On Why Leaving Academia Mightn’t be the Same as Leaving Other Jobs
With so many colleagues in HE facing redundancy at the moment, amidst a significant crisis in university finances, and with my own experience of job loss still resonating, I continue to reflect on the human costs of these changes and, in particular, on the identity-related issues they raise.
Of late, I have been wondering whether there is something peculiarly potent about the experience of job loss amongst academics. Whatever the reason for moving on from a university post, whether through role deletion, redundancy or retirement, when it comes to surrendering an office, ceasing the obligatory round of meetings, or no longer receiving a salary, I find that one still wakes in the morning thinking like an academic. This interdisciplinary scholar, for one, continues to mull over a host of overlapping questions. Books still appeal and get purchased, articles are tagged to be read, professional communities are still thought about and followed on social media, and ideas for research projects and papers continue to present themselves at inconvenient moments, while in the supermarket or out walking. You get my drift.
Someone who has spent years researching does not simply cease to do these things because their relationship with an institution has changed. Similarly, the desire to write and teach is not snuffed out simply because one loses the title or role that once made it all cohere. This can make the transition from academic life, however it comes about, rather more complicated than the phrase ‘leaving a job’ or ‘retiring from work’ might suggest, and potentially rather more painful as a result. For many academics, work and identity have become deeply intertwined.
Research on recently retired academics points towards the depth of this identification with the role. Miron and colleagues, in interviews with 19 recently retired university academics, found the centrality of academic identity to be the overarching theme in participants’ accounts. They identified three broad responses to retirement: identity change, in which other identities became more important; identity continuity, in which important dimensions of academic identity were carried forward; and identity conservation, in which academic identity remained strongly held while satisfactory alternatives were difficult to establish (Miron et al., 2022).
A more recent international study by Dafna Lemish suggests just how common continuity may be. Interviews with 54 retired professors in twelve countries found that more than half remained actively productive in scholarship after leaving the payroll, with another substantial group continuing selected academic activities. Only a small minority had deliberately disengaged from academic work altogether (Lemish, 2026).
Why might this be?
More than an occupation
One reason may be that becoming an academic involves acquiring an identity that is not reducible to employment. Academic life often involves unusually prolonged formation. Before someone obtains an established academic post, they have often spent years acquiring specialist knowledge, completing postgraduate study, undertaking doctoral research, publishing, teaching and entering a disciplinary community. Long before any permanent contract arrives, and goodness knows there are far too few of these highly competitive things, ways of thinking and behaving associated with academic life may already have become part of the self.
Academic identity is also frequently grounded in a discipline rather than solely in an employing institution. The literature on disciplinary cultures has long recognised this. Becher and Trowler’s influential description of academic ‘tribes and territories’ drew attention to the cultures, practices, languages and allegiances associated with different fields of knowledge. Later work has complicated the metaphor, but the underlying point remains important: disciplines constitute communities within which knowledge, values, practices and identities are formed (Becher and Trowler, 2001; Trowler, 2014).
Mary Henkel similarly argued that academic identities have traditionally been sustained principally through membership of disciplinary and institutional communities. These provide ways of understanding the work, standards by which it is judged, relationships through which recognition is conferred, and values such as intellectual autonomy around which professional identity can be constructed (Henkel, 2004; 2005).
All this creates an unusual relationship between an academic and any particular institution. I may be employed by a university, but I am also a historian, theologian, sociologist, chemist, or whatever disciplinary identity has been acquired and inhabited over time. University role descriptors such as Lecturer, Associate Professor and Professor are organisational, but being an academic also makes a claim upon who I am and how I encounter the world, perceive it, understand it and order it. A university can terminate the former much more readily than the latter. Differentiating between the two may well be one way of understanding, and then surviving, the rupture that comes about as a result of radical change.
Work without an obvious ending
There is another peculiarity about academic life. Much academic work has no natural point of completion. A surgeon eventually has to stop operating. A pilot cannot indefinitely continue flying commercial aircraft. Many senior organisational roles depend upon possession of an office and the authority attached to it. Scholarship is different.
