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.

*

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.

When I spoke to The Tatler about all this, he understood. You see, he himself had made the decision to leave his PhD after a year. He had experienced the lab. He had seen the lives of his colleagues – the grafting postdocs and underpaid, undervalued research assistants with PhDs – and he had realised that even if he got his PhD, he would not want to stay in academia. He would likely still want to go into industry. And if that were the case, he thought at the time of leaving his PhD, why not start now? Why spend three or four more years in a PhD only to leave academia at the end anyway? 

During our conversation, however, he reminded me of something: he had made his decision to leave after one year with three (or more) still to go. By contrast, I was already three years in, and only had one year left. Safe to say, my emotional calculus shifted after this. 

Amidst all the despair and hopelessness, some sober realisations came. 

The Tatler was right. I had already spent more than three years working toward this PhD. I really only had a year of my PhD left. And truthfully, I had enjoyed the research itself, even if I had grown disillusioned with academia more broadly. In the end, I would still walk away with a degree: a PhD. 

Besides, I thought in attempts to convince myself to continue, “I wouldn’t be less for having a PhD – a PhD I was so close to completing anyway. In some eyes, perhaps, I would even be more.” It was, after all, a highly prestigious degree. 

I will not lie to you, Scholar, but at that point, I was motivated by the simple fact that I would hold this degree. That I would be called ‘Dr’. That perhaps, just perhaps, I would even be more respected, and jobs would come easier.  Yes, those reasons were somewhat superficial. But they were there. And they factored into my decision to continue.

The decision was, therefore, made: I would carry on. 

So, I turned to my computer: an empty Word document glaring back at me. The words did not come. For the first time ever, words would not leave my fingers at all. I turned to my data, reread my previous writing, hoping for inspiration. Nothing. 

I was struck with the most serious case of writer’s block I had ever experienced. Not the best time for it, given that I had a whole thesis to write. I went around asking for advice on writing. I Googled ‘how to write a thesis’, desperately searching for a clearly laid, step-by-step set of instructions – anything to just get the job done. The thought of having to write a full, coherent, structured monograph – and the time it was going to take me – paralysed me: I was unable to do anything at all. 

I spoke to one of my supervisors about it. I told him how I didn’t know how to write anymore. He couldn’t believe it. All these past three years, I had always brought writing to our supervision meetings. My writing had even been consistently complimented. Now, I was sitting in front of him not only telling him that I didn’t know how to write my thesis but also asking how to begin. He was, I guess, a bit shocked. 

He said I looked distraught. He demanded - quite literally, ‘San, I am demanding, as your supervisor, that you take some time off your PhD thesis.’ ‘Three weeks’, he said, ‘of not thinking about your thesis, your research, your PhD.’ He made me promise. But this only made me angrier. I did not want to waste any more time, I just wanted this PhD to be over. This ‘time-off’ would only delay things. It was counterintuitive to my goals of leaving academia. 

You see, Scholar, up until the point of my breakdown, I had only ever planned on writing an ‘experimental thesis’. The idea was simple. You know how a thesis – or even a research paper – follows this structure: 

introduction-literature review-methodology-findings-discussion-conclusion. 

But in reality, research rarely unfolds so neatly or linearly.

We don’t just review literature at the beginning, never to return to it again. We constantly go back and forth between existing literature and our own research, even as we’re writing up our findings, discussion, and conclusion. Similarly, neither do we start with a fixed question and stick to it unchanged; it shifts, evolves, and often transforms entirely as we move through the research process. The process of doing research — and of producing knowledge — is non-linear, post-hierarchical, often messy, and circuitous. It is, as philosophers Deleuze and Guattari would say, rhizomatic.

That is, our knowledge production does not just start with a single root (a central question or premise) that branches upward in a tidy structure and direction (methods > results > contributions). Instead, it spreads in multiple directions at once. It does not follow a singular, ordered path but occurs through iterations, connections, ruptures, revisions, and unexpected associations. 

So, for the longest time, I had planned to write my thesis rhizomatically – in a form that could map the rhizomatic process through which the research itself had unfolded. I wanted to break away from the conventional standards of writing a thesis. 

But now, after the breakdown, and after deciding to simply finish this degree and get that PhD, I convinced myself that I had to write a conventional thesis. One that conformed to institutional standards of scientific writing. 

Writing an experimental thesis would take longer. It would mean reading more philosophy, analysing not just my findings but the research process itself, and articulating a different set of logics and rules. 

That kind of work is slow. And I didn’t want slow. I wanted out.

Besides, writing an experimental thesis was risky. There was no guarantee my examiners would accept it. In fact, there was a very real chance they would reject it – ask me to rewrite the whole thing in a conventional format. Which would mean more time, more work, more of me stuck in academia. I might be given six months of corrections. Or worse, a year.

I am fairly certain that even you, Scholar, might have rolled your eyes just now as I explained what an experimental thesis is. It is true, it’s unconventional, perhaps even absurd.

