A year ago I wrote about my decision to leave academe and a tenured, endowed position to try something else. I had what would be considered a very successful faculty career — with more than 200 publications and $2.3 million in grants — but felt increasingly unhappy in a job that was extremely hard to get.
Perhaps I could have found joy in securing more grants and leading new projects, but being a professor also meant writing about literature for a shrinking audience of specialists, and a dwindling number of students, while occupying a position that could pay the salaries of at least two junior faculty members with fresh training and new ideas. Sometimes you just know that it’s time to move on: You can use tenure to hang on to your privileges, making little use of them — if not doing actual harm — or you can take a leap of faith into the unfamiliar.
I chose to leap. I concluded my academic career without another job in hand. Some colleagues said I was making a terrible mistake; that I was too young to retire, at age 53. And there were times over the course of this past, difficult year when I worried they might be right.
Leaving academe was possibly the hardest decision I’ve ever made. And I could not have done it alone. I was fortunate to have a partner who was willing to help. A year later, I have a new career, but the transition wasn’t easy — not practically, emotionally, or spiritually — for either of us.
The strain of “rebranding.” I understand why leaving a tenured position seems unthinkable. Back in 2000 I wrote about how being offered a tenure-track position at a church-affiliated, liberal-arts college in the Midwest restored my hope in the profession, and I spent 22 years there. The positives and negatives of that experience are now so entangled that I can no longer separate the profession from the culture of that institution and the community in which it resides.
When you leave a tenured position in the humanities, the chance of finding another one — unless you are a freshly minted Ph.D. or a star in a hot field — is close to zero. You must rebrand yourself for a new career path in ways that will cut your identity to the core.
I was not emotionally prepared to do that. We moved to Chicago, where there are almost unrivaled possibilities for employment combined with a relatively moderate cost of living. But even with all that opportunity and support, for more than six months — a period that included dozens of informational interviews, extensive personal networking, and at least 50 job applications — I did not get a single job interview.
As the months wore on, and the days darkened, I fell into a despair from which I am lucky to have emerged. During those months, I was fixated on the sunk costs of my faculty career. It had been such a slog: so much debt, so many relocations, so many people left behind. And what about all the sacrifices made by others to help me? How could I have walked away from that? I don’t think there’s any way to avoid such feelings.
Tenured professors often overestimate their value. Our besetting sin is pride. Sure, professors work hard in the early years of a faculty career, passing through many narrow gates. On the other hand, there is little, at the outset, that distinguishes us from long-serving adjuncts except privilege, luck, and the willingness to relocate. On every faculty there are haves and have nots, and the advantages of the haves accumulate, under the pretense of pure merit. In our hearts, the tenured know that we won a lottery in a cloistered system, and that casts a shadow over any confidence we may have about our value in the “outside world.”
Meanwhile, my inner world became one of endless negative self-talk: Who am I if I am not a professor? The answer I got from myself: Nothing. Academics are trained to think that way about the “life of the mind.” That’s what keeps so many of us in the profession, even when we are being exploited in part-time, no-benefits positions. It’s also the ugly reason we are prone to look down on people without doctorates and tenure, or with positions that seemingly rank lower than ours.
Changing careers, for academics like me, has been both a voluntary and an involuntary process. It has meant embracing a depth of humility that presents itself, initially, through feelings of lost self-worth and hopelessness.
Shortly after I submitted my request to retire — wallowing in fear and diagnosed with depression — I even asked my former employer to rescind it. Like I was drunk-dialing after a bad breakup. Eventually my institution granted me emeritus status but declined my request for reinstatement. Returning to the campus one day, I found that I could no longer enter the building that housed my former department. I was now on the outside looking in, literally.
There is no going home. That reality forced me to make changes that I was not previously prepared to accept. And it made me reach out for help, finding many friends in places that I did not foresee.
In the early phase of my job search, I also explored some new directions. That included signing up for classes at the Acting Studio Chicago, Second City, and the Chicago Dramatists. I had taught comedy writing for a few years, and I was also the notorious creator of a Twitter persona called “Werner Twertzog” with almost 80,000 followers. Based on that background, I thought I might have a chance at a late-life career in comedy writing. I am not charismatic or spontaneously funny, but I did have an interest in writing for television. It took me a semester to learn that comedy is a more plausible pursuit for the young, financially independent, and others who have the capacity to face a level of long-term rejection that is even more brutal and soul-killing than the academic version.
At the same time, I thought — after being told so by a lot of people — that my “sandy gravitas” could lead to a career in voice acting. That mistake was obvious to me within a few classes. For starters, a good voice actor needs many voices (New York taxi driver, Viennese opera singer, angry howler monkey) and I only had one, with minor variations. Nor could I perform sound effects (a locomotive bearing down upon a flock of sheep or a Victorian pump organ playing underwater). I hadn’t attended a performing-arts school, and the other students were like the cast of Fame.
Meanwhile, my nonacademic job search was going nowhere. My fundamental mistake was thinking that I could present myself as I was, with my 20-page CV and my conversation salted with insider jargon. I probably conveyed a self-importance that was unmerited. Moneywise, I would have accepted much less than my former faculty salary. But I was not yet prepared to serve as an intern, or to consider jobs that were aimed at recent college graduates.
I had to learn, again, how to start over. It took nearly a year, but I eventually found a new position — with help from counselors who have walked a similar path (especially Paula Chambers, founder of a career-planning website called The Versatile Ph.D, and Chris Caterine, author of a 2020 book, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide).
Complete rebranding was required: Here is the new me. That meant trimming down my bloated CV to a lean two pages. All those publications and presentations over which I had agonized for decades — “poof,” reduced to one sentence. The Harvard doctorate: buried at the bottom, just above “Memberships.”
What’s left: quantifiable accomplishments and deliverables, specifically keyworded to the jobs for which I was applying. Instead of three pages, my cover letter was just one, directly identifying the relevant skills and experiences I would bring to the position.
Ultimately, this transition meant accepting that no one outside of academe understands — or cares — about its obscure markers of status and accomplishment. Once I let go of that, opportunities began to appear, although they were different from what I expected.
Where I landed. Eventually I ended up where I began my education, almost 50 years ago: at an urban, Roman Catholic middle school. I am now a development officer for Chicago Jesuit Academy, an 11-month, extended-day, full-scholarship institution that serves students of color primarily from the west side of Chicago, a region of enormous historical disinvestment and racist housing policies. The Jesuits have sponsored it as one of their “Nativity Schools,” but it does not aim to convert students, most of whom are not Catholic.
The academy supports its alumni through high school and postsecondary education, until they are 25 and established in stable careers. For a relatively young school, its outcomes are extraordinary. My role will be to find support for those students, possibly using my experience with foundations and multi-institutional collaborations. In many ways, this position is a homecoming and an opportunity to give back to the parochial schools that launched me into a life that I could not have imagined from where I started, born in Camden, N.J., and raised in Lower Northeast Philadelphia.
If you are one of the many academics who have reached the point where you feel like it is time to leave, then you should know — as if you don’t already — that it’s going to be tough, even if you have support as I did. Be prepared to reinvent yourself and change your expectations about what “counts” in the professional world. Learn to respect people who are not tenured professors. Depending on how long you were in academe, and how fully you identified with your work, you may experience profound feelings of loss, shame, humiliation, and grief. Surround yourself with friends and loved ones, and get help if you need it. The people close to you may not understand what you are experiencing, but they will be affected by what you’re struggling with, too.
Therapists say it takes about a year to recover from every five years of a major relationship. The hardest part, for me, was beginning that journey.
