Zachary Ernst: Why I jumped off the ivory tower

[Ikhide]

" I'm leaving my position as a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy and taking a job in the private sector. By any normal standards, my academic job was excellent. I was tenured at a Research-1 institution, in a department with a growing PhD program. I had a lot of freedom to pursue the kind of research and teaching that I wanted. And I used that freedom to pursue a lot of diverse interests. My students -- especially my graduate students -- were excellent. I enjoy teaching, and I also happen to believe that philosophy is increasingly important and relevant.

I should begin by acknowledging that I've had some major and sometimes quite public conflicts with my home department and administration, especially about their treatment of my spouse, which I strongly believe to be the result of highly sexist attitudes. And to be perfectly honest, those conflicts and the resulting fallout certainly played a role in my decision to leave. However, I've been preparing my exit from the university for several years, long before those conflicts erupted. For a long time, I've been the uncomfortable owner of a coveted faculty position that I didn't want.

My decision to leave isn't really about my department or university in particular, but about a perverse incentive structure that maintains thestatus quo, rewards mediocrity, and discourages potentially high-impact, interdisciplinary work. My complaints are really about the structural features of the university, and not about the behavior of particular people. Although I believe that my university is unusually bad in these respects, I think these structural features are quite common."

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- Ikhide

 

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

This is actually a familiar genre. Once in a while, someone comes along and pens another why-I-let-the-academia essay that gets people talking. 

If we're honest with ourselves, there have been times when the thought of leaving the Ivory Tower to do something less esoteric and with more reach, consequence, and relevance to the human condition crossed our minds.

My own moment came about 7 years ago, when a prestigious international consultancy firm approached me to consider coming on board after a friend of mine, also a history Ph.D, who had built a career with the firm, recommended me. 

It definitely was appealing. The money would have been a lot better than what I was earning. Given the poor salaries that academics earn, any opportunity at a high level in the corporate (or bureaucratic) sector pays a lot better. I have an undergraduate student who will graduate in December and has an investment banking job lined up, which will pay her more than I, her professor, earns. It is not only Nigeria-based academics who are paid poorly--if at all they are. In the US where I live, academics are the poorest paid professionals. And unlike our Nigeria-based colleagues, we don't earn exam supervision allowance, hazard/injury allowance, project supervision allowance, sick allowance, grading allowance, excess workload allowance, etc. Your salary is your salary--nothing else.

So, the opportunity was tempting--and the author of this piece is absolutely right that American academics should stop the pretense of not caring about money. Kind of reminds of Stanley Fish's celebrated sarcastic essay on Volvo driving professors. Anyway, considering the potential to earn a lot more money and the frustrations I was feeling about the limited reach of Ivory Tower intellectual productions (you're lucky if ten of your colleagues read your work), the allure of a new beginning in a non-academic but intellectually challenging environment had a pull.

The reasons I resisted are:

1. My two daughters are my world and no other job will afford me the opportunity to spend as much time as I do with them. My spouse may get by with not seeing a lot of me as I slave away in a corporate labyrinth to justify my earning, but not my kids.

2. I was not yet tenured, and the thought of leaving the academy before securing tenure left a poor taste in my mouth. I did not want to carry the blemish of an uncompleted project. Although I was ahead of schedule in terms of the tenure requirements and process, I did not want to give some people a reason to suspect that the pressure and requirements of tenure pushed me out. I finish what I start--that's my philosophy, and that's what gives me satisfaction. Which is why, although the thought of leaving graduate school for something else sometimes crossed my mind when I was in school, I stuck with it until the Ph.D was done.

Now that I have tenure, the same instinct is at work. I have to get to the peak of this profession that I have chosen. I'm not quitting midway. No way! Plus, it's funny how tenure can affirm and confirm the wisdom of the decision to get into academia in the first place.

Good luck to Dr. Zachary Ernst, but his story is not exactly everyone's story.

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There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.


---Mohandas Gandhi