But I’ve always valued scholarship precisely because of the out-of-the-box thinking it makes possible. Because it encourages risk, creativity, experimentation. And yet, we both know that academia doesn’t always reward those things. It likes to talk about originality and creativity, but it also enforces norms and conformity through institutional pressures and standards. Those pressures keep academics in line. They discipline us structurally by making risk undesirable.

So, given that I desperately needed to pass – seeing as the whole point of continuing was to get the damn PhD – I decided to conform. I chose to write a conventional thesis. And it was that decision to conform that brought on the most severe writer’s block I have ever experienced.

How does someone who has only ever envisioned writing experimentally suddenly switch to something so different? How do you make that shift in mindset, in form, in voice so instantaneously?

This was when I finally understood what writer’s block really is. 

It wasn’t the absence of ideas: no, I had plenty of those. It was the silencing of the voice that actually wanted to speak. The one that wanted to experiment, deviate, think in unexpected directions. That voice had been with me all along – it was what had carried me through my fieldwork, my early drafts, my conference talks. But now I was forcing that voice into a format it didn’t recognise.

Writer’s block, I saw then, is the friction between what you want to say and what you think you’re allowed to say.

It is the paralysis that sets in when your thoughts no longer have a home in the form you’re trying to give them. It is your mind’s rebellion against writing a lie. Or at least, that’s how it manifested for me. 

Still, I began to write something – somehow.

I mimicked conventional theses that I was reading for ‘inspiration’. I changed my voice entirely, killing my writing style, tone, and structure for the sake of conformity.

The first thing I wrote was an empirical chapter; it took me two months to finish. When I showed it to one of my supervisors, they congratulated me.

“Very good, well-structured academic writing,” they said.

I hated that chapter, I still do. I ended up changing it quite a bit towards the end of my thesis-writing period, but I never stopped hating it. It remains to me, one of the worst chapters of my thesis. Believe it or not, my thesis examiner agreed. She said it was one of the weakest chapters of my thesis: it lacked depth, originality, and analytical clarity. She was right. That first empirical chapter I’d written in the beginning of my thesis writing period felt like pulling teeth. Unnatural (for me), dry, stiff, like I’d been put into a corset. 

But something happened in that process of writing and more importantly, in the struggle to write. I found myself returning to the activities I truly enjoyed. I resumed reading all kinds of literature again: not for inspiration or citation, but to move my mind. I started thinking with my reading, with my data. 

Yes, I was still struggling to write. But I was writing. And writing had always been something I loved, ever since I was a little girl. And so, in reading, thinking, and writing – even if at the time it felt forced –these activities returned to me. 

During this period, other events unfolded that brought even more pronounced shifts in my posture.

Just before my breakdown – a few months earlier – I had submitted a manuscript to a journal. Yes, it was still written in an unconventional, experimental style. I heard back around the same time I was finishing that dreaded first empirical chapter. The decision was a ‘reject and resubmit’. But unlike the usual curt editorial emails, this one came with a lengthy, personal note from the Editor-in-Chief himself.

He praised my “unconventional, artful language and a high level of competence and consistency in your use of conceptual and methodological arguments.” He wrote that he “found engaging with the language games of your ontological tradition thought-provoking and inspiring.” 

The rejection, he said, was not because the manuscript lacked rigour or originality, but because – in his words – 

“if your work is to have any broader impact, it needs to reach a larger audience. My impression is that you have gone past the threshold of what you can expect a general research audience to be able to follow.”

In other words, the manuscript was not rejected because it wasn’t interesting or lacked conceptual rigour but instead it did not have the ability to be ‘impactful’ for a broader research audience. 

Strangely enough, this rejection didn’t defeat me. It gave me confidence. Not because I thought I could revise and eventually publish it. But because it affirmed what I had long suspected: that I did not write conventionally, and more importantly, that I didn’t want to. That what I did best was write artfully, playfully whilst not only producing different kinds of research but producing research differently. It brought around in me a stronger belief in my work, and the need for this kind of work which challenges knowledge production itself to exist in our ecosystem of knowledge.  

That email changed the trajectory of my becoming as a researcher. It didn’t push me toward conventional writing. It did the opposite. It reminded me that I could write in the ways I write best. It convinced me that I didn’t want to break my voice to fit a form, and that I didn’t care if I got published in journals that measure the worth of a scholar’s work in citation metrics and readership statistics. I was leaving academia anyway.  

And in the wake of that realisation, something unfolded:

The Scholar – the individual who thinks, learns, and inquires because of the pleasure, intellectual stimulation, and intrinsic value these activities bring them – began to return. The Scholar – who wants to live in a dedicated relationship with knowledge – was coming back to my sense of being. 

I was good at thinking (and thinking about thinking), reading deeply, engineering conceptual arguments, playing with ideas. I realised I still loved knowledge, even if I no longer loved the university. And most importantly, I realised that I could write in any form I wished – as long as I held my work to the highest standard of conceptual and methodological rigour. 

That moment marked the beginning of a new kind of emancipation. Not from writing but from writing for someone else’s game; from trying to prove I belonged; from measuring my worth by institutional standards of academia. It was only the knowledge that I cared for, at the end of the day. 

