Saturday, August 04, 2007

Escaping Academic Hell

There's a Canadian woman whose blog I read regularly, who apparently was a member of the hallowed halls of academia, until a few months ago, when she realized that the job of her (previous) dreams was slowly killing her. Now she's doing something really NOT academic, and a happy woman.

I felt trapped. What was I qualified to do? Nothing. (This is the problem with knowing more and more: you feel you actually know less and less.) If I left, what would that make me? I’d constructed much of my identity around my job. When people said, "What do you do?" I said, "I’m an academic." Who would I be?

1 comment:

Rufus said...

Ugh, I understand nearly every word of this. I don't know what makes institutions treat academics so badly, but they all seem to do it. Actually, it's something of a constant throughout history. We don't produce products; we just go through funds with the vague and nebulous result of adding some sort of 'value' to society. It's understandable that we might be seen as con artists by the general public. But by universities too?