On Breaking Up With Academia

🍏your Thursday essay 5th June, 2025

An original piece to get you thinking.

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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.

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