On Not Leaving Academia, But Standing Outside It

🍏your Thursday Essay 3rd July, 2025

An original piece to get you thinking.

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Hi Scholar,

This week’s essay marks the final piece in the series I’m Not Leaving Academia, But I Am Standing Outside It. What began as a single essay unexpectedly grew into a three-part series published over the past month. I didn’t realise how much I had to share, how much I needed to let out. In trying to articulate the position I’ve taken since completing my doctorate in March, I found myself revisiting parts of my doctoral journey and my time with/in academia that I had long tucked away in the darker corners of my mind and heart.

The last two essays have been intensely emotional for me. They unearthed pain, anger, shock, frustration, sorrow, and helplessness but also hope, pleasure, joy, gratitude, and affection. I’ve shared my biography with you not only because the act itself has been meaningful – allowing me, as one reader wrote, to find my own human truth – but because I couldn’t otherwise articulate or ground my present and future stance. For me to stand tall, shoulders back, and declare, “Yes, I am not leaving academia, but I am standing outside it,” I had to take you through the story of how I got here in the first place. 

After all, what are we without our biographies? Don’t the things that happen to us mark the things we end up doing – as we write the next chapters of our lives?

Now that the time has come to share what I mean by standing outside the academe, this essay will differ a little from the previous ones. When the task is to describe what one is currently doing – and hopes to dedicate oneself to – the tone inevitably becomes more forward-looking. And while writing about one’s past often demands distance (not the spatial kind, but temporal in nature), writing about the present and future calls for a different kind of reflection: one grounded not only in experience, but also in thought.

So I must preempt you, Scholar: to delineate the position I now inhabit, I have had to turn to ideas, not just biography. 

Read this not as a proposal or prescription. I am not offering a model for you or for any other scholar to follow. I am simply sharing my stance, my story, my becoming. And as I said at the beginning of this series, the position I’ve ultimately arrived at – after all the tumult of my time with/in academia – is one of hope. Having now written my way through this series, I can say with confidence: I still stand by it. In fact, I stand ever more convinced. I have found my own form of critical hope – one that allows me to remain in relationship with the scholar and the academe.

P.S. If you’ve read the previous Letters in this series, you might find that the first few hundred words cover familiar ground. I’ve included ideas and reflections you already know – not out of forgetfulness, but because some new readers might be joining us here for the first time. I trust you’ll forgive the repetition, and perhaps even find something different in the re-telling.

On Not Leaving Academia, But Standing Outside It 

Written by The Critic

For many of us, academia in its current form has lost its meaning. How could it have not? 

The profession of the academic, as it stands, demands of its practitioners a form of schizophrenia. 

We are trained in virtues – critical consciousness, ethical clarity, a commitment to truth – even as we are structurally nudged toward their erosion. In the same breath that academia claims to serve society through the pursuit of knowledge, it rewards and values only that academic work which can generate income, attract funding, and boost institutional prestige. A maddening double standard! The scholar is asked to uphold values that the institution itself cannot live by! 

But perhaps… perhaps…this should not come as a surprise. Reading Virginia Woolf’s essay, Three Guineas, published in 1938 (!), made me realise how educational institutions have long been sites of exclusion, dominance, and subtle violence. The very institutions lauded for offering the 'finest education', she wrote, were also those that channelled research toward the interests of manufacturers, participated in the invention of the implements of war, and produced students who succeeded not as thinkers, but as capitalists. Far from teaching generosity and magnanimity, she observed, education made the educated “anxious to keep their possessions.” In demanding an “adultery of the brain,” intellectual liberty is sold into captivity.

It is no wonder, then, that the hegemonic academic ideal today is shaped by hyperproductivity, individualism, and competition – values that stand in direct opposition to the scholarly virtues we hold dear: collaboration, humility, care, and ethical consciousness. And yet, this is the very ideal that academics are expected to inhabit if they wish to remain within the system. It is under the weight of this ideal that so many of the academic’s actions and behaviours – competitive, calculating, manipulative, even sly – are not only shaped, but rationalised.

