On Breaking Up With Academia

🍏your Thursday essay 5th June, 2025

An original piece to get you thinking.

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Online Thumbnail Credits: National Gallery of Art Open Access Collection; Credit Line: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund

Hi Scholar, 

This is the first essay in a series titled, ‘I’m Not Leaving Academia, But I am Standing Outside It’. In it, I wish to share exactly what this position is, and more importantly, how it came about. 

Originally, I thought I would write a single essay on this position. But once I began writing, the floodgates opened. The writing unearthed things that I had only experienced but never articulated. It pried open memories I had long buried. When The Tatler read the first draft, he told me not that this writing should neither be trimmed nor toned down for the sake of polish or palatability. ‘The rawness’, he said, ‘is important.’ These are things that must be heard, not hidden. So, I decided to keep going. 

This is, for the first time, writing I have let others see that feels so personal. Instead of hiding behind intelligent interpretation and analysis using theories and concepts, I have chosen to write plainly and honestly. I have decided to do so to show how this position of ‘not leaving but standing outside’ has emerged from biography. My own. 

Biographies are all we have. The marks they leave on us make us who we are. They tell us where we’ve been, what we’ve endured, how we’ve changed. 

So, I share parts of my biography with you, Scholar. Not to convince you of anything but because perhaps, you too, find yourself in similar conditions. Perhaps you have questioned whether it’s you who is the problem. I offer this to remind you that it’s not. It is the place in which you find yourself. 

On Breaking Up With Academia

- Written by The Critic

First, apologies are in order: I could not start on a more positive note. This first essay in the series is a bleak one, and for that I am truly sorry. But the position I end up choosing – the one where I say ‘I’m not leaving but I’m standing outside academia’ – is liberating. Perhaps, even, it offers hope for those of us who find ourselves in the bleak shadows of academic life. So you will allow me to speak freely, dear Scholar? You will stay with me through this reckoning: through the despair, the doubt, the disillusionment? For ‘breaking up’ with academia – declaring that it was over, that we weren’t meant to be – was painful, yes. But it was necessary. I couldn’t have arrived at this new position without first walking away. 

I broke up with academia back in late August of 2023. Nearly two years ago now. I was sitting in the back garden of our house, after (I’ll admit) a couple of pints at the pub, when I broke down in front of my partner. Howling like an animal caught in a trap, I admitted that I no longer wanted to stay in academia, or, for that matter, continue with my PhD. 

I was nearly three years into my PhD at the time.

I had just finished conducting all my empirical work; I hadn’t yet started writing my thesis. I had given it everything that past year: early mornings and long days in the field, late nights organising the day’s data, weekends spent working because my field was ‘fluid’. If you’ve ever done intense empirical work, you’ll know exactly what I mean. You will have felt the drain, the exhaustion of doing empirical work. Even the thought of it might give you a shudder…as it still does to me. 

But that, in itself, was not what broke me.

Research is difficult. The task of producing new knowledge, I like to imagine, is as laborious as birthing a child. I don’t say this to diminish the pain of the labouring mother, but to suggest that both involve creation through intense energy and effort, often under considerable strain. 

This laborious part of research actually brought me immense gratification. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing the ideas that take shape in your head begin to play out materially and tangibly. It was a part of being an academic researcher that I genuinely, truly enjoyed: yes, even the long days, working weekends, and the exhaustion. It was painfully good. My apologies if I come across as glorifying overwork and burnout, that is not my intention: it was only that I genuinely did not mind this. My idea of ‘fun’ as a kid in school was reading my textbooks three weeks before the new year started and doing homework in the evening. 

But being an academic involves more than being a researcher. And in the months leading up to that breakdown, I had been experiencing that other side of academic life. I was trying on the other-than-researcher aspect of being an academic: partly because I was genuinely curious about what those experiences might involve, and partly because I wanted to start climbing the academic career ladder after my PhD. So, I thought, best start building my CV. 

You see, I had picked up a few teaching and research assistant gigs on the side.

