Citation: Doležal, Joshua. “The Big Quit: Even tenure-line professors are leaving academe.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 June 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-big-quit.
Image: “Image” by emdot is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
In this June 2022 cover story, Doležal documents the pandemic’s toll on faculty members and sketches the exodus that its fallout has wrought. “Before Covid,” he writes,“it was still possible to see tenured and tenure-track faculty members as relatively immune from the stresses of working in higher ed. No more.” The trials of the quit-literati — those legions of overworked postdocs and adjuncts — have turned out to be not anomaly but harbinger: A survey conducted by The Chronicle and Fidelity Investments found that, since 2020, over a third of tenure-line faculty members have seriously considered leaving academe. Plenty of others are eyeing early retirement. The push factors are many: Untenable workloads coupled with stagnant pay. Lax or nonexistent Covid precautions. Campuses that can’t, or won’t, accommodate the needs of working parents. Escalating legislative attacks on tenure and academic freedom. And a pervasive sense of malaise and burnout, spiked with the fear that, bad as things are, they may yet get worse.
Nearly everyone featured in this essay frames quitting as a painful but salutary choice. They say they feel more secure, less exhausted. They’ve reconnected to their intellectual curiosity (and to their families). They’d make the same decision again. Still, the undercurrent of grief is impossible to miss. No one Doležal spoke to regretted the decision to leave, but all expressed a mix of relief and loss. Like him, they were leaving a calling.
Jess edited this piece during her time as an associate editor at the Chronicle.