It is in this vein, therefore, that when I hear of academics rewriting their research just to fit the preferences of a high-ranking journal – even when their work aligns more closely with a smaller, more meaningful one – I am not surprised.

And when I think back to the senior academic who tried to manipulate their way onto a paper I wrote, doing no work yet seeking authorship it does not make me think, ‘How could they?!’. I understand how, I know why. 

It is the conditions of academia which forces academics to act in ways they do. They are dependent upon academia for their incomes and livelihoods, so they must act according to the demands of the institutions they are dependent upon. All professions, after all, have certain undeniable effects upon their professors. 

You see, I had come to see – through experiences detailed in On Breaking Up with Academia, and the reflections shared in On the Inability to Let Go of the Scholar – with painful clarity what being a successful academic would demand of me. And more than that, how easily those demands could corrode the very scholarly virtues I – and perhaps even you – hold most dear.

What was I to do then?  

‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ The way Woolf contemplates in Three Guineas: a symbolic call to burn down the institutions that educate for war, uphold power, and betray intellectual freedom. Was I to do the same? Burn academia to the ground? Despise it? Turn my back on it? Make academia cease to exist in my purview? 

No, that would not do. 

For as I wrote in ‘On the Inability to Let Go of The Scholar’, academia was, and perhaps still is, the home of the scholar. It is one of the few remaining places in society where a livelihood can be made through a relationship with knowledge. However compromised, however distorted by market logics, academia continues to house something sacred: a vocation, a calling, a desire to think deeply and with care. Even if it malforms that calling in the name of prestige and profit. 

To abandon it entirely would be to abandon that vision – of the university as a sanctuary for inquiry, a commons for knowledge, a place where it is still possible to learn and think in public. That is what I wish to preserve. That is what I am committed to. And putting rags, petrol, matches to it would only mean eviscerating the very possibility of a scholarly life.

It was here that Virginia Woolf’s position as an ‘outsider’ resonated with me. 

And it is here that I was able to articulate my own position: ‘I’m Not Leaving But Standing Outside Academia.’ 

Writing in Three Guineas, Woolf speaks from the position of a daughter of educated men: excluded from institutions, yet shaped by their ideals. And while her exclusion was shaped by gender, what resonated with me was something else: a shared sense of outsiderness. Of standing at the threshold of a world I had been shaped by, indebted to, and yet could no longer enter in good faith.

Woolf argues that there’s a unique power in not needing the institution from which you learned. If you are no longer dependent on it for your income, your titles, or your legitimacy, you gain something rare: independence. Not just financial, but intellectual. Emotional. You are free to write what you actually think. To critique without flattery. To admire without needing to be admired. You are, as she puts it, “free from unreal loyalties.”

Reading this position through my affinities – for the world of knowledge and the figure of the scholar – I began to wonder in the months since submitting my thesis if it would be possible for me to do something for academia and make academia mean something again by adopting an outsider’s stance? 

Woolf’s outsider position holds that stepping outside doesn’t have to mean walking away. In fact, there may be no better position from which to offer something back. “They would bind themselves,” she writes of the outsider, “to obtain full knowledge of professional practices, and to reveal any instance of tyranny or abuse in their professions.” The implication is clear: to hold an institution to account, one must first know it intimately – its practices, its logics, its internal contradictions.

And I did. I had already learned so much within academia. How to inquire deeply, how to challenge assumptions, what it means to make meaning, yes. But also, I had learnt ‘about’ academia: what it has become, the problems, its challenges, and contradictions. Now, standing outside – but not leaving – I could begin the work Woolf describes. I could reveal. Refuse complicity in academia’s violences against the scholar. Care for the home of the scholar not through obedience but through critique: completely unbothered by and unrestrained from the disciplining powers of academia. 

