The Heartache of Leaving Academia

While it is fun venturing into the space of Medium, the unfortunate truth is that this exploration is taking place during my process (and heartache) of leaving academia. This comes after a decade as an educator, and at a time fraught with difficulty.

To understand the depth of how painful it feels to leave, it is important to understand my impetus for entering. As you’ve may have gathered from my Why I Don’t Read White Folks Anymore and Choose Your Side: Teaching Toward Freedom, I’m very clear that the reason I entered academia was as an act of social justice: to support, nourish, and empower BIPOC and marginalized students so that they would not need to suffer in the ways that I and countless others have had to suffer.

The Dream Job: Why I Loved This Work

I’ve been doing this work passionately and joyfully for, quite truly, bulk of my career. I have loved my classrooms, my courses, my students, and all the wonderful, critical conversations we’ve engaged within, share within, and strengthen within upon all aspects of race, class, gender, culture, and sexuality. These conversations were always passionate and alive! They were fueled by palpable feelings and participation that run counter to how under resourced communities and at risk students are described to be. Again and again, they’ve shown their resilience, intelligence, and willingness to engage with deep, critical conversation even as we belonged to dispassionate institutions, admissions, and faculty boards.

This was the work I thought I would be doing for the whole of my life. Even now, I find myself stunned that this is not the case. As it stands, if the job included the students alone, I would still be doing it, but the lack of care and support the institution and its administrators have for its educators and even less for their BIPOC educators that remain marginalized against the egregious numbers of white counterparts in positions of power and all the decision making power that comes with and retains the same problematic tendencies that result in inequities across faculty, class matter, and student power.

Crushing Reality: What the Pandemic Revealed

It occurred to me, mid pandemic signing in for the next of my back-to-back six classes on my poor laptop with no resource or support from the institutions I instructed for, that it shouldn’t be like this. I shouldn’t be an adult uncertain of the stability of my income, of the infringements of my rights and safety amidst a global pandemic, and of the quality of education and nurturing we were delivering to our students in a time when we needed and could have been a stabilizing force in their lives that had been shattered. Our students belonged to the very black and brown communities suffering the highest infection and casualty rates than others — this was the ghetto, this was shared housing, this was proximity and food desert, this was blue collar workers sent out regardless, and this was teenagers and young adults stepping in to support families when there was already so much on their plate.

We, as in academia, could have helped, and to make that help happen, educators should have received appropriate support and care to make it happen. Instead, we were left to flounder on our own, utilize our own resources at a time when there was so little, and then take the brunt of criticisms as our institutions failed and failed again to respond in a good enough and caring enough way to the crushing nature of disaster. Such a shame. I cannot say it enough, and it resounds in my head again and again — such. a. shame.

Our work load only got more and more tough — quicker than we could prepare or breath, it did. Still, we held on; and it got more tough (and more ridiculous), and still, we held on. Arguably, we’re finally on our way out of the fog of chaos, but we’re left with a pertinent question: can we stay with institutions that abandoned us in time of need? Cane we stay with institutions that valued us so little previous and valued us even less at a time when it truly counted?

The Heartaching Reality: I Can’t

I just can’t matter so little. I’ve spoken to so many colleagues, half of us toeing the line between staying and going. There are, of course, other internal matters of such vibrant disrespect that fan these flames, that I and so many of us have been rendered speechless.

Like so many who have taken on the front lines of pushing and establishing justice oriented classrooms and shifting teaching practices to modalities of equity, I am always and forever a proponent of having BIPOC, marginalized youth and adults being taught, informed, supported, and nourished by BIPOC educators and mentors. But, not at the cost of personal martyrdom.

The reality is that for so much of my life, I practiced martyrdom as a way to give back and love my communities. I believe in this so much because I had adults in my life that did exactly that when I was a youth. I suppose it wasn’t until I was older myself that I realized how terrible and precarious of a position this is, all the while knowing that there is money and resource out there, we’re just not being given it. This work we do will never draw in a stable enough income because our society and culture doesn’t prioritize this type of social nurturing work.

An Ending: A Terrible One, But I Got Nothing

Recently, I attended an equity workshop where a professor was presenting their newest anthology work, which a years long project of working with inmates, teaching writing, creative and critical, and then creating an ongoing anthology series out of their writing for others to read their work. It is, in truth, a wonderful project; however, I did have questions for him.

He gets to “enter” the “ghetto,” and then leave to return to the warmth and safety of his upper class home all the while putting his name upon this good samaritan work — but, what about his colleagues? I’m not talking about the other high profile educators and administrators, but all the others roped into this work that don’t leave the very communities they survey. How are they compensated? What about us still here? What about everyone doing the important, needed work comparable to yours that don’t receive the funding and support? What about all of us that show up every damn day whether there is the promise of money or not?

He was thrown. Because the question stands — would he have gone through this project if he didn’t receive ample funding and social aplomb for it? Would he go through it if he had to go it alone? In front of hundreds, he couldn’t give me an answer, and there lays the difference between a well resourced, tenured faculty member and…the rest of us.

I am certainly rambling now, but the point is…I don’t want to suffer it anymore. Not when it is clear the institution is and, for a long foreseeable future, will continue to be biased in retaining its status quo, the practice of white liberal mindedness, without viable change that actually does change the lack of equity present in both the student body and the working body. And so, at least for now, I need a breath and a break.

Mabuhay, I’m EA Garcia, and I’m a thriving eater of story. I reflect on all my reads across genres, forms, and categories. Since I only read BIPOC work and prioritize small, indie, and micro press work, you might find a new read! I also write on academia, publishing, & decolonization, ftw.

Feel free to recommend things in the comments below! I LOVE recs: particularly books, dramas, manga, & webtoons! Try to keep it BIPOC and marginalized ❤

Read about WHY I only read BIPOC folk, get a taste for my stance on decolonizing bookshelves, or look at some funky reviews of storywork!