Lost it with academia

[purplepandas]

It can't be just me. I have totally lost it with academia. It's not the students (although I won't get started on unit evaluations) but the management and wider structures. I feel so jaded and demoralised. Hard to get out for various reasons with similar pay but if this is it, I am not sure how much longer I can last.

It is a complete nightmare....I am non RG, humanities... it is as if the plug has been pulled and we are in the last days. Workload more than doubled, barely any students. What is it all for?

Look at retraining into instructional design. I love it. And I retrained at 50.

What happens if you hate the teaching side? I used to love teaching but after such a high workload I've become disillusioned and don't think I'll get the spark back at this point. I go and deliver well, get good scores but I hate it all.

Instructional Design is creating courses, generally online, so you move out of teaching. But your knowledge of teaching makes it a relatively easy transition.

Really sorry to hear that others are having such a crap time too. I am feeling so despondent with it all. Instructional design sounds interesting @Wallywobbles . How difficult/long was the re-training?

I did a lot of short courses on LinkedIn to get a feel for it. Mostly it's learning some new software and formalising what you already know, all of what we do in class has a name!!
Then I did the MicroMasters on EdX in Instructional Design and Learning Technologies. Which is 4 courses that last 9 months roughly and take a day a week.
I retrained while teaching more than full time. Got to be honest I didn't see my kids much for the year. I was around but spent weekends in my office working, Saturdays learning, Sundays preparing courses for the following week. But it was very rewarding getting to create something for the Masters and getting to try it out with my students that week.
I love what I do. I earn more and now WFH full time.

Hello my people! Same here only RG. I get a decent salary but over the past two years my workload has gone sky high as student numbers have declined. Promotion still inextricably linked to funding bids all sources of which have shrunk or become embedded in elaborate and inaccessible network affiliations. Professional recognition is laughable, professional development only designed to indemnify my employer against risks. I would really like to get the heck out of here and do something more interesting but can’t afford a salary cut or to pay to retrain.

The only thing I paid for was the EdX and that was under a 1000€.

@Thewolvesarerunningagain what are you currently earning?

@Thewolvesarerunningagain , you are me! All of what you saif resonates. Promotion feels impossible.

Guys, I'm late to join this thread but feeling so down. Mainly because I feel bullied by a senior colleague. I'm thinking I need to get out but don't know how.

Sorry to jump on a bit of an old thread but I feel this too.

I've NC.

I don't feel particularly demoralised with wider structures or management. My issue is with my colleagues, why are there so many absolute bellends in academia?

Their blind acceptance of gender bollocks is the thing that's most grinding my gears. But it's also the relentless virtue signalling, the talking for talking sake in meetings, the desire for exceptionalism for academics as compared to other types of jobs, the completely paradoxical desire to 'stick it to the man' while also working at a world top 100 university.

I'm working on a bid about women's health. The PI wrote something on the bid about how a condition affects 'women only' and, of course, out come the bellends with all the comments about people who may suffer from PCOS but not identify as woman or be non-binary. Fuck off. It was only 2pm but I shut my laptop down, took the dog out for a couple of hours, then made a cake 😂
I don't know how much longer I can do this.

This is when I'm glad I work in historical research. You can talk about "women" without all the "identifying as" if they're dead.

Your post really made me laugh. It wouldn't surprise me if the gender bellends started to insist on using 'identify as dead'.

But your post did put me of the kerfuffle around Joan of Arc's gender identity. So maybe dead women 'identifying as' women isn't actually that ridiculous.

Interesting thread.
It is happening in most sectors.
Is it not just late stage capitalism infecting everything with its bottom line focus?
All that remains to be done is walk dogs, bake cakes and let the absolute bellends fight like rats in a bag among themselves.

Or bellends in a bag!

I hear you sister. This is my department to a T. So many people who still think and behave like undergrads.

I'm in the physical sciences, and generally things are much saner. We have a (small but growing) number of students who quietly identify as the opposite sex (this may be correlated with the high incidence of autism among students in this area). We have gender neutral toilets (in addition to male and female), there's gentle encouragement to add pronouns to email signatures and (thanks I think to support staff) the 2021 version of the rainbow flag is prominently displayed in our building. But no TRAs.

I have however recently exprienced the 'younger generation' of humanitites lecturers in a slightly different context. One was lecturing before me. After overrunning her slot by 5 minutes, instead of wrapping up as quickly as possible, she put on loud music and started dancing. The music was so loud several of the students waiting outside with me visibly flinched. As far as I could tell it had no relevance to the lecture; it was a big hit from the 2000s (presumably when she was a student...). I attempted to explain how inconsiderate this was, in particular to neurodiverse students. She simply didn't get this.

That is totally bizarre! Was it a social history lecture?

@ghislaine I've just checked what it was and am now even more gob-smacked. I don't want to share the module title (in case it's outing) but it's an extremely serious topic (in particular in the current global context). 2000s pop music has no relevance. Possibly it's an attempt to light the mood?? (I'd previously thought it was just a misguided attempt to be 'down with the kids'.)

Hugs OP 💐

@xxuserxx Oh God, we have music-playing lecturers in my department too. It's because pedagogy <nods knowingly>

A few years ago, a senior professor floated the suggestion that we should make our webpages a little more approachable by including information about what led us to our research areas, our non-work interests, and our families.

Off the back of this, several colleagues created short animations to introduce themselves to students, telling students where they live, how many children they have, what their home-office set up is like etc. This was during Covid.

I found it all so incredibly cringe and 'down with the kids'. That Covid year was when I really started to think "fuck this" about academia.

No way would I ever do that. I like to keep my work and home lives completely separate.

Exactly so. I used to be quite chill about it but now I don't even talk about what I did on the weekends with people at work.

My pull back was partly prompted by that mad oversharing that happened during Covid. So it was kind of counter-intuitive because while some colleagues opened their whole lives for students, I vowed not to share anything remotely personal at work ever again 😂

When the suggestion about more personal webpages came, I logged onto mine and made it uber-slick and uber-professional, the complete opposite of what was suggested.

I'm hoping to retire early and live on a meagre income but retain my sanity and health.

This is my plan. Twelve more years will take me to 50. Then I'm off. Earlier if I can manage it. I regularly plan my resignation letter in my head.

Twelve more years. That's 72 more Board of Studies, 36 Education Boards, 12 Department Away Days. Not that I'm counting....