Leaving the field

While being a social media Luddite has many perks, it does mean occasionally missing out on an interesting thing until a resident of those walled gardens points it out to you. Most recently this was a post by Hadas Kotek about her decision to leave the field after several years in temp positions. She gives a detailed account of how she reached that decision, and I’m happy to see that it got a lot of positive feedback. However, there’s one thing that rubs me the wrong way about this whole incident, and that’s the implicit assumption that leaving the field is something that needs to be justified. If anything, it should be staying in the field that needs justification!

As every academic likes to point out nowadays, the academic job market sucks. Fewer tenure-track positions, the adjunct trap, cranking out way more PhDs than there’s academic positions for, top-heavy universities with little faculty-governance, ridiculously high burnout rates, yada yada yada. You’ve heard it a million times before. Linguistics, by virtue of being a small field that’s mostly limited to R1 universities, is better off in some respects and much worse in others. Even so, the widely agreed upon baseline is that

1. things aren’t exactly rosy in academia, and
2. they’ll likely get a lot worse before we manage to turn it around.

But if that’s where things are, then why are we all acting as if an academic career were a sane default choice? Anecdote time: I recently had a student who wanted to brainstorm topics for their dissertation. I asked them the same questions I ask my advisees at the beginning of year 3 and 4:

What is your thesis gonna do for you? Do you want to get a job in industry or academia? Where do you want to live? How much do you want to make? How important is a good work-life balance to you?

They were completely flummoxed. Nobody had told them before that picking a thesis topic involves more than just going with whatever topic you think is interesting. Nobody had told them to seriously consider the implications of an academic career, to weigh the pros and cons.

It’s only natural, though. Grad school is one giant bubble of professors at the top of the academic totem pole or students who aspire to get there. There’s no role models for alternative career paths; our colloquia don’t have alumni that talk about their non-academic jobs and how they use linguistics there. Yes, once in a blue moon a very dedicated faculty member might organize a career workshop with some of those alumni as panelists. But that just perpetuates that this is something special, the outlier, the deviation from the norm, an exhibition of the select few who dared to venture outside the ivory tower and explore the undiscovered country. That’s a very unhealthy attitude. Not just because of the current job market, but in general. People should always consider all their options, and none should be ruled out a priori due to a perceived peer group lock-in.

And it’s not just students. Faculty members should also reevaluate their career choices on a regular basis. If things keep getting worse, what’s the breaking point? At what point do I bail and pursue a different career? For the last three years, I have been doing a kind of “year in review” assessment each summer. I write down my personal list of criteria and see how my current job fares in that respect. So far, the scores have been largely off the chart because I’m very happy with my department and I’m still in a stage of my life where I can spend lots of time and energy on my job without making major sacrifices somewhere else. But things are constantly in flux, so I never assume that I’m locked into my current job for life. Doing that just makes you exploitable. Nothing gives an employer more power than a large pool of employees with a calling and/or no exit strategy. So let’s buck the trend and start normalizing the non-academic career. Because it really is the reasonable choice, and academia is the oddball move that needs a good justification.