On the surface, the pay for the teaching positions looked good: £16-19 per hour. But… there’s always a but…I was hired on a contract basis. As I said, I’d picked up a few ‘gigs’. And finding myself in academic gig work for the first time, I quickly learned what that actually meant in practice. 

Up until then, I had only been hearing all the fuss about gig work and increasing precarity of academic employment. I hadn’t yet experienced it. This happened to be my first step toward being inside and experiencing ‘real’ academia. 

In practice, taking up teaching gigs at the Uni meant being paid for a fixed number of hours to deliver a set number of lectures and seminars. For every session delivered, I was also paid for two hours of preparations. Generous. But anyone who has ever delivered any teaching at higher-education level will know that this is not generous at all. 

That two hours is nowhere near enough ‘preparation time’ for designing a whole two-hour lecture! 

When you care about the work you do – about bringing good-quality learning content to your students – you will research. You will study to decide what to cover. You will prepare your slides with care. You will take the time to think about how to make your teaching engaging.

And all of that work takes more than two hours.

This experience made me realise why, during my own undergraduate and master’s degrees, I had so often encountered slides that felt outdated. The trick – as my mentor at the time told me – is to make your slides once, and then keep reusing them endlessly. Why wouldn’t you? The structure of academic work discourages care, renewal, and creativity. Why, then, would you bother updating your slides, researching new material, or improving your teaching when the work you do is valued so little? 

Aside from the teaching, assessment – grading papers – too followed the same quiet erosion of value, revealing, once more, the systemic disregard for academic labour. For this work too, perhaps unsurprisingly, one is paid hourly. 

The number of hours contracted was calculated roughly at 30 minutes per paper. 

I’m not sure what background the person responsible for those calculations had but, once again, anyone who has graded papers will know: reading a 2,500-word essay, evaluating it thoroughly enough for offering thoughtful, meaningful feedback takes much longer than thirty minutes! 

The outcome of such cold, perverse calculations is that the grader is forced to make a difficult decision, one that cannot be made lightly. A choice between 

rushing through the process: copying+pasting remarks and comments from a pre-made list of ‘feedback’ while only skimming through essays, an insult to the very idea of ‘assessment and evaluation’ of a student’s work

or 

doing it properly. That is, taking the time to read, reflect, and actually evaluate meaningfully, while putting on hold the other work she actually depends on to build her academic career. Her research. Her writing. Her publishing. Because she still needs to do so, lest she perishes. 

Rushing the evaluation of students’ work is not something one does willingly: especially when you care about education, and are acutely aware of the role that feedback plays in learning. But then again, you also care about finishing your data collection. Writing your conference paper. Attending that seminar which might be really important to your own research. And so, you're forced to choose.

A faceless student, whose work you're assessing, is quietly kicked to the curb. You decide to rush through the process. 

And I’ll say this again: one does not take that decision lightly. You’re painfully aware of what’s at stake: someone else’s education. Perhaps much like those who made the original calculations, the ones who decided how much that task was worth, you weigh it up, and you decide.

Academia forces you to make an endless list of hard decisions: between ethical labour (like thoughtful grading) vs. unpaid overwork; between quality teaching vs. career-advancing research; and so on. It’s not that we don’t want to do it all: we want to teach well, mentor students, research meaningfully. On paper, academia even expects you to do it all; but structurally, it does not make doing it all possible.

So even with the best intentions, we’re forced into ethical compromises or personal sacrifices because of academia’s messy value system: one that rewards certain outputs of labour and sidelines others. 

But let us leave the matters of ‘financial value’ and ‘pay’ of academic work alone for now, shall we?

For even if we were to put aside the financial conditions of our labour, I still have moments – telling ones – that help explain why I came to consider my relationship with academia over. There are several. But for the purpose of explaining to you why academia and I parted ways, only one lengthy event from my biography will do. 

I will speak as freely as possible. Though I must admit: I’ve altered a few details of this events’ particularities here and there. Allow me this liberty, for I still move in and around academic spaces, and some instincts for discretion are hard to shed.

