I Worked My Ass Off to Get My ‘Dream Job’: Now, I’m Leaving.

Part 1: Letting the Cat Out of the Bag

I have been obsessively reading ‘quit lit’ for more than a year. The Chronicle of Higher Education; Inside Higher Ed, and other periodicals of note are not only full of essays penned by scholars reflecting on why they are leaving Ph.D. programs, the hamster wheel of adjunct and term employment, or tenure track positions; but also catalogs of the reemergence of quit lit in higher education and meta-analyses of the genre that range from the comparative to the critical. Frankly, I can think of nothing more “academic” than an individual and an institution assiduously examining a door from their respective vantage points — its architecture and function, its history and context, the consequences and politics of its swinging —while the former attempts to avoid letting it hit them in the ass as they take their leave. I’ve mused, should I ever feel compelled to offer my own addition to ‘the literature,’ that I would do things differently.

Unless you are horribly unobservant, you have already figured out that this is the beginning of my work of quit lit. And unless you lack a sense of irony, you have recognized that I am not only not doing things differently; I am lining myself up to check the boxes on all the relevant quit lit tropes. Those tropes are as follows:

• Make the shocking announcement that you are leaving a position that (to date) represents the culmination of everything you have ever wanted, worked, or sacrificed for.
• Provide a vision of what you thought the position would be (that is suitably rose-tinged enough to set your past self up for a heartbreaking realization).
• Provide a harrowing narrative of your slow and heartbreaking realization of the true nature of the position and system in which it exists that is laden with vague references to injustices endured, wrongs survived, and problems that need correction (not by you, of course).
• Provide gracious statements of gratitude for those you are leaving behind who have been genuinely supportive and pleasant to work with (thereby avoiding any inadvertent assignment of blame where it does not belong and passive-aggressively assigning blame where it does belong through a process of exclusion).
• Close on a hopeful note about what’s next for you now that you have made this profound declaration of your moral certitude and intention to live your best life.

Shit. That’s a lot. Maybe I will do this differently.

Academia is a great ruiner of stories. This is because academic stories can only be told with a vocabulary of conventions that are nonsensical to most people who are not part of academia. Attempts to work around this fact result in stories that are beleaguered by lengthy explanations and that rarely hit the mark. Imagine telling the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears while having to explain what a ‘bear’ is, what a ‘forest’ is, what a ‘house’ is, the social conventions regarding entering houses that are not your own, the need to suspend disbelief as it pertains to anthropomorphized bears, and the sense of danger inherent in human-ursine interactions. Understandably, academics tend to save their academic stories for other academics.

Thus, it is with no small amount of annoyance that I make the ‘shocking’ announcement that the 2019–2020 academic year will be my last in my current position at Randolph College. The non-academics among you are no doubt wondering what the big deal is in announcing my intention to leave a job an entire year from now. The academics among you have no doubt considered the timing of this decision and realized what a colossally significant life choice this is.

Most of you probably hard shrugged.

I will be honest and say that I am still deciding how and how much of the “why” I want to share. My reasons for leaving run from the deeply personal to the profoundly political and sharing is, for me, an important part of successfully navigating a process that is equal parts mourning and rebirth. I will soon find my way to that story and, perhaps, invent my own vocabulary so that I may tell it. This is, after all, how I have made my way thorough academia thus far.

I will continue to be honest and say that one of my biggest motivations for writing and making my quit lit public is to avoid having to explain myself over and over and over again. While I am a social person, I am painfully introverted and loathe having ‘conversations of consequence’ in all but the most comfortable of situations. I can think of nothing more excruciating than enumerating my whys over dozens of semi-private cups of coffee or ruining perfectly good beers with awkward conversations.

All of which is to say, don’t @ me. Just wait for Part 2.