On Quitting Academia as Full Professors

“Why I left academia” stories have flooded the academic press and internet (see below), along with a cottage industry facilitating such moves. Most are told by graduate students, junior faculty and recently tenured faculty who saw no future, or at best a very restricted future in higher education. 

I’ve been hesitant to add to the torrent. Memoir is not a genre I feel happy writing. I now do so because perhaps there might be some interest in why full professors quit (other than to take prestigious positions in government, for example, where the reasons are self evident).

So here is my admittedly fallible, selective, and probably over-detailed account of our decision and its consequences.

What follows is neither a criticism of those who chose to stay nor does it discount the pain of those who would have liked to but could not. It’s simply to add a different perspective.

Our reasons for resigning our university positions

Simple. Restlessness. A need to have a change, to experience life outside school and university, and to get a different perspective on the world.

In the mid 1990s, my husband Larry and I realized that we’d spent all our conscious years in various educational institutions, half of them teaching in universities. In our early 50s, we were both full professors, were or had been chairs (not that that’s so great), had enjoyed teaching, had research projects we loved supported by NEH, NSF, Fulbright and the like, and Larry was President-Elect of his professional society, the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division.

We’d loved the academic life. We did not feel burnt out.  We were not having mid-life crises. We were not seeking better pay or greater security.  We just did not want to keep doing the same things until retirement.

Of course we also had the usual concerns about academia: the increasing homogenization of the professoriate; the creeping of academia into all areas of cultural life; the disregard for undergraduate teaching; the rising costs of education; the decline of collegiality that accompanied the star system; the inaccessibility of campus resources to the public; the ever-heavier bureaucratic load; the uncontrolled proliferation of graduate programs and consequent growth of justifiably-disgruntled un- or under-employed Ph.Ds. 

These problems were all evident thirty years ago and were sufficient to give us pause. They were not, though, the root reason for leaving. Time for something new and to let younger scholars to take over.

How did we pull off leaving before retirement age?

Financially, we were lucky.  Not that we had inherited money or trust funds or a golden handshake, a nice little pot of money, from our university to entice us to leave. None of that.

We were, however, of a generation who had gone through higher education debt free, thanks to grants, scholarships, and part-time jobs. Our children’s generation was not as fortunate but had nothing like the expense that going to college now means.

We had good savings for retirement since Larry had been full professor for over twenty years and chaired for much of that time. My contribution was much smaller, having had a much rockier career (perhaps a topic for another blog since so many younger faculty look back to a golden age when jobs and promotion were secure).  Ten years in Honolulu meant that our apartment had appreciated to the point where its sale would finance a house in a less-pricey place.

The trickiest problem we faced was how to afford medical insurance for ten plus years until we reached 65 and could draw Medicare.

If we could resolve the medical insurance issue, we reckoned that by withdrawing part of our savings and by taking on part-time writing jobs we could live frugally but comfortably until Social Security kicked in at 62. 

What, though, about leaving our research, our collegial network, and the prestige, such as it is, that a full professorship bestows?  My impression from conversations then and since is that there are a fair few full professors in a financial position to cut their university ties.  It is the non-financial factors that are daunting.

So far as research was concerned, both Larry and I were ready for a change of direction after many years working in the overlapping fields of philosophy of science (Larry) and history of science and technology (Rachel).  Since we worked in humanities, we did not need laboratories or high powered data analysis so perhaps we would start new research projects. On the other hand, perhaps we would try something different altogether.  We’d both thought starting a business might be an interesting challenge.

Being in a collegial network is important for research but we had managed to thrive on the periphery of those networks as well as at the center. After his Ph.D., Larry had moved to England, ignoring his Princeton committee’s warning that this would put an end to his job prospects. Later, he had left one of the best positions in his field (Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh) so that I too could pursue an academic career. When we took positions at the University of Hawaii we did not become indolent beach bums as some predicted. The society, the environment, and the intellectual contacts opened perspectives that we would never have encountered on the mainland.  In short, we concluded that in intellectual life (and not just intellectual life) the cut and thrust of the bustling centers could become provincial while the different perspective of the periphery could shake up that provinciality.

Where would we go? 

There we were the incredibly fortunate position of being able to choose where we would live. The mainland United States? Returning to the mainland did not seem to match our vision of a new challenge.

On the other hand, we did not fancy an expatriate community. We did not want to be nomads, moving from one place to another. Getting to know one place well was more our style, and that meant choosing a place where we could become reasonably competent in the language fairly quickly. Our new perch had to be affordable. Finally, after years of sitting on the most isolated inhabited islands on earth, it had reasonably close to family in the US and England.