In the bolstering of this confidence – this refusal to conform – I discovered other PhD theses. Theses that, too, were written unconventionally, flipping the structure of the academic thesis on its head. Reading them moved me. The vulnerability with which they were written, the risks those scholars had taken just to stay true to how their research had actually unfolded – not by following rules, standards, or expectations, but by honouring their own research processes – gave me courage. 

These theses didn’t just contribute to a disciplinary conversation; they expanded our ways of knowing. They questioned what it means to produce knowledge. They didn’t just speak about knowledge; they spoke back to epistemology itself challenging the very conditions of how knowledge is known. They reminded me: I was no longer chasing the spoils of academia. I was done. And if I was done, then I could take risks. I could produce knowledge in the way that felt truest to how I had come to know it: in a post-hierarchical, non-linear, rhizomatic way. If others had done it, I could too.

Of course, this slowed me down. But in slowing down, the writing of my thesis – which ultimately took me more than a year, nearly 18 months – gave me something far more ‘valuable’: space for transformation, exploration, and becoming. It gave me the room not just to produce knowledge, but to be produced by it.

My inherited assumptions about what it means to know and how to know came undone. 

But this time, I was not the one breaking down. Instead, academia had given me the opportunity to break down my relationship to knowledge itself and in doing so, to rebuild it on my own terms. The space-time of writing my thesis provoked a deeper reckoning: a rethinking of the role and purpose of higher education and inquiry in the formation of the self. It made me reflect on the self-transformation that education and inquiry brings to the individual, and what that transformation might bring to our collective vision of human society. 

It encouraged me to cultivate a non-consequentialist approach to knowledge, to reconnect with academia as the temple of education, learning, and scholarship. 

And I began to think, as James March has said, that if we wish to resurrect that temple, 

This process – which showed me the other side of academia – the side that nurtures and produces Scholars – gave me hope. But not hope that I could still ‘make it’ as an academic in contemporary academia.

My favourite philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari, likely would not have thrived in academia today. Their work – often regarded as some of the most convoluted writing – would hardly be allowed to have the ‘impact’ it eventually did by academia’s institutional standards today. They published in small, experimental journals. Their careers in academia, had they started now, might never have taken off in the academic climate of the 21st century. 

Even Peter Higgs – the British physicist and Nobel Prize winner – has said no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough. Reflecting on the contemporary academic culture of churning out papers, he said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

But regardless, I felt hopeful because somehow, academia still managed to produce Scholars. 

I hate to admit it, but those 18 months of writing my thesis – not worrying about academic pressures of publishing papers, rushed teaching and assessment gigs – were some of the most beautiful months of my life. Those 18 months brought about a transformation I never imagined I would undergo by simply doing a higher educational degree called a PhD. And I hate to admit it because those 18 months – as beautiful and transformative as they were – were still facilitated by the very institution I wanted to walk away from.

In the postscript of my thesis – written in the moments before submission, as a surge of emotion overtook me while reflecting on the process – I wrote of this transformation: 

“I would like to highlight that the writing of this text in itself has been a transformational project. For me, the bodily practice of ‘writing’ has not been one where I have merely expelled what I have learnt and experienced onto this text but instead has involved an inscription onto my very own body. This inscription is an act which has not only marked my body but altered my very self. As Kamler and Thomson (2006) have suggested, the process of writing a thesis “creates the scholar who at the end of writing is different from the writer who began” (pp.16). More than a year and half of writing – and struggling to write – this thesis has shown me the possibility of producing scholarship that is different: one that does not completely conform with institutionally accepted standards of academic writing but would nevertheless still be considered an acceptable doctoral thesis. I have written this text in a way that has allowed me to – to some extent – make visible the post-hierarchical, rhizomatic way in which this research was produced. I performed this inquiry in ways that were unable to follow the linear sequence of doing research, and instead remained open to the possibilities of the material-realities I was inquiring into and through. It is in doing and writing this inquiry that I am a scholar who is different from the one who began this inquiry. And while I am unable to fully articulate this transformation, it is an ineffable sense of not just arriving at the end of my thesis but also of my own arrival.” 

The transformation I could not name then was this: I had become a Scholar. 

I arrived at The Scholar after deciding to leave academia. And yet, I cannot not deny that The Scholar in me was forged within, with, and through academia itself. 

At the end of my thesis-writing period, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the institution I had so badly wanted to leave. I felt indebted to it, even. For was it not academia that had given me the space-time to pursue my scholarly becoming? Academia had given me the opportunity to make this transformation happen. 

And so, I have asked myself since: what am I to do? How could I leave the very place that had nurtured and facilitated my becoming into a Scholar? How could I walk away from the institution that had, in part, made me who I now was? How could I leave academia when I had developed an ineffable inability to let go of The Scholar? 

If this essay stirred something, be it a question, a reflection, a story of your own, we want to hear it. The Scholarly Letter exists because we believe that knowledge begins in conversation. So just reply to this email if you want to start an exchange.