Quit job, feel awful

[Kickintheteeth]

Until last night I had a permanent post teaching a Humanities subject at a Russell Group university. There were lots of things I didn’t like about my job but plenty that I did like too. Unfortunately it’s a substantial commute away and I’ve had two children. My husband’s job, meanwhile, has become more demanding and he’s not in a position to be the ‘drop it all and get to school/nursery when the kids are sick’ parent. We have no family nearby. Childcare costs for the younger child are ruinous where we live, and so is the cost of the commute. I thought about it and thought about it and I could not see a way of making it work. I couldn’t see how I could have anything like a satisfactory home life or a satisfying work life at any time in the next 10 years. For the next two years at least we’d be running a loss during term time as childcare and travel costs would be greater than salary. Also, I hate commuting and I have completely lost confidence in my research. Just don’t believe in it, or myself, anymore. So I quit. And I’m so, so upset. That’s it. My career gone and a lot of my identity with it. Friendships with respected colleagues, gone. I feel like it’s an insane thing to do but the alternative is working my socks off, sticking the kids in wraparound care and with god knows who if they’re unwell, missing a lot of breakfasts and bedtimes, and travelling for minimum 4 hours a day, all for net £2k a year and a constant awareness that I’m underperforming at work.

Don’t really know what I want from this. Anyone done the same and made it back into academia? Anyone understand? Have I done something insane?

@Flockameanie In a financial position to quit at the moment, yes, and it is a real privilege. Though I will need to return to work eventually and I will really miss a lot of the things I loved about academia then, including many of my colleagues. When it comes down to it I would not be making this decision if I didn’t have a commute that is incompatible with being the main carer for young children. I’m definitely anxious about what I’ll do next (we can’t afford for me to be out of work for more than a few years). I hear you about the languishing and the research woes, though. There is a part of me that feels intensely relieved not to have to put together the grant application for a project I cooked up in a bid to be more REF friendly and collaborative whilst knowing, truthfully, that I don’t like that kind of research and I would hate doing it.

@resistingreality I’m sorry you’ve had such a difficult time. I had several pregnancy losses as well, one of them very traumatic and occurring during my only ever period of research leave. It really, really knocked the wind out of me and it threw my research off course more than I could ever have expected. You’ve articulated the point very well that research can be emotionally demanding for all sorts of reasons and that makes it difficult to sustain when other pressures come to bear.
it makes me very, very angry that universities undervalue (often while insisting that the opposite is true) some of the really important work academics do. I’m sure your public engagement work is great, and will be making a real difference. I found it incredibly frustrating that whilst we were assessed constantly on our research achievements (and mostly how much funding we were bringing in) our teaching successes (or in some cases reprehensible failures) were pretty much ignored.

@Mischance Thank you for such an encouraging and humane post. I hated leaving my son to go back to work between my maternity leaves, and hated it even more that when I was with him I was often thinking about work. In theory I was part time with days when I didn’t need to check emails. In practice there were pinch points in the year when I needed to be responding all day every day and I still regret tapping out emails while he tugged at me for attention. I can’t get that time back, but I can be here for him and his sister for the next few years. Your post has really helped me to bring that back into view.

Hi @Kickintheteeth Procrastinating on a paper hence swift response. It makes me angry too. Increasingly so.

It's probably a bit outing to say this but my research area is equality and diversity. I explain to organisations that they need to make big structural changes if they really want to value talent and make things fair (they can't do that, or don't want to, and so things stay the same - hence why this is a difficult message to give them)!! It's true in universities though too. Many talk a good game about equality and diversity but they do very little to actively facilitate it. It's possible to get to the top as a woman, say, but largely if you do exactly the same as the typical man: constant productivity, no breaks, fulfill 'ideal' worker norm of 24/7 work, build beneficial networks, play the 'right' game.

In a way, there's an underlying problem here which is that it's very difficult to reconcile equality with difference. But one of the things that makes me most angry is that I work alongside a lot of academics who research similar topics and know this stuff but absolutely do not live it in their everyday life - they are as obsessed with rankings and status and hierarchy as the people in commercial organisations, who they like to critique. It's all bullshit, really.

Anyway. Having got that off my chest (😁) just to say again - good luck! And I am so sorry about your pregnancy losses. It's so painful and for me (in retrospect) I am cross that I felt this sort of additional shame - that I wasn't able to cope with it all. This sounds a bit selfish but thanks again for starting this thread as it is helpful for me to know that other people struggle too.

@resistingreality Procrastination or warming up? Potato potato…
That’s a really interesting post and matches my experiences and suspicions. My university talked a good game about diversity and supporting women in the work force yet the professorial class was massively man-heavy whilst the onerous but not especially showy admin roles were all done by relatively junior women. Part time roles were ok, but meetings I was required at, or even leading, were routinely set on days when I wasn’t working. When I pushed back against this my (female) head of department grudgingly offered to cover one such meeting for which I simply could not get childcare but added that perhaps my admin role should be reallocated to someone ‘more flexible about their time’. And that sort of thing was pretty common. It wore me down and made me feel constantly embattled. I can only imagine how frustrating it must feel to be leading research into this area and trying to improve awareness whilst watching your colleagues enacting the very opposite of what they knew to be good practice.
I hear you on the shame. I felt it too. A friend suggested that if I were a ‘real academic’ (whatever that means) I’d be taking refuge in my work rather than questioning it, and I think that sums up the unhealthy intellectual Calvinism of some of the academe; any doubts or difficulties about research are a sign that one is not one of the academic elect. That’s something I won’t miss.

Hello OP,

Well done on making such a brave decision and leaving the cult! I had a permanent job in humanities in a UK university until recently, until it became very insecure due to falling student numbers. I managed to get another job in Ireland but for a while I was considering just quitting/having a career break as the job was far from my partner's and it wasn't secure enough for us to move closer but equally the commute wasn't manageable with small children. Now that I have another job it's nice in a way but I do miss the children. We moved for my job and I'm the higher earner now so it doesn't make sense for me to be part-time at the minute and I do worry about the strain of the children being in nursery full time - four days was fine for them but five days feels a bit much (just speaking about my own children here). I feel like I'm trying to square a circle all the time to work enough to do my job to an acceptable standard and also be around enough for my family and it's really hard to find time to look after myself enough so I don't start going nuts/getting ill. My dad had a bit of a health scare recently and I'm not sure where caring for elderly parents will fit into all of this! I'm sure your children will be really happy to have more time at home with you and the family will really benefit from so much of the pressure coming off. I'd guess it would take time to grieve the loss of the identity as an academic but as others have said there's a good life outside universities and I'd be hopeful you'd find positive things about your new life and that you will treasure the memories of your time with your young children and they will too. I'd also be hopeful that you will find ways to stay in touch with friends from academia if you want to. Best of luck with all this, it's not at all easy and it really does feel as if universities' implicit model of an academic is a very able-bodied person with no dependents/other emotional strains and every weekend and evening available for unpaid work - for so many of us that's just not who we are as mothers and it's okay to decide you don't want to bend yourself and your family out of shape to conform to a model that wasn't designed for your flourishing.