Mourning What Never Was: Saying Goodbye to my Career in Academia

Deciding to leave academia has been a difficult and rewarding intellectual and emotional process.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come not to praise my academic career, but to bury it.

Here, on this day, I officially announce that I am withdrawing from academia. I will no longer be applying for jobs, I will no longer be running the gauntlet of that relentless cycle of crafting materials for each and every job that comes out, sending them in, navigating a dozen different application systems (some of which are so arcane as to be laughable). I will no longer be attending academic conferences. I will finish up my few remaining obligations, and then it’s time to begin pursuing other options.

Truth be told, this has been a long time coming, this official announcement that I’m taking my leave of academia, setting aside my dream of one day being a tenured academic, of being able to tell friends and family back in home that I was a professor, with all of the cultural caché that still carries with it in some quarters of America (even in a red state like West Virginia). That doesn’t make it any less painful, of course, but there is also a sort of peace that comes with officially accepting something that you…