For at least 50 years now, there has been a diaspora of academics in the humanities leaving higher education, the job sector for which we were specifically trained (and for little else). Some of us depart after long teaching careers, while many other Ph.D.s never get a chance to grow frustrated with faculty life.
Imagine going to medical school with the expectation that, after a decade of training, you would be unlikely to find work in medicine: “While it’s true that only a small fraction of our graduates become doctors, there are many other things one can do with a medical degree — for example, sorting packages, stocking shelves, or selling health coverage over the phone, while paying down $120,000 in student loans. Remember, educational debt is ‘good’ debt.”
Whatever your reasons for leaving academe, you’ll find plenty of career advice on your transferable skills. That’s not my aim here. Instead, this is about all the academic inclinations that you have to get over to be a viable job candidate in the world beyond the campus.
Just 25 years ago, when I was pursuing a doctorate in English at Harvard University, graduate students were leery of attending career-development events because it might suggest that you were not committed to becoming a professor. Only a minority of my graduate cohort eventually joined the profession. I remember incredulous news reports of Ph.D.s driving taxis. I was writing about this situation in the late-90s, before some of today’s graduate students were born, and I have a file cabinet of printed emails from back then telling me that my “just don’t go” warnings about graduate school were alarmist.
Now that a traditional academic career is all but an impossibility for most new Ph.D.s, the survival of many doctoral programs (and their affiliated faculty positions) depends on maintaining a perception that one can use that experience to find employment anywhere. For at least two decades now, there has been a lot of talk — such as this 1998 essay — about how a doctorate in English offers “transferable skills” (critical thinking, research, public speaking) to prospective employers outside of academe.
I was one of the lucky graduate students who had a fellowship and who eventually did have an academic career as a tenured professor at a liberal-arts college in the Midwest. But after retiring early from that role after more than 20 years — for reasons that I wrote about in 2021 here and here — I initially found myself failing to persuade employers that I might have something to offer them. I had trouble getting job interviews, even with my extensive experience in research, teaching, publishing, speaking, consulting, fund raising, and grants administration.
In 2022, I found a full-time position as a development officer at a nonprofit in Chicago. It took me six months on that job to realize that — while I could support the mission of the organization — it was not the kind of major grant-seeking work that I wanted to do. Mostly it was a lot of days spent making cold calls to dormant accounts, following up on conversations at events, giving tours, and sending thank-you letters. I felt simultaneously underutilized and overqualified, and as the months wore on, I became visibly unhappy in the role. So much so that I looked toward the inevitable end of the position with relief.
And I am once again on the job market, drawing down my retirement savings, paying for medical coverage, and wondering if this is a downward spiral from which I will never recover. Do I regret leaving my faculty job? Sometimes. I miss teaching, colleagues, and relative job security. But I also continue to have hope and work toward a new life beyond my career as a professor.
For any professors and doctoral students who are planning to leave academe, know that, especially after a long career, the shift may very likely shake the foundations of your being. Ultimately, I’ve had to minimize my “academic self” and focus on specific skills and deliverables that might justify a nonacademic employer hiring me for positions that typically are filled by recent college graduates.
I want to emphasize: Former academics can bring many positive things to any nonacademic workplace. Among them are critical thinking and communication skills, research-mindedness, and, in most cases, a commitment to social justice in a variety of forms. Former academics have had to pass through many narrow gates: It is not easy to get into a reputable graduate program, earn top grades, write an original dissertation, find a job, teach effectively, publish even more, serve on committees, win grants, network, navigate institutional politics, and earn tenure and promotion. The tenure track is one of the most competitive races in the entire realm of professional employment. Those levels of capability and persistence are, all by themselves, signifiers of inherent value for any sort of position.
Beyond that, many academics are idealists who dream of having a positive impact on the world: Ph.D.s are not in it for the money (after all, we could have pursued careers that required far less training and paid far more than higher ed does). We generally value work for its own sake.
All of which should make former professors attractive candidates for a wide range of positions, especially in the foundation sector. But success — or even a modestly paying job with benefits — after long service in higher education is not a sure thing. As I can personally attest. Because, while former professors may have inherent capabilities and many transferable skills, we may also have ingrained habits and dispositions that make career transitions challenging for us and for our employers and co-workers, even with the best of intentions.
Many academics are not used to regular business hours. When you’re a professor, you work much of the time and do as you please some of the time. As the saying goes, “You can work any 50 or 60 hours per week that you like.”
That’s nearly true: Professors teach and serve on committees at scheduled hours, but most of us are not used to the discipline of the 9-to-5 workday. We ruminate, walk, eat, read, shop, make calls, teach a class, write a committee report, talk with a few students, grade some papers, and then get back to research, perhaps late into the evening. Who can say how many working hours that adds up to in any given day, but most of us are at it all the time. Professors prize self-direction and control over our schedules, including weeks and months that may be focused on independent research. That freedom is part of the creative process, but it can also become a problem in more structured workplaces.