I could work to preserve the promises of scholarship: inquiry as a process instead of a product. By experimenting beside it, beyond it, I could remain in fidelity to what it once promised to be. As an outsider, I would be distant enough to avoid being consumed by the values of the hegemonic academic ideal required to survive within it but close enough to stay in cooperation with the parts that still serve the scholar and knowledge. From this position, I realised that I could critique academia freely, and importantly, be creative in my critique, offering not just a refusal but a site of potential and a vision of what might still be possible. 

‘Nonsense!’, 
you might think, Scholar, of such an outsider stance – the kind that Woolf describes and that I found resonance with. 

‘It’s nothing but a romantic fantasy and a made-up movement. It looks better in print than in practice’, you might add. 

But I will disagree with you because this position that I speak of is not some imagined fantasy. It already exists. 

It even has a name: ‘Para-Academia.’ 

The prefix ‘para’ means ‘besides’, ‘side by side’, ‘aside’, ‘beyond’. It suggests both proximity to and distance from the thing it modifies. To be para-academic, then, is to be simultaneously in parallel with academia while also building on it. It is to critique and revise academia in order to

At its core, para-academia holds that we can change academia by changing how we think and act as its constituent parts. Like Plato stepping out of the Academy to think beneath the olive trees, the para-academic finds value in wandering the space just outside the logos – the proper place of knowledge – in order to think differently. Para-academia believes the university can be reclaimed – not by protest alone, but through practice. As a reader wrote to me recently,

This means that the work of reclaiming begins in how we, as scholars, think, relate, collaborate, and create. Because to reclaim is not only to take back: it is to (un)learn, to struggle, to imagine otherwise, to restore life where it has been depleted. Para-academia offers the space where such reclaiming work can begin to take root:  where knowledge, learning, and thinking could be continually re-articulated and reclaimed.

A few Letters ago, we wrote that we see The Scholarly Letter as a para-academic project. You might ask, however: How? What makes you say these Letters are para-academic?

Will you allow me to explain? Perhaps in doing so, I might also show you what my position of “not leaving academia, but standing outside it” has looked like in practice.

Each week, The Tatler and I task ourselves with writing these Letters. 

They are a mode of academic conversation – a practice of exchanging ideas and reflections – but they enjoy the benefit of being unbounded by the constraints of the academic journal article. They are not impersonal, nor do they hide the author behind an invisible, objective human voice. They are personal, reflective, dialogic communications that seek to intertwine subjective experiences of the scholarly world with theoretical and conceptual perspectives. They often begin in moments of personal discomfort, surprise, awe – jolts from the everyday that we trace into writing, bringing them into conversation with existing ideas while inviting new ones in return.

In this manner, you will agree they are scholarly in nature? They speak of knowledge, inquiry, research, education, and everything that orbits these worlds. But more than that, each week we write in reckoning with the gaps between our ideals and the institutional realities of academia – gaps we have encountered and that scholars continue to face.

Through this praxis of letter writing – one that weaves intellect and emotion (anger, sadness, despair, hope, frustration, longing, agitation) – we hope to connect with others who share these emotions and experiences. In doing so, we seek to make meaning together. Not only to make meaning about academia, but to make academia and the scholar meaningful again. And in that shared meaning-making, the hope goes further still: to become together. Not only as scholars, but as individuals striving toward the kind of academia that so often feels just out of reach.

This is what it looks like, then, to practice a para-academic stance in real time. Not from a distance, but through a continuous practice of relation, reflection, and correspondence. And while the writing of these Letters may appear solitary, it is anything but isolated.

These Letters are born out of individual praxis. Yes, there is no denying that. We sit at our desks, click-clacking on our keyboards in disconnected physical spaces. We engage in imagined dialogue with you – you, whom we call, Scholar. But every Thursday, when the Letters are sent out to our network of correspondents across the globe, our thoughts and reflections scatter and settle in many different places. It is there, in that moment, that we come together, however briefly, through this mesh of written correspondence. It suspends us in a space of in-betweenness, offering a kind of commons that draws us into thinking the same questions.