There is no obvious age at which one completes being interested in an area of knowledge or in the questions related to it. Reading, thinking and writing remain desirable and possible long after formal employment has ended. Indeed, Lemish’s retired professors sometimes experienced retirement as an opportunity finally to concentrate upon precisely the scholarly activities that had originally drawn them towards academic life, freed from some of the administrative demands of university employment (Lemish, 2026).
This creates an ambiguity around what retirement or redundancy actually means. An academic may have finished employment without having finished the work. This distinction can be liberating, but it can also be painfully frustrating. One can retain intellectual curiosity, writing, teaching, mentoring and scholarly friendship while relinquishing meetings, administrative pressures and institutional politics. At the same time, this very continuity can make transition more difficult. There is no clean boundary across which one steps and becomes something else, and institutions sometimes make it harder still to negotiate that transition. Therein lies one of the identity challenges brought about by redundancy in particular.
The institution we thought we transcended
There is a further paradox. Academics often understand their scholarly identity as independent of their particular university. Knowledge is larger than any institution. Disciplinary communities cross organisational and national boundaries. Scholarship belongs, at least in principle, to communities of inquiry rather than to an employer.
Yet the university provides much of the social architecture that sustains academic identity. It supplies colleagues, students, seminars, conferences, libraries, email addresses, titles, affiliations, research infrastructure, and the countless small encounters through which intellectual life is affirmed. It also confers recognition. Others respond differently to someone who speaks as a professor attached to a university than they may to someone pursuing exactly the same intellectual work privately.
Research on academic retirement repeatedly identifies continuing connections as important. Cahill, Galvin and Pettigrew’s longitudinal study of women academics found maintaining connections with academia and negotiating occupational identity to be central themes during transition. Follow-up work found that questions of recognition, inclusion and continuing meaningful professional relationships remained significant after retirement (Cahill, Galvin and Pettigrew, 2022). Perhaps, then, one of the shocks of departure lies in discovering just how socially sustained an apparently autonomous identity has always been.
A person may remain every bit as knowledgeable on the Monday after leaving a university as they were on the Friday before; their intellectual capacity has not suddenly diminished. Yet some of the structures through which that identity was recognised and enacted may disappear almost overnight. The loss can therefore be curiously intangible. One has lost something significant while remaining, internally, much the same person.
Belonging, recognition and status
Academic life also offers forms of belonging that can be difficult to reproduce elsewhere. There are disciplinary conversations conducted over decades; colleagues who understand why an obscure research problem matters; doctoral students, conferences, learned societies and networks of friendship formed around shared intellectual interests. These are not merely professional conveniences. Over time, they become part of the social world through which identity, belonging and networks of esteem are sustained.
Miron and colleagues found precisely this complexity. For some retirees, retaining an ‘academic-minded’ identity provided continuity even after the formal academic role had ended. Others found the loss of institutional belonging harder to negotiate.
Status complicates matters further. Academic life has its hierarchies, vanities and absurdities, but titles, senior standing, publication records and institutional affiliations carry symbolic meaning. Over a long career they can become woven into how a person understands their place in the world and how others respond to them. Remove these abruptly and the psychological jolt can require a good deal of adjustment.
We might prefer to imagine that intellectual vocation is untouched by status, but human beings are rarely so emotionally immune. Recognition matters. Having one’s judgement sought matters. Belonging somewhere where one’s accumulated intellectual expertise has currency matters. Transitioning out of a role may involve significant losses of status and recognition alongside losses of activity and community. I have felt the sting of the sudden loss of such things.
Is academia unique?
Probably not, I have concluded. Medicine, for instance, offers an instructive comparison. Studies of doctors approaching or passing retirement similarly find powerful professional identification. Manor and Holland’s research with retired doctors found that continued work allowed participants to preserve professional identity, status and a sense of being needed. Other studies of surgeons and academic physicians describe retirement as potentially threatening a deeply established sense of self (Manor and Holland, 2022).
