On The Inability to Let Go of The Scholar

🍏your Thursday Essay 19th June, 2025

A original piece to get you thinking.

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Online Thumbnail Credits: National Gallery of Art Open Access Collection; Gift of the Marcy Family in memory of Sigbert H. Marcy

Hi Scholar,

This week, we continue with the series: ‘I’m Not Leaving Academia, But I am Standing Outside It’. In this series, one of the authors of The Scholarly Letter – The Critic – shares the biographical experiences that led her to adopt this position: not leaving academia, but standing outside it. In doing so, she will also explore what this position really means.

We feel it’s important to share and clarify this stance, because The Scholarly Letter itself was born from both of its authors (The Critic and The Tatler) having taken up this position and it continues to be written from that posture. By writing from this posture, we hope to push for the cultural and normative shifts so desperately needed for scholars not merely to survive, but to thrive within academia.

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In the last essay – the first of the series, titled ‘On Breaking Up With Academia’ – I, The Critic, wrote to you about events and circumstances from my biography that led me to declare my departure from academia. 

I wish I could tell you that you can read it in our archive, in case you missed it or have only recently joined us. Scholar, call me a coward, but for now that essay will not be archived publicly. There were things said in that Letter that some in the academe might have preferred I not say aloud; and if I’m being honest, its publication may reduce my ability to negotiate with the academe going forward. So, for now, that Letter remains within a network of private correspondence. If you would really like to read it, please write in to say so, and I will send it to you privately. 

Still, because this current essay builds upon and continues from the last essay, I shall offer a short (and perhaps shallow) recap of it. 

Nearly three years into my PhD, I began to encounter the institutional conditions of doing academic labour: not just as ideas and stories I had read about, but as lived experience. These included poor wages, ethical compromises, and manipulation for the sake of publication – to bundle the contexts of that essay into three major themes. In turn, these experiences lifted the veil between what academia appears to be to those who wish to live in a sincere relationship with knowledge and education, and what it has actually become under the neoliberal regime. Unable to bear the dissonance, I broke down in front of my partner and declared that I was done with academia. 

Today, in this Letter, we pick up almost immediately after that ‘break-up’. 

The first essay may have been received ‘negatively’ by some. I expected as much; I even opened the essay with an apology for the darkness of its tone. But if you can be patient, and read what follows without judging but with sympathy as a fellow Scholar, you will find hope slowly begins to emerge. The kind of hope that we cling to because we are Scholars who feel a duty for, and to, the very place that nurtured us: academia. 

On The Inability to Let Go Of The Scholar

- Written by The Critic

In the immediate aftermath of that declaration – my break-up with academia on a late August day in 2023, sitting in the back garden of my house – there was despair. 

A complete loss of hope.

I was just over three years into my PhD. I had not yet started writing my thesis. And having decided I no longer wished to stay in academia, I wanted to bring that decision into effect immediately. 

For the longest time, the dream had been to stay in academia, to become an academic, to climb the ladder and one day hold the title of Emeritus Professor. So my PhD amidst all these dreams and hopes had mattered: it was the first step toward that imagined future.

But now that I had declared I wanted nothing more to do with academia, I began to question:

‘Why should I continue with my PhD if I no longer want to stay in academia?’
‘What’s the point?’
‘Why waste another year writing this stupid thesis to earn a stupid degree for a world I’ve already walked away from?’

Spending another year finishing this chapter of my life felt like putting the rest of my life on hold.

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