Industry job offer

[Marasme]

I ve been feeling a bit disillusioned with academia and generally bored and sometimes unappreciated at my uni.

I ve worked there for close to 20yrs, got promoted to prof a few years ago. I have made no secret that I am not enjoying the endless admin imposed on us because management is making all our admin staff redundant or drive them elsewhere by treating them like dirt.

There are still stuff I really enjoy, but these are rarer. We used to have amazing postgrad students - truly bright young people who would challenge us / the class and make teaching a joy. Also fantastic PhD students. Neither of these really occur very often anymore.

I ve got quite a lot of grant funding, but administering this is hell, and i do very very little of the science.
I ve been involved in a number of leadership "opportunities" which stretch me for a little while, but then become a bit mundane and empty of meanings, with meetings for the sake of meetings.

Management knows of my struggles, with the above, as well as fairly toxic non-collegial colleagues, yet is stringing me along, promising changes "next year". It s been 4 yrs of these promises, we (department) have lost 2 techs and 4 admin linked to our unit, yet have doubled our student intake and phd numbers, and tripled our grant capture.

i ve been looking at job elsewhere and been offered an industry job, well paid, abroad, but far from science, research and teaching. It would be a renunciation of what is basically a huge part of my identity, and i find it super scary to consider stepping away from what i ve been "programmed" to see as success ever since i started a phd: professorship at a RG uni with an active lab group.

On the other hand, i dread to think that i could wake up in 15 years like my most bitter colleagues, hating my job and the system even more than i currently do, but too late to make any change.

Am I missing something? Being ungrateful?
I consider going for it but then get cold feet, even though DH is supportive...

... and something I totally forgot in the OP...
The anxiety.
This feeling of drowning, slowly, as disasters unfold thanks to understaffing and crap management.
The constant firefighting

i would love to "just chill" as some of my (old, male) colleagues tell me i should. Except that the effect and bite-back of me "just chilling" is quite different to them "just chilling".

Can you take unpaid leave for a year to explore the industry job?

I am a senior academic and have exactly the same feelings as you. Academia seems to be moving inexorably in the wrong direction with no signs that this trend is slowing down. Most UK universities have large and increasing numbers of administrative staff but the amount of administration put onto academics is still growing all the time. This is because there are shortages of people to do everyday necessary administrative tasks but increasing numbers of highly paid administrative strategic roles, with people in their 30s in such roles sometimes being paid more than senior professors with 30 years' experience. Academic standards are falling, both in education and in research. Both major strategic decisions and day to day operational decisions are increasingly made by people who think of universities as businesses and think academics should conform to standard corporate approaches. It does feel like watching a disaster unfold in slow motion and I agree that female staff find it much harder to "just chill" than many of their older male colleagues.

year out to explore would be ideal - i doubt my head of school will facilitate but i might just ask him.

Most of my requests to date have led to me being gaslighted so that i keep quiet for a bit longer, so I am not holding my breath.

An alternative would be retaining a 0.2FTE but i am aware, via past requests, that HR is not keen on payrolling people outside the UK (despite doing it for some male colleagues who deserted to EU countries)

I have seen colleagues get an unpaid year agreed by talking about future impact cases, possible future KTPs/industrial investment etc -- when clearly they just wanted to try out industry and see if they preferred it. From what you write above this approach may not be at all credible for your job offer, but it depends whether your head of school would know this....

There are payroll implications for staff working abroad but I agree that these seem to be surmountable for colleagues with friends in high places.