At the beginning of that same year – the year I decided to break up with academia – I had begun writing a paper.

And as you’ll know, any story in academia that begins with ‘a paper’ rarely ends well. But we shall continue. 

During the process of writing a paper, it is typical to solicit as much feedback as possible –  especially from those working in your area of research. Occasionally, however, you encounter someone who becomes very excited about your research – perhaps because the topic is ‘trendy’ – but who doesn’t actually research that area themselves. 

Still, their enthusiasm about your research is infectious. It feels good to have your work appreciated. [Yes, I’m aware this is giving hard core academic validation; allow me - I was a whole two years younger than I am today.] And in this romantic haze of excitement and recognition, you become convinced that their comments and feedback – which they are offering so willingly and generously – will help you develop your paper. You believe this despite being aware that they are likely not very familiar with the area your paper is contributing to. But they are also a fairly successful academic: they’ve published. And often, general feedback on the structure and logic of a manuscript – instead of the research itself – is still incredibly useful. 

So, you start discussing your paper with them. They offer their thoughts – admittedly, sometimes vague. But you are fully aware of how valuable feedback can be, so you take it in whatever form it comes. Somewhere along the way, they become a kind of mentor in the process. They even encourage you to submit the paper to a conference – a fairly prestigious one at that. It feels good to know that someone is looking out for you. You take them up on the suggestion and begin working toward it. 

And so, that’s what I did. I decided to write the paper with the aim of submitting it to that conference: an opportunity to get more feedback; something to put on my academic CV. 

A week before the conference submission deadline, this proxy-mentor asks if I’m still planning to submit something. I’m nearly done writing a 3000-word extended abstract, and say so. They respond by saying they haven’t got anything written to submit this year but would still really like to attend the conference. They make a joke, ‘I really need a holiday’. It’s the kind of humor around conferences that’s fairly normalised in academic spaces. Then they proceed to ask, ‘Could you put my name on your paper? It’s just so that I can go to this conference.’ 

Scholar, you probably already know how I responded. I certainly did not say what I should have said, ‘No way, write your own paper.’ 

I agreed. 

Besides, I told myself, ‘It’s just a conference abstract’; and ‘It probably won’t even get accepted. It doesn’t matter.’ And I also – perhaps through normalised discourse around conferences and treating them as a ‘free’ holiday sponsored by your university – sympathized. ‘I guess they literally just want to go on this holiday, whatever.’ 

And that’s how you make sense of the situation. That’s how you keep working on your paper, which now has been edited to include ‘we found’ and ‘our research’ and so on. But it’s okay, you tell yourself. It is just for this conference, you reassure yourself. 

News came: my – well, our – submission was accepted. When I told the proxy-mentor, their response was simply, ‘That’s great. Get working on it.’ Well, fair enough, I suppose. They’re not an actual co-author, they’re just on the author list because they needed a way to attend the conference. 

Then you attend a few academic events where this proxy-mentor is also present. You get talking to a few people who are fairly well acquainted with this proxy-mentor of yours. And they’re all telling you the same thing: ‘Proxy-mentor is working on some really cool research [proceeds to explain research]…it’s such an important topic right now.’ And you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Hang on. This sounds a whole lot like my research. The research I’m reporting in the paper that I’m currently writing. The paper I submitted to that conference.’ 

But wait. It isn’t just ‘my’ research anymore, at least not as far as the author list goes. 

That’s when it hit me. This proxy-mentor isn’t my mentor at all. They didn’t care about me. They cared about my research – not because of the ideas, not for the questions, but for what it would mean if they could be attached to it. It was the kind of backdoor manipulation, so subtle, it had slipped under my radar.

A fairly senior academic was trying to get their ‘numbers’ up. 