Europe?  Not in our budget. Asia? Not much chance of learning an Asian language well fast enough.  Australia and New Zealand? Too far from family.

Mexico checked all our boxes. On prior visits to give talks at the National University in Mexico City (the UNAM), we’d been impressed with the intellectual life, the culture, the food, and the climate.  We bought health insurance with a high deductible through BUPA, essentially catastrophic insurance, and reckoned we could pay ordinary costs.

Mexico City, though, seemed a bit of a stretch for people without Spanish. Instead we opted for Guanajuato, a beautiful colonial city a couple of hundred miles north of Mexico City, capital of the eponymous state, seat of a university, and site of the largest cultural festival in Latin America.  We bought a pleasant house in a middle class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city and, not without trauma, got our goods moved from Hawaii.

How did it work out?

Wonderfully. 

For a couple of years, we concentrated on getting to know Guanajuato and learning Spanish. When our friends, most of them fluent English speakers, began speaking to us in Spanish instead of English, we knew we were on our way.  After failed attempts to get on top of years of Latin, French and German, it was a good feeling.

Guanajuato was absorbingly interesting.  A half hour stroll took me to the main shaft of the Valenciana mine that had pumped out more silver than almost any other mine in the world as I’d learned years earlier as a geology student. I was lucky to be invited to sit in on a graduate seminar on colonial Guanajuato. By virtue of that mine, colonial Guanajuato was at the center of the world with routes stretching out across the Pacific and Atlantic and a multicultural population hoping to get rich quick or forced to work the mines. The field trips we took to haciendas, convents, model towns, textile and leather factories, churches with baroque organs and the extraordinary rare book library of the University were eye opening.

Gradually it became obvious that we were intellectuals through and through and we turned back to research.

Larry decided that having spent years on one of the great institutional systems devoted to discovering the truth—science—it would be enlightening to compare it with another—law.  He dug into criminal procedure in Roman law as well as common law and ended up publishing widely on legal epistemology, including Truth, Error and the Criminal Law (Cambridge, 2008). 

I had already become interested in food history in Hawaii, home to three quite different culinary traditions transported from the south Pacific, from Europe and the United States, and from East Asia. This provided the springboard for tracing out how successive waves of culinary tradition have transformed food worldwide, which I finally published as Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (California, 2013).  I could never have done this had not first a kind member of the History Department, then the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and finally the Institute for Historical Studies, all at the University of Texas offered me library access on occasional visits to the United States.

We lived in Mexico for fifteen years. Although it had not been our intention on going there, Larry ended up accepting an appointment at the National University, so that we moved to Mexico City, as well as a Visiting Appointment at the University of Texas Law School.

So perhaps we did not leave academia quite as definitively as we had intended. Even so, our research changed in ways it would never have done had we stayed in American academia. We made many new friends in Mexico in a variety of different walks of life. We became immersed in the Spanish-speaking academic world, with two semester visits to Buenos Aires, three to Catalunya, and shorter excursions to Brazil, Panama, and Colombia. And we were never to look at the English speaking world in the same way after the chance to see politics, history, and culture from the perspective of the Spanish-speaking world.

In 2012, we decided that for medical, practical, and family reasons, we needed to return to the United States.  It was equal measures of deep regret and enormous gratitude that we said goodbye to all those who had helped us have this wonderful decade and a half.

Samples from the leaving academia literature

Here’s a historian who left academia after tenure, I think to become a lawyer. https://www.vox.com/2015/9/8/9261531/professor-quitting-job

Leaving for a bigger impact. https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/09/professor-i-wanted-have-bigger-impact-so-i-left-academia-government-job

Leaving the ossified culture. https://asm.org/Articles/2019/October/Leaving-Academia-as-a-Tenured-Professor

Most anthropologists do not find jobs in academia.  Here’s a whole journal issue,  Divergent Paths to Career Fulfillment in Applied Anthropology.

Former academics helping other academics find jobs outside academia is a cottage industry. Here’s what appears to be a recruiting site for scientists thinking about leaving academia. https://cheekyscientist.com/leaving-academia-accelerate-career/  Another site dedicated to helping the transition. https://roostervane.com/nobodytellsyou/

Early retirement for scientists. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05715-8

Colleges begin thinking about buyouts for older professors.  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/colleges-offer-retirement-buyouts-to-professors/487400/

Why senior academics should retire at 70. https://community.chronicle.com/news/2061-a-professor-s-last-crucial-decision-when-to-retire

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