On Leaving Academia

As I write this, I'm just a handful of days away from teaching my last class at Berkeley...certainly the last as a graduate student, and perhaps the last ever (I've learned to never say never).  A year ago, I would have greeted this day with overwhelming joy, but something funny happened in the last year.  I started having fun again with school and my work.  The first year back after J's accident was really hard.  After a year or so of dealing with very. heavy. stuff. it seemed odd to be focusing all my energies on early modern Europe or writing about theatres and Calvinists.  It all seemed trivial.

But once I got over the initial hump of writing--and submitted a truly terrible first chapter--I started enjoying the process more (not always...there have still been moments that I've truly loathed in all of this).  I joined writing groups and found inspiration in reading other people's works (BIG hugs to my writing group friends..they made this past year one of the best of my grad school career), and found myself excited about writing.  There was joy in crafting beautiful sentences and paragraphs and sections.  I also had the opportunity this past year to really embrace teaching through my job as a teaching consultant.  I'm glad this past year has been positive, because come July 15, I'll be saying goodbye to academia.  I'm glad to be going out on a more positive note.  A year ago, it would have been very different.

But I am, in fact, leaving.  And happily so.  When I started thinking about the job market, it became clear to me fairly quickly that I would not pursue traditional academic jobs.  A lot of factors contributed to this decision, with the biggest being our unwillingness to leave the Bay area.  Jason is happy at work, we LOVE Savannah's school, we have friends here, and feel like we belong to a community.  I don't want to destroy all of that.  Plus, the Bay is super wheelchair-accessible and good for SCI-ers. There are, of course, colleges and unis in the Bay area, so if I really wanted to pursue academia, I suppose I could have done so.  But, when I really thought about what I wanted out of the next phase of my life...what I wanted for our family, it became obvious that I would not find those things as a tenure-track professor.

Because, when it comes down to it, there's a lot about academia that I'm happy to leave.  While grad life has been relatively family friendly--flexible, lots of ability to work from home, etc etc--pursuing the tenure track would be different.  I don't want to travel for work anymore (at least not for the weeks and months necessary to do proper archival work); I don't want to leave my family for that.  For as much as I've come to enjoy this final bit of dissertating, the notion of starting a new project from scratch does not appeal.  At all. I also prefer to be teaching rather than researching, by a lot.  These concerns, of course, assume that I would be able to land a tenure track job, that holy grail newly minted PhDs seek.  In the years since I began grad school in 2005, though, the academy has changed.  Budget cuts and other institutional changes have led to the adjunctification of the professoriate (see http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-adjunct-professor-crisis/361336/).  Right now, 76.4% of faculty at universities in the US are adjuncts--generally speaking, this means: low pay (like poverty level low), no benefits, no job security, no real guarantee of advancement, and so on.  I don't want that, and, honestly, I don't think anyone who has spent 7+ years working on an advanced degree should be put into a situation where that is their only real option.  I want security, and I would like to know that there is at least the possibility of advancing my career. I want something a bit different, which is why I accepted the job that I did.  Starting in July, I'll be teaching AP World History at a new private school in San Jose.  I'm excited to be teaching full-time, and look forward to being able to work with a group of bright, engaged students.

I have enjoyed the last nine years.  I have met amazing people, been intellectually engaged, and have learned the joy to be found in teaching.  So much has happened in this period--it truly has been transformative.  But it's time to move on to new challenges and adventures.