Losing Your Academic Identity

...if you ever had one in the first place!

Hi, everyone! While today’s post is specifically about leaving academia, it contains insights about DEI as well as what else gets loaded into our professional identities in any contemporary workplace, and so I do hope there’s something here for everyone. As a reminder, I’m forever eager for submissions to my Ask Me Anything series on topics in ANY of those three buckets. And if you’re especially interested in today’s topic, you may also be interested in my next choice for my book review series: Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. That will post in about a month, so grab a copy and read along!

OK, let’s dig into today’s topic….

One common thread of the discourse around leaving academia is about the challenge many academics, be they long-tenured faculty members like me or grad students who got fed up with the lack of viable academic career options, face in not just finding new careers but also new identities. So when I began my process of leaving back in 2020, and Capital-L Left in 2021, I braced myself for that loss.

….And it never came.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

I want to be clear that the grief in one’s loss of academic identity is widespread, valid, and worthy of care in response to it. I’m sharing that this was NOT a struggle for me 1) to remind you that, if you are considering leaving academia, not all of your fears about loss will come to fruition, and 2) because as I’ve reflected on why this wasn’t the emotional path I walked, I think the reasons I’ve surfaced tell us more about the structure and culture of academia, and professional identities more broadly.

I also selected this topic to follow The Good Enough Job, the focus of my last book review, because I suspect the challenge for many academics in forging a new identity is a result of the enmeshment that Stolzoff explored in his book. When we are enmeshed with our work, work not only seeps into so many elements of our day that it can produce burnout, but it also becomes our main, if not sole, source of community, meaning, and, critically, identity. While I worked myself to exhaustion during the 13 years of my faculty career, and constantly was experimenting with strategies to put some boundaries around my time and energy, I don’t know that I was fully enmeshed. I was a (tenured!) faculty member, but Academic was never Who I Was.

The reasons for this, I think, were twofold. One is that, perhaps as a function of being mostly single and free from caregiving responsibilities during that era of my life, when I did have time that I could carve out as my own, I had near-total freedom to put my energies where I wanted them, and I wanted life outside of work, however fleeting. While I had (and still have!) many dear friends who are/were academics, including an important group who navigated our institution’s fuckery together by leaning heavily on, and organizing alongside, one another, my closest friends were in other occupations, industries, and even life stages. So when I was unplugged from work, I was fully in that other world. That became an important anchor for me as I made my transition. My whole world wasn’t changing —just my job.

I have never been to Princeton: Photo by Tim Alex on Unsplash

The second reason I don’t think I experienced it is a bit deeper. There’s a level on which I never felt like a real academic. Perhaps this is imposter syndrome; despite my many academic accomplishments, everything from the books I published and the awards I won and my smooth path through my two promotions to Associate and Full, I never really let myself believe I was worthy of the prestige that those things theoretically conferred. And I say “theoretically” because it is not just my own baggage around worthiness that shapes that experience.

It’s also the experience of exclusion, erasure, and exploitation that structures the career for women, those in the social sciences or humanities, and those who didn’t have the right kind of (economic and therefore) social or cultural capital that brings them to the right Ph.D. programs and advisors. I was never positioned to run in anything but the peripheries of my areas of expertise. (Note, of course, that this disparity is often even more pronounced for those who come from lesser economic means, for faculty of color, etc.) On campus, older men outside of my discipline would sometimes explain my area of expertise to me like I was one of their students, and couldn’t hear the pushback when I’d (admittedly likely too gently) set them straight. Students would treat most other male professors with reverence and respect and me like I was there to serve and soothe them. (Did I resent them? No.) But I could go on. In the end, I still experienced gatekeeping even from inside the academy. The point is that few ever really treated me like An Academic, like a Faculty Member, like an Expert. So how could I have come to really feel like one?

Photo by Clayton Cardinalli on Unsplash

How do I think about my identity now? I mostly don't. But there are some things I grapple with: One is the problems inherent in the “What do you do?” conversation when you meet someone new. I try hard not to ask it myself (“What do you like to do?” is a better alternative, if you need one), but those getting-to-know-you interactions almost always lead us there anyway. As an academic, especially in low-stakes exchanges where the person was unlikely to go on to become a friend, I’d evade saying I was a professor because I feared it conveyed a status that didn’t feel true for me. I’d say, “Oh, I teach,” or “I work at a university” if I could get away with it. But now, when I get that question, saying “Oh, I do customer research for an insurance company” also feels like it doesn’t say enough.

This is in large part because, again, the question itself is a bad one: none of us should be reduced to what we do for a paycheck. But I confess I also find myself sometimes telling people, “It’s so much more interesting than it sounds!” I’ve also found myself wanting to tell people, and sometimes I do, that I used to be a professor, or that I’m a former academic, or that I’ve also worked in DEI Strategy for a well-known media company. Is this ego? Yes. Is it also a defensive posture toward those who still revere academia over other career paths? Yes. Is it a reflection of the sociological reality that our identities are always forged by how they are read and rewarded or punished by others? Also yes.

In the end, I don’t think it’s really about a loss of academic identity. I think, instead, it’s a shift, a new way of negotiating something that has always been fraught with tensions. Identities like “academic” are never as fixed and fully conferring of [fill in your preferred way of imagining what that means for others] here. And there’s always, no matter how enmeshed we might become, the fuller picture of who we actually are.

Much as Stolzoff reminded us in The Good Enough Job, it’s likely useful for all of us to ask ourselves, and more importantly remember, who else we are, outside of our professional identities —especially knowledge workers like (former) academics. Therein likely lies a way to hedge against those losses but also to remember how we should all regard one another in community and social settings —as full-ass humans who are more than our jobs.

For the comments: How do you negotiate and communicate your professional identity? —This is no less interesting for non-academics; I’d also love to think together about how where we’re positioned in differing social hierarchies shapes our relationship to our work identities. In short, jump in and tell me what this looks like for you, and what you think I might have missed as I’ve pondered this landscape.