My Leaving Academia Story

I’ve had no regrets about doing what at first felt like walking the plank, but has in reality been a joyful leap into a fuller life.

Welcome to all the new subscribers to MeghanBPhD —a newsletter exploring the intersections of DEI, leaving academia, and contemporary workplaces. I am so glad you’re here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so! It will help to assure that my posts land in your inbox. The newsletter is free for the entire month of June 2024. Enjoy!

Today’s post is a bit of an orientation —letting you in on the journey that got us here, and addressing one of the most common questions I’m asked: “Why did you leave a tenured(!!) Full Professorship?” This will be a longer post, so if you’re truly curious, get comfy! (Want the Tl;dr? I’ll bold the key points.)

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

During the academic year of 2019-2020, the same year I made Full Professor, our university administration and Board put faculty through a sham of a program review process. (You can read more about the details of that failed process here, in the AAUP report that provides the context for the later sanction my former university would receive. As of June 2024, that sanction still stands.) We were told explicitly that no tenured faculty would lose their jobs, and then a group of hardworking faculty colleagues were tasked with using a data set and framework, hired in from an outside consulting firm, to make a series of tough curricular recommendations. (Because faculty own the curriculum, this was the right choice at that juncture.) Sociology, my home program, passed those metrics with flying colors. We provided a clear value to our students, we were cheap ahem, cost-effective, and we had the metrics to prove it.

Those wider program and curricular recommendations were shared, debated, and endorsed during the spring of 2020, and while many of us were disappointed about some recommended program changes (our sister program of anthropology being reduced to a minor was among them, though they had a clear and strong role remaining in our general education curriculum under this plan), we breathed a sigh of relief when the semester ended, turning our attention to surviving a global pandemic and learning how to deliberately teach online for the first time in the fall. (It seems worth noting that I was also recovering from 4 days of being hospitalized with blood clots in my lungs in April 2020, too, and so the rest and reset felt particularly important to me.)

Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash

That changed on Friday afternoon, June 12, the same day my research was featured in O Magazine, when dozens of us received letters informing us that our programs were being recommended for closure. No clear rationale for this decision has ever been provided. It was also unclear what would happen to our positions. In short, after paying handsomely for that outside consulting firm to train us on their data and metrics, the Board and administrators basically said “wrong answer” and began the process of terminating the programs they saw as dispensable, based, it seems, entirely on vibes.

That summer involved long days organizing with our fellow faculty and many devoted alumni and other supporters, organizing made additionally challenging by the lack of vaccines at that stage in the pandemic. We were given an entirely new, though deeply vague, paradigm from which we were to make our cases for professional survival. In the end, once again, my home program of sociology survived, but others did not, and 9 of my fellow tenured colleagues, including our dear colleagues in anthropology, lost their jobs. Tenure was functionally ended at Illinois Wesleyan, as those who were not faculty took power over the curriculum, and the one frayed thread of “job security” we clung to in exchange for low pay and constant overwork was severed.

Fast forward to the end of that summer: I can still recall the exact spot on the TART Trail in Traverse City, MI (my favorite place on earth) where I was biking with my parents when I stopped my bike, looked at them, and said, with the cool winds of Lake Michigan blowing into my helmet, “How dare they not have fired me?!?” I was tasting the freedom that could sit on the other side of this experience, dreading stepping back into an academic year that, like so many others, left little time for my own health and happiness because I gave so much of my time and energy to my institution. I was furious that after everything that had happened, I had to walk back onto campus and pretend that everything was fine. That was my first clue that I wasn’t just relieved to have survived the program review process again. It had also broken me. I wanted out.

I’ll dive deeper into this in future posts –the clarity that the summer provided about my tenured job not really being tenured after all, the recognition that I’d been approaching it like a(n abusive) marriage when instead it was just. a. job. I was furious that I had given so much of my one wild and precious life to an institution that cared nothing for me in return, that had given me no reason to trust them other than when they told us, at the beginning of that academic year, that program review would be an iterative process. I couldn’t do this anymore. So I began looking for an exit.

Photo by Andrew Teoh on Unsplash

There is more I could say about that offramp for me, and I will share what may be useful about that in future posts. In short, early that fall, a colleague and friend in another program whispered that she was planning to leave because of what had happened, and I asked if I could watch and learn from her as she did. Then, I gave myself a weekend-long at-home retreat (not hard for a homebody hermit with recent lung trauma before vaccines were available during a global pandemic) where I focused on application materials and translating my skill set for non-academic jobs. Then I began to send out some applications. Then some of those applications got traction. And then a friend doing some contract work for a major media company reached out to introduce me to their DEI team, who needed a research study done for one of their efforts. I successfully completed that study, meeting the terrific people on their DEI Strategy team who told me that a full-time opening was on the horizon. I applied when it became available, and was quickly hired. The rest is history.  

That history, of course, like all histories, is laced with the realities of privilege: it would have been harder if I was older, if I wasn’t white and straight and cisgender, if my body size was much larger or if I was disabled, if I hadn’t already had the long runway of a full-time academic position for 12+ years prior during which I could demonstrate my expertise and skill set, etc. I also didn’t have a partner at the time, nor kids whose lives could be radically changed by my own sharp career turn. There are complexities to all of those realities for me, and we’ll dig into many of them in the context of work in future posts. But it was a position from which I could launch the next stage of my life, and so I did.

And, friends, it’s been beautiful.

I’ve moved both roles (from DEI to Research) and companies (from a major media conglomerate to big 4 insurance) since that time, but once I was out, that wasn’t hard at all. And today I’m totally confident that I made the right choice, and that my newfound focus on career security over the (false!) promise of job security is the right approach for my life and career. I make great money now. (My 2020 tax return, since I had to look it up, reports a pre-tax income of $62K as a professor, and I still had a lot of student loan debt.) I can live in a place of my choosing —something academics often cannot do given the nature of the academic job market. And, critically, I do interesting and meaningful work with other really smart, thoughtful people, and I have terrific work-life balance. 

I don’t miss teaching, as I’m often asked, in part because I’m still doing it in my role –just not the kind of teaching where I’m constantly grading and students are crying in my office. And I sometimes miss writing, so now I’m doing this! I never miss the service (faculty meetings, advising, committee work, peer review, Saturdays spent on campus recruiting high schoolers, etc.). In the end, even as a “rising star” in the academy, earning Full by 40, publishing 3 books and lots of articles that according to my Google Scholar alerts are still being widely cited, winning teaching and mentoring and service awards, being nationally recognized for my DEI expertise, …in short Doing All The Things and then some –I would never go back to that life. I’ve had no regrets about doing what at first felt like walking the plank, but has in reality been a joyful leap into a fuller life.

So, thank you for joining me here in it. I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned in this transition and bringing my expertise to bear on conversations about careers and work more broadly –for those considering or already leaving academia, but also for all of us grappling with contemporary work writ large. I also am excited to learn from your stories and the places we’ll go together as we wade into the messy questions we’ll get to ask and begin to answer together.

Please do join me in the comments —I’d love to hear your thoughts on job and career security, moments that may have rattled your professional cage and cracked you open, the contours of your own pause, stop, and start buttons both personally and professionally, and what you’re curious to know as we try to make sense of them. Remember, you can (and should!) also submit your anonymous questions for my monthly Ask Me Anything series that starts in a couple weeks.

Tuesday, I’ll have a new post for you about the problematic language of “welcoming” in DEI efforts. And if you want to read along for this month’s book review, I’m reading Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle —it will be fascinating to discuss this book from a range of academic and non-academic perspectives, with DEI, as ever, at the center.

See you again soon.