This suggests that academia belongs to a broader family of occupations in which work becomes vocation, community, expertise and identity at once. Religious ministers, medics, members of the judiciary, those employed in the arts, and some forms of public service may generate comparable attachments and comparable forms of identity conflation.
Academic life may nevertheless possess an unusually potent combination of features. Its formation is long. Its disciplinary affiliations extend beyond the employer. Its work often originates in intrinsic curiosity. Its boundaries between work and leisure are porous. Its communities provide status and belonging. And perhaps most importantly, its central activities can continue after the employment relationship has ceased. One can retire from a university while remaining a scholar. That possibility is both gift and problem for those forced to move on through age, redundancy or institutional change.
Transition without repudiation
Perhaps this is why the language of ‘moving on’ can sometimes be unhelpful for people leaving academic life. ‘Role deletion’ is undoubtedly a less kind term, but ‘moving on’ can imply that a previous identity should be relinquished and replaced with an alternative, contrasting one. Successful transition may involve something different: discerning which parts of an identity still belong to us and which depended upon the context that has now gone.
The research on academic retirement suggests that continuity need not represent a failure to adapt. Carrying elements of academic identity forward can itself be a form of adaptation (Miron et al., 2022). The more difficult position may arise when someone remains strongly attached to an institutionalised identity that can no longer be enacted, while finding no other contexts in which valued parts of the self can find expression.
That is where a number of questions come into play, and where the presence of a thoughtful interlocutor may become important.
Which parts of academic life were genuinely mine, rather than the institution’s?
What do I still want to research, teach, write or contribute?
Which relationships do I want to sustain?
What forms of status is it most painful to lose, and why?
What possibilities become available when institutional demands loosen their grip?
If the role changes, what remains continuous in my story as a person?
I have found that coaching can be valuable during transitions of this kind because the task is not simply one of career planning. A range of thoughts and emotions may be in play at once: grief, relief, anger, a sense of injustice, status loss, unrealised ambition, even amidst ambiguous feelings of freedom or excitement about the emerging possibilities. Work with a coach involves recognising these different currents without insisting upon premature reinvention.
Academic identity may outlive the academic job because, after many years, it has become part of who one is, rather than simply something one does. It need not, however, exhaust who one is, nor become a cage that prevents the individual from finding renewed meaning and purpose in life. The challenge may be to discover how an identity formed through academic life can continue to develop beyond the particular structures and relationships that give it external shape.
References
Becher, T. and Trowler, P.R. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines. 2nd ed. Buckingham: Open University Press/SRHE.
Cahill, M., Galvin, R. and Pettigrew, J. (2022) ‘Becoming an academic retiree: a longitudinal study of women academics’ transition to retirement experiences from a university in the Republic of Ireland’, Journal of Occupational Science, 30(3), 438–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2022.2046139
Henkel, M. (2004) ‘Current science policies and their implications for the formation and maintenance of academic identity’, Higher Education Policy, 17(2), 167–182.
Henkel, M. (2005) ‘Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy environment’, Higher Education, 49, 155–176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-004-2919-1
Lemish, D. (2026) ‘“I can finally focus on my work”: continuity through academic retirement’, Global Perspectives in Communication, 1(2), wpag009. https://doi.org/10.1093/gpcomm/wpag009
Manor, S. and Holland, R. (2022) ‘Retiring in a white coat: doctors working after retirement’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 133, 103678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2021.103678
Miron, A.M., Branscombe, N.R., Ball, T.C., McFadden, S.H. and Haslam, C. (2022) ‘Interpretative phenomenological analysis of social identity transition in academic retirement’, Work, Aging and Retirement, 8(1), 82–97. https://doi.org/10.1093/workar/waab018
Trowler, P. (2014) ‘Academic tribes and territories: the theoretical trajectory’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 25(3), 17–26. https://doi.org/10.25365/oezg-2014-25-3-2