Why is it that I still feel so much guilt about leaving academia?
Academia is a vocation. Smart, well-educated people who covet money or power can find careers that’ll offer those things far more readily, but academia still inspires high expectations – the opportunity to add to the sum of human knowledge, to potentially make the world a better place, to be part of something ineffably larger than yourself. Some may indeed achieve something close to their early expectations, but many – most, in fact – will not. For every Nobel prize-winner in science there are very many jobbing academics.
What’s remarkable about those rank-and file members is the intensity to which many continue to cling to those ideals. I should know – I was one of them. Even as my research productivity slowed to a trickle and my career prospects dwindled, I was still inspired by the grand notions that first fired me. I was still finding things out that were new. I no longer dreamed of developing a blockbuster drug or finding a cure to a disease, but I was helping to teach and train new scientists. I felt (I still do feel!) part of a larger community of like-minded people.
And then, in the end, I realised I couldn’t go on.
It is a bereavement. Anybody who leaves academia involuntarily – whether by being forced out or by realising that they cannot go on or a combination of the two – will feel that they are being severed from something they believe in and have fought to remain in. My leave-taking of academia left an emotional and psychological scar that may eventually heal over but will, I think, never fully go away. I bear the knowledge, and the guilt, that I knowingly walked away from the only career that I ever seriously intended to pursue, and one that I did pursue until I had nothing left to continue with.
I think that this guilt must be similar to what people who leave religious cults must experience. You stay because you feel you belong, because you feel you should be grateful for what little you receive, and you secretly perhaps fear that you won’t fit in anywhere else. You sacrifice more and more of yourself and tell yourself if’s for love. You make yourself believe things despite evidence with your own eyes to the contrary, and that belief in the abstract ideal rather than the everyday reality becomes an article of faith. You cling to the dream. You obliterate your sense of self.
Perhaps, this, then, is why the longer you stay, the harder it is to leave. Because when you’ve been hanging on and hanging on for so long there’s very little of you left to walk away. But it’s also because if, like me, you’re one of the people who reaches that point, you’ve also been struggling for so long that you’ve had to tell yourself a lot of untruths just to keep going.
“No other career could be as varied,” you tell yourself, as your life settles into a research+teaching rhythm.
“No other career would be as satisfying,” you tell yourself as you go through the latest set of anonymous, vicious peer reviews.
“Nothing matches the thrill of discovery,” you tell yourself, trying desperately to remember the last time you properly felt it.
“Nothing else gives me the same kind of freedom”, you tell yourself as you work nights, weekends, holidays, racking up hundreds of hours of unpaid and unlogged overtime.
“The students need me,” you tell yourself. And they do. But don’t think you’re not replaceable.
It’s why leaving is such a wrench. Leaving means that you implicitly have to reject the things that you’ve chosen to believe as a justification for staying. The suffering you endured became a proof of your commitment, but it’s worth asking whether that selfless commitment was genuinely valued. Alice Marwick’s book “Status Update” similarly questioned the same shadowy side of the tech industry and social media where content creators are working like mad and telling themselves that they’re empowered, but actually subject to an algorithm…and ultimately, who really profits from their labour? Academic scientists may have likewise bought into a work ethic that might not be doing them personally (or professionally) much good.
Academia undoubtedly relies on those true believers, the people who put up with the slow atrophy of their research, that get drafted into implementing administrative initiatives, that take on a disproportionate share of the teaching load. It needs the people who will put up with everything, even the abnegation of their individual needs, in total service to the system. But as teaching and administrative loads continue to mushroom, and the promised dream of intellectual freedom becomes harder to sustain, you can’t blame them for choosing to walk away.
The problem with leaving a cult is that when you walk away there’s a strong compulsion not to look back, because the emotion might choke you. You’re less likely to maintain ties, because severing the bonds that kept you will cost you so much. Unfortunately, that not much help for those still on the inside.
But perhaps the fact that it’s guilt I feel, and not anger, is a sign that shows I still feel and know that I belong. I’m still here to help.
Total Internal Reflection 
I think you’re asking the wrong question. The implicit argument is that academia is “for the greater good” and the commercial world is not. I strongly dispute that.
The same sense of “bereavement” exists whenever anyone changes jobs (assuming they left a job / company that they enjoyed working for). To leave one thing that you have enjoyed and to start afresh somewhere else always means leaving things behind and a sense of both regret and guilt. Indeed, if you feel neither regret nor guilt for leaving a job, the chances are that you were no good at it.
I always find it interesting how “academics” view themselves to be fulfilling a higher purpose than those in the commercial world – the external perception of the commercial world (from the viewpoint of academia) seems to be grubby and money-grabbing, rather than altruistic.
The same is true of public service: those that have served in government (e.g. my mother) have a moral sense that they have been serving the greater good, rather than contributing to the profits of shareholders.
But the distinction is not as clear cut from the opposite side of the fence.
Where academics may regard their freedom to explore as essential to their pursuit of knowledge, people who work in the private sector may regard that same independence as a rudderless lack of pressure to show results.
Where public sector employees view their work as serving the public, commercial employees may highlight that the bureaucracy and intransigence that exists in most public sector organisations is a “luxury” which is paid for thrice by the taxpayer: bureacracy means delays; delays result in re-planning to move with the times; and both result not only in increased direct costs, but in opportunity cost.
The commercial world is far from perfect, but the definition of value is “what someone will pay”. Academics are paid via grants which are, in turn, funded by institutions which expect a return on their investment. Research is often not well paid because the chances of success are so small.
The division between “for profit” and “not-for-profit” organistions will never go away until it becomes far more commonplace for people to spend their time on both sides of the fence.
There’s a strong argument that “crossing the fence” should be more actively encouraged in all of the estates discussed above.
But most importantly, in my view and in the context of your post, the commercial world is not an industry to which you have sacrificed your values and reluctantly been removed from the gene pool of explorers.
Any institution that one works for will require your pound of flesh and, in general, the more of oneself one has to commit to a role (and the more expertise required to do the job), the higher it will be paid.
But professional happiness doesn’t come from salary or industry. It simply comes from whether or not you can wake up, more often than not, looking forward to the working day in front of you, whatever that may entail.
And that, regardless of industry, comes down to whether or not you feel you are making a difference.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Huge thanks for writing – so many interesting ideas here! I confess I hadn’t conceived of this as a “public sector vs. private sector” posting when I was first writing it, but I think you’re perhaps right to pinpoint that framing as the root cause of the discomfort I (and so many other academic émigrés) feel.
It is of course not the case that the private sector doesn’t do good – it’s the private sector that’s responsible for most of the drugs, vaccines, and other products that are making a real difference to individual lives in biomedical terms, and on a personal level, my experience of the work environment since crossing over has been entirely positive. Rather, I’d agree that most people who go into the public sector generally (not just academia) do so out of a desire to serve some nebulous kind of higher and somehow more honourable purpose…which means that leaving carries an implicit judgement that that service somehow wasn’t valued.
I think too that you may be right in calling bullshit on the bereavement – is the pain that a departing academic feels any different from someone who resigns or is let go from a regular job? In fairness, probably not, and there’s plenty of people – not just academics – who find that they have to switch sectors or retrain in order to get new employment. I am however not aware of a highly-skilled profession besides academia that simultaneously encourages people to stay while withholding permanent contracts from all but a very few. But again, this might be a predicament peculiar to biomedical research – our cousins in the humanities have very few illusions about the likelihood of long-term academic careers.
Regardless, I’d concur that it would be beneficial if more scientists did move back and forth between the private and public sectors. Outside of the USA though, this is vanishingly rare at present.
LikeLike