Why I Left Academia

The author looking for a suitable place to self-immolate

I always think of my first car accident in China when someone asks me about leaving academia. A few weeks before the accident, I’d been a PhD student on a leafy New England campus when my coworker, Ellen, and I found were in a taxi hit by another taxi. Ellen was from the HR Department, which was a one-person department in which Ellen did work she hadn’t been hired to do.

I hadn’t been in China for long by that point, but I’d already figured out that I’d been tricked into working for a high-class, high-tech plagiarism firm. Ellen had taken pity on me and gone rogue in helping me to get out of my contract while maintaining my visa. The process wasn’t simple—streamlined bureaucracy doesn’t rank with Daoism, calligraphy, and education as among China’s many cultural riches.

The clock was ticking, and we were hustling. As I remember, we were rushing to submit an important piece of paperwork to some office. The accident wasn’t serious, but that taxi wasn’t going anywhere, and the driver was freaking out. Rushing against the deadline, Ellen and I played a game of Frogger with the oncoming traffic before climbing through a hole in a fence on the side of the freeway. Stumbling down the embankment, we found ourselves on a weird side street in a residential neighborhood neither of us knew. We were down to the wire, and things looked bleak until, out of the blue, a slow-moving taxi happened by that we were able to flag down.

Ellen was irritated as we got into the back. “I can’t believe this. A day from hell,” she said, arching an eyebrow and glancing at her phone to check her messages. “I’m so sorry.”

“I think this is one of the best days of my life,” I blurted out without thinking.

“What?” she said, seeming perplexed and maybe a little annoyed.

The rest of the day comes to me as a montage of questionable authenticity. I remember the person we were supposed to meet laughing as we tumbled into the room to submit the required form only minutes before the office closed. I remember eating dinner at my favorite noodle place up the street, and I remember sitting on my balcony that night as I tried to escape the humid Shenzhen air.

That probably is what I did that night because that’s what I usually did, but I don’t really remember. What I do remember is being surprised by Ellen’s irritation and thinking that I couldn’t remember a time I’d felt that alive in years.

***

It’s a true story, and it’s true as far as it goes. But this isn’t my shot at a third-rate version of expat Kerouac. Moving to China was the first thing I did after I dropped out of my PhD program. It was an exhilarating time, but of course there was another side to things. Leaving academia was one of the hardest decisions of my life, and after leaving, I grieved like I’d lost a loved one. I remember wincing when I broke the news to my former colleague, Reid, in Café Algiers.

I loved and love academia as much as anyone I’ve ever met (which is not to say I’m as good at it as everyone I’ve ever met). I still read academic sources both for fun and for my professional life as an editor. More than once, I’ve been called an academic machine.

So, why did I leave? There are a lot of answers to that question. There are the more routine ones. Often when the topic comes up, people mention important practical advice. Examples are easy enough to come by: choose a program based on research fit, choose a program with multiple potential advisors, be ready for an extremely harsh job market, etc. 

All of that is good advice. Some of it I took, and some of it I didn’t. There’s no question that poor research fit, limited career prospects, and my own thirty-something age were starting to catch up with me by the time I finally got around to leaving. At the time, I was already thinking about going into writing, editing, or publishing, and the fact that literally every person I talked to in those industries recommended I leave my program to get hands-on experience certainly made it easier for me to go. For once in my life, the thing I wanted to do was also the prudent thing to do.

However, the deeper answer for why left I has a lot to do with my willingness to take responsibility for myself. I’d let too much go for too long, and that bill came due. In hindsight, I can see how clearly many of my choices in my teens and twenties were motivated by fear and insecurity. My compulsive attempt to distinguish myself from my mal-intentioned, lumpenproletariat father combined with the feeling that I was behind in life to foster an obsessive perfectionism that at times bordered on self-abuse. That outlook, particularly when united with a moral code that was as quirky as it was rigid, wasn’t a recipe for lucidity regarding major life decisions.

Other troubling dynamics took hold. I was a first-gen college student from a milieu in which college was a fairly unusual path. Amongst my family and friends, no one seemed to know quite what to do with me until we settled on something of a hometown hero role, but that jerry-rigged, pariah-parvenu fix wasn’t sturdy enough to last.

Ultimately, however, the core issue was my own self-infantilizing. In bad faith, I’d convinced myself that outsourcing my decision-making regarding basic life choices would free me up to focus on weightier matters. I turned those decisions over to other people and common-sense solutions. I guess I saw this as the rough equivalent of other strategies I’d adopted to free up cognitive bandwidth, such as eating the same lunch every day to save time (a tossed green salad with raw tofu, a piece of fruit, and a peanut butter granola bar).

I don’t want to turn this into third-rate existentialism any more than third-rate Kerouac, but I suspect at least part of what was behind all of that was an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for having to make major life choices and deal with the messy complexities of life. Surprising perhaps no one but myself, this life strategy mirrored the one my father had employed on a very different register to disastrous and disreputable results. Abdicating responsibility for one’s life is a potent narcotic, and I still have to watch my impulses in that direction.

To bring it back to the PhD, the result was I woke up one day with no real sense of what I wanted out of the degree—or, even more fundamentally, what I wanted out of life. I was riddled with anxiety about my capacity to make decisions. What I experienced as resentment of everyone, and everything, was ultimately a reflection of the resentment I felt for myself after having turned over my life to be lived by others.

My response was to burn down everything I’d built, including a ten-year romantic relationship, and move to the other side of the globe. This forced me to find my own solutions for car accidents, visa challenges, and whatever it was I was going to do with myself. It made life seem impossible in the day-to-day, yet ever easier in the broad scheme of things.

***

Should I have finished it at the time? The answer depends on how far back we go in the thought experiment. If we take our time machine back to the day I chose to leave, then I suppose I might as well have finished. I don’t know how big of a difference it would have made in my life, but I had enough material on Dewey kicking around that I probably could have put together an unremarkable but satisfactory dissertation without terrible strain.

If we go back before that, then I’m not so sure. Hindsight is 20-20, but I certainly could have spent that time in ways that would have made my life a lot easier now. Then again, past a certain point, the question becomes so counterfactual that who’s to say what path I would have found myself on, and there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t have continued fouling things up for myself if I’d continued trying to make that path work.

Besides, I was spoiled, with a quite generous funding package from the university. Little of what I did during that round of grad school had anything to do with building an academic career, but I learned a great deal in a number of areas and left with not much more than my pride damaged. A lot of the skills and bodies of knowledge I picked up are central to my life now, and I salivate thinking about the resources and opportunities that I casually took for granted in the university setting. In the end, I guess I got out of it what I needed, and I have a certain fondness for the experience despite the frustration and bitterness I felt at the time. If I’d had the foresight to know I’d feel this way, I probably could have taken even more from it with less pain.

Would I go back now? There are days I miss it, and there are days I don’t, but that train has left the station. When I left, I’d told myself all sorts of things—I’d go back, I’d transfer programs, I’d switch fields. On some level, I think I knew that was the end, and as is often the case in life, after you’ve moved on, you’ve moved on. The currents are too strong.

***

So, we find ourselves back on that highway with Ellen. Every now and then I hear from her. The last I knew she was living in Vietnam and working as a translator. Once she’d jokingly asked if I still thought that was one of the best days of my life.

“I really don’t know, Ellen, but it was the best of something,” I’d said.