Scholar, I will neither recount nor provide an analysis of the systemic issues in academia that lead academics to behave the way they do. We do so often enough in our more ‘conceptual’ essays; The Scholar Manifesto, especially, took up these systemic questions about the profession of the academic. This Letter is not that. I do not aim to critique academia through theoretical or conceptual analysis here. As I have said, I do not wish to hide behind intelligent interpretations. I have only wished to relate – to speak plainly, perhaps as a form of therapy that comes from telling one’s story – to another scholar who may be all too familiar with what it means to inhabit the ‘academe’ in the 21st century. 

This event I have just narrated to you might surprise you but perhaps it won’t shock you. Maybe you will even nod in sympathetic agreement, ‘ah yes, yes, been there.’ The pressure to publish brings out a certain kind of slyness, competitiveness, and manipulation in academics. Events like this – where an academic is hungry for publications and will claw their way toward them through whatever quiet, outlandish means – are not uncommon. PhD supervisors plagiarising their students’ theses is not uncommon. Using paper mills to churn out publications is not uncommon. Research fraud is not uncommon. 

And when you take a long, hard look at the kind of environment academia has cultivated – the logics it rewards, the values it signals, the career metrics it sanctifies – it becomes disturbingly easy to understand how such behaviours have become so ordinary to us. 

There are more instances from my biography – perhaps not as explicit as manipulation for publication – that transpired during my PhD and ultimately led me to realise ‘where’ I had found myself. 

There was the time when I proposed the idea of writing an experimental thesis to my internal reviewer: one where not only the ideas were new but the way those ideas were communicated would be original as well. They outright dismissed the notion. Because, they said, such research would never be published in higher-ranking journals – research communicated through experimental writing would only be palatable to smaller journals. And in academic research, as I'm sure you also already know, ‘smaller’ and ‘bigger’ are measured by metrics like impact factors. Small journals are just not worth it, I was told, not worth the risk to one’s career, and certainly not worth the creativity. 

Then there was the discussion about who I wanted on my PhD Viva committee. When I suggested a few scholars whose work and thought-style had significantly influenced my own intellectual style and research, I was told that I’d be better off choosing someone else. These scholars were less known in academic circles; they were not at prestigious universities, didn’t hold large grants, and often published in smaller, more experimental journals. Naturally, their h-indexes weren’t very high either. So, it was advised that I pick someone more ‘powerful’, someone who is ‘a somebody’, because they would be better for my career. It mattered less who I could have the most meaningful conversation with regarding my research, and more what kind of value they could bring in terms of power and position.  

As I say, these are more subtle events. I call them subtle not because they were insignificant but because they didn’t arrive with the same shock or theatre as being asked to share authorship unfairly. These were slower, quieter disillusionments, the kind that unfold through institutional logics, professional advice, and the gradual accommodation of compromise. 

But nevertheless, they – along with the other events from my biography – lifted the veil between idealised notions of academic life and what a career in academia really entails: precarious employment conditions, ethical compromises, relentless competition for publication, systems of ‘value’ and ‘worth’ driven almost entirely by financial metrics.

They show how our understanding of thinking, learning and knowledge as ‘activities with multiple values beyond the scope of any capital-driven market, and which exceed quantification in economic terms’ has become nearly impossible. These events crystalise the crisis of value we are experiencing in academia. 

So, as I was slowly shown the behind-the-scenes of the academic circus, I found myself increasingly constricted, unable to keep tolerating the false promises of a career in academia. One that once claimed to ‘pursue and venerate knowledge and learning as a manifestation of faith in what it means to be a human being.’ A career that once revered learning and scholarship for their contributions to the vision of humanity. 

The values that this space espoused, the conduct it encouraged, the behaviours it rewarded (even required), just did not align with me. I found myself unable to accept these conditions any longer. I understood them. But I could not find myself satisfied with them. 

I could not accept that education and research were calculations and choices, rather than visions and commitments. 

That knowledge and research were investments, instead of a testament. 

So, I decided to break up with academia. Nearly two years ago now, sitting in the back garden of my house, after a few pints at the pub, bawling my eyes out, I announced to my partner – and all my neighbours – that I was done with academia. 

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