Scholar, is it so hard to imagine that you and I share something in common – here, now – as you read what I have written, and I have written it for you? Can you deny that we – through my writing and your reading, and others reading alongside you – are not suspended, just for a moment, in a shared plane of thought and emotion?

This is not a coming-together in space or time, but in affect, in reflection, in thought. It is a virtual collaboration – not in the technological sense, but in the deepest sense of possibility. It gathers us, orients us and just perhaps, it allows us to do something. To become together. To shape an academia that we so desperately desire.

Our Letters are meant to extend our web toward you. 

You, me, and other readers of The Scholarly Letter – we are already in a web of relationships, one we believe can generate ripple effects that influence not only individual trajectories, but the shape of the collective itself. These Letters we write are small acts of reclamation. They are seeds for a community grounded in friendly collaboration – one that resists and recovers from the neoliberal epidemic and reclaims academia as the home of the scholar. 

For now, this – this small but perhaps meaningful and meaning-making task of writing scholarly Letters – is all I have to offer. It is not a blueprint, not a manifesto. It is a contribution. A place to think, correspond, and become together in hope. It is my offering in lieu of the position I have chosen: not leaving academia, but standing just outside it. I have ink to spill, ideas to pollinate, and seeds to scatter in the hope that a generation of scholars might reclaim academia for themselves, from within.

The independence of The Scholarly Letter, which The Tatler and I work to maintain, is what enables this ‘path of critical intervention.’ It provides a site for reflection outside the rigid frames of institutional academia. But rather than building something entirely new, it acts more like what Sean Dockray once called the AAAAARG project — a kind of scaffolding 

In this (in)dependent form of scholarly work, we hope to enable a co-produced commons: one in which scholars across time zones, institutions, and contexts might collide in thought, reflection, critique, and hope.

But I have more dreams – dreams that must be dreamt – of further carving out a para-academic space. 

The dream to nurture the community that The Scholarly Letter has only begun to sow: a living, breathing, self-sustaining, self-organising para-academic community. One that orients itself not around metrics or productivity, but around knowledge, inquiry, and learning – for no other reason than that it is our calling to do so.

Communities like this once existed. They were exclusionary, yes, limited to men educated at Oxford or Cambridge. But they were also self-organising, driven by love of intellect and curiosity. Think of the 'penny universities' of 17th-century Britain: the coffee houses where intellectuals, artists, and writers gathered to debate, discuss, and commune. Schools without masters. Thought without administration.

You might find this conclusion anti-climactic. You might say, “This does not deliver.” That apart from diagnosing the problem, the author offers no blueprint. And you would be right: if you came to this writing expecting to be told what to do, how to conduct yourself, how to leave academia while standing beside it.

But that was never my promise.

From the very beginning, I said this series was reflective. Experiential. A sharing. I never intended to give advice. I only meant to offer a glimpse into life after the doctorate – from the perspective of someone still deeply in love with two things: the figure of the scholar, and the traditional space the scholar is meant to inhabit – the academe. I have merely sought to share with someone how I’ve come to ‘not leave academia but stand outside it’ and what this has meant for me in practice. 

I have chosen this position, and now I wish to dedicate myself to nurturing a place for the scholar. A commons for scholarship. A space for knowledge pursued for its own sake. A self-sustaining, self-organising community that cultivates the practices of thinking, learning, and inquiry because they are human, because they are beautiful, and because they are ours.

Apples can only say so much! If this essay stirred something, be it a question, a reflection, a story of your own, I want to hear it. Even if it’s something negative, it’s okay. The Scholarly Letter exists because we believe that knowledge and scholarship begins in conversation and communing. Respond to this email, Scholar, we want to hear what you have to say and share.