or advising work in the summers, reducing time for research in the quest to pay the bills, raise a family, and start building the retirement savings that are already a decade or more behind. And that, too, is a structural problem.
Whenever the institution is at cross-purposes with our life goals, with common and expected life goals, that’s a structural problem. And although structural problems are common reasons people struggle with academia, they’re also something we don’t talk about — because we’re supposed to just be so fucking grateful we got a job in the first place.
Myths
They’re more difficult to see, but myths are one of the more pervasive reasons people struggle and leave. Myths are all of those stories we tell about academia and that the larger culture tells about academia — and even when we consciously know they aren’t true, at some level we think they should be true or they once were true or we wish they were true. And then we spend our energy trying to reconcile these myths with the reality we’re experiencing.
So, for example, there’s the myth of the “life of the mind,” the assumption that once we “make it” in academia, that we get to spend our time thinking deep thoughts and talking about important ideas. That, of course, is immediately belied by the endless rounds of committee meetings, advising, teaching, grading, planning, and administration that routinely take up large swaths of academic time — and even how much space there is for research at all is determined largely by the kind of institution you work for. But many of us were drawn to academia through our enjoyment of the reading and talking and thinking we experienced as undergraduates, and that myth dies hard, no matter how clear-eyed we are about the reality.
If myths like this one are part and parcel of how we get to academia, other myths help keep us there. Despite the spotty intellectual engagement many academics experience with their colleagues, there’s a myth that only in academia is intellectual engagement even possible — that the rest of the world is an intellectual wasteland concerned only with capitalist rapaciousness. Myths like this inhibit our ability to imagine a satisfying life elsewhere, no matter how conflicted and difficult our lives inside the academy are.
Fit
And finally, there are simple problems with fit: People who don’t, in the end, enjoy teaching. People who don’t, in the end, enjoy advising, or committee meetings, or the repetitiveness of getting one group of students to an understanding of critical theory or communication or why history matters only to start again with another resistant group.
Problems of fit are hard to talk about because of course this is the greatest job in the world — doesn’t everybody kind of wish they were us?
Structure, myths, and fit aren’t neat categories, of course — they have a tendency to overlap and meld into one another and create unique blends of difficulty we throw ourselves against. But it’s important to identify why we struggle, what it is that we’re experiencing as problematic, because only then can we untangle the stories we’re telling ourselves — that this is the perfect job, despite the fact that we’re miserable, or that there aren’t any other options — and start imagining other ways of being.