Quit Lit: Professors Who Leave Academe Pen Blistering Departure Op-Eds

Inside Higher Ed, Public Good-byes:

Like most breakups, those between higher education and the academics who choose to leave it typically happen quietly. But as in romance, sometimes these breakups become very public affairs -- usually when an academic decides to reflect on the decision in a blog or other medium. The genre, called “quit lit,” has been around for several years, at least according to social media. And it’s enjoying a resurgence of sorts, thanks to some recent high-profile Dear John letters.

Oliver Lee Bateman, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, attracted lots of attention this week with his Vox column called “I have one of the best jobs in academia. Here’s why I’m walking away.”

Bateman says that he was looking forward to spending a lifetime in academe after triumphing in the “Hunger Games” that is graduate school, but then “it all began to fall apart.” First there was the “sniping” from peers and administrators, he says, including critiques that he was too casual and calm for someone on the tenure track. Then there were “official pushback and politics,” he says, such as criticism for performing public outreach by publishing in popular magazines such as The Atlantic. Finally, he says, recalling a student who was watching old episodes of Breaking Bad instead of listening to a relatively dynamic lecture, “I realized not even the students were too invested.”

“Op-eds about the failings of higher education are like certain unmentionable body parts: everybody's got one,” Bateman wrote. “But these are just parts of a larger and even more troubling story. After spending four years working in higher education, trying to effect piecemeal improvements, I'm convinced that the picture is more dire than most people realize: there's no one single problem to fix or villain to defeat, no buzzword-y panacea that will get things back to normal.” ...

In an interview, Bateman said he’s received similar praise from peers, as well as some criticism from those who say he simply can't “hack" academe. Bateman said that was partially true, since he’s rejecting the overwhelming “pressures” of academic life for one closer to family, practicing law. He said he hopes his essay -- which includes a point-by-point analysis of what he thinks is wrong with academe -- opens up a conversation about how to improve it. He stressed that it’s not the people in higher education who are to blame for its faults, but rather a deeply flawed system. ...

Quit lit’s been around for some time, and it ranges in tone from highly critical to matter-of-fact to inspirational. In a 2014 interview with The Hairpin about her decision to leave academia for a job as a news editor at BuzzFeed, for example, cultural studies scholar and blogger Anne Helen Petersen said that “much of academic writing prides itself on being as inaccessible as possible, and I mean that both literally and figuratively -- you can’t understand it unless you’ve had at least five years of graduate school, and you can’t actually get your hands on it without affiliation with a major institution.” Petersen also said that academe was “drunk,” in that it tended to be myopic in its interests.

In a less controversial but widely viewed post to his personal blog in 2010, Matt Welsh, a former associate professor of computer science at Harvard University, said he was leaving his faculty position for Google for the simple reason that he loved the work he was doing for the search engine giant.

Chronicle of Higher Education, Why So Many Academics Quit and Tell:

Recently, there’s been a surge of cathartic columns in which scholars—with tenure and without—explain why they’re leaving academia. (We've listed the essays we've read here in a Google Doc; take a look and add pieces we've missed.)

There’s nothing new, of course, about academics leaving the ivory tower. But the exploding genre of “Quit Lit” demonstrates that saying goodbye is becoming an increasingly public act.

We’ve been collecting these pieces for a while, in part because we wanted to get a sense of what was driving the writers to move on. Find the results of our informal study here.

But then we came to an even more basic question: Why are so many ex-scholars motivated to write? So I asked a bunch of the stars of Quit Lit for their thoughts.

The Atlantic, No One Cares That You Quit Your Job:

Making the rounds yesterday and today, yet another “why I quit academia” piece. Quitpieces, I guess we’re calling them—or I am anyway. (The term “quit lit” has also circulated, but the “lit” designator seems generous to me.) There are lots more of these, if the genre is new to you.

Guess what. Working for a living is a pain in the ass. Nobody cares that I quit finance. Or advertising, retail, technology consulting, the entertainment industry, or anywhere else I’ve worked. The trick with quitting is that you want people to throw a party for you when you do it. Quitpieces are the opposite of parties. If you're writing a quitpiece you've already lost. Everybody knows that quitters quit. ...

There are reasons why scholars find succor in quitpieces, but they are both exhausting and counter-productive. Here’s the truth: academia is an amazing sector with some of the best features of any job, even if it also has substantial problems. Folks on the way out might feel like they're biting their thumb at something, and those still “stuck” on the inside of this troubled-but-terrific career might feel some welcome-if-temporary solidarity. But after that, it’s just more fodder for legislators, corporations, and the general public to undermine the academy. It helps nobody in the long run.

Why should anyone be impressed that somebody can quit something? Much more impressive is figuring out how to live with it. More staypieces, please.