A lot of Ph.D.s think deadlines are flexible. When I first started graduate school, one of the biggest surprises for me was the laxity regarding deadlines. Professors would permit extensions, sometimes indefinitely, for final essays in their seminars. I suspect many of those essays never materialized, and the students faded away within another semester.
The same is true for many academic editors, who often build this tendency into their planning and publication schedules — so much so that I eventually started asking, “Yeah, but what’s the real deadline?” And then, a bit later: “OK, but what’s the real, real deadline?” The stress of academe is often so high that perfectionism mutates into procrastination, and finally results in the inability to produce anything, combined with crippling feelings of guilt and shame amid relative job security.
In most jobs outside of higher ed, such work habits are not possible: Your time-on-task may even be monitored, minute by minute. But then you may find yourself accountable to a manager — perhaps 20 years your junior — on a daily or weekly basis. And if you can’t produce steadily, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., that will eventually prove your unsuitability for the work. The discipline of such monitored productivity can change the bad habits that academe often permits, sometimes for decades, after professors secure tenure and drift into the rhythms of teaching and service, sabbaticals, and summer breaks, shadowed by unfulfilled obligations to editors.
On the other hand, most nonacademics actually enjoy their weekends, holidays, and vacations. They’ll talk about plans for travel, sports, or time with their families. Academics — when asked about their weekend and vacation plans — tend to say, “grading,” “writing,” or just “crazy busy,” as they stride down the hallway, swilling coffee, and looking anxious and tired. The first lesson of academic life is that you never admit to having leisure time, outside interests, or a personal life. Your only interest must be your work, which is so very, very important. To admit otherwise is to indicate that you are “not serious. No academic would say, ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’”
Academics like to be THE expert in the organization. Perhaps it’s the cultural antagonism faced by academic humanists that causes many of us to adopt a pose of self-importance that seems so odious in other contexts. We can test people on what we have said in a lecture hall, and we grow accustomed to feeling like unchallengeable authorities. We dress as we please and cultivate eccentricities that would not be tolerated in many professional workplaces.
Of course, more than anything else, professors crave meaning in their work, which we are conditioned to believe cannot exist outside of academe. Similarly, we value individualism: the ability to decide on our own, not just how to spend our time, but what to believe, and how to express ourselves. That freedom is incredibly hard to give up for a time clock, a mission statement, and an organizational style manual.
Anyone who has attended a faculty meeting knows the difficulty of reaching consensus and cultivating a team spirit: The freethinking culture of academe works against that — and it is not wrong to do so. Academic freedom — where it survives — is the best feature of working in higher education. Tenure allows us to throw ourselves on the gears and levers of change and say “Stop!”
And it’s also why former academics sometimes languish in authority-driven work cultures with set routines and productivity goals. That’s especially true if, post-academe, you are unable to reframe your understanding of the boundaries between life and work: “If I agree to this marketing plan, what does that say about me?”
Academe thinks so highly and idealistically of itself — sometimes with good reason — that leaving a campus may prompt a profound sense of having come down in the world, of having lost a calling. In varying degrees, professors exist in a total culture for so many years that we become institutionalized, and sometimes we struggle to find a similar meaning in other occupations, much like someone who has left the military, a monastery, or a prison.
And yet most of us have had the same struggles inside academe. Who am I doing this work for? Who wants it? Who reads it? We know something is wrong, but we dare not rock the boat. We are like Sinclair Lewis’s minister in Elmer Gantry who dreads having to give another sermon to empty pews but remains unable to change anything. We have lost the call, but we are unable to find another. What if we fail? What if we must keep steady hours and become accountable to a manager for everything we do? What if no one takes us seriously when we talk about Foucault and the Panopticon, again?
Whatever your profession, if you can’t find meaning in your work — if you recognize that you are part of the problem — then you are in the “wrong job,” and you need to start looking for the “right job” somewhere else. For me, that became true in many aspects of my faculty life. And now I am working hard to find my “right job” again, probably outside of higher education, since it’s almost impossible to return there once you’ve stepped away.
I’m not claiming that these counterproductive tendencies I’ve cited here are universal among all former academics, but they are common. And I am not posing as someone who has never been afflicted by them. For a former professor, every misstep can become a breakthrough. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void with great speed. When you stub your toe on the foot of the bed, that was a gap in knowledge. And pain is a lot of information coming at you quickly. That’s what pain is.”
If that’s true, then I have acquired more knowledge and information in the last year than in the previous 10. I wish I could have acquired it sooner, and less painfully.
