Why Leaving Academia Feels Like Withdrawal (opinion)

Every academic knows the small electric jolt of the email. We are pleased to inform you— Or, just as familiar: After careful consideration, we regret— You learn to read the verdict from the first line, before your mind catches up with your pulse. Without ever deciding to, you let a career organize itself around those two sentences—around who is permitted to send them, and what they confer or take away.

Most advice on leaving academia is useful the way an exit interview is useful: It tells you where the doors are, not why they feel welded shut from the inside. I left academic medicine years ago, and the hardest part was not losing the salary. It was a sensation I could barely admit—that walking out of the university was a kind of disappearance, as if I might almost cease to exist. For decades I had learned to want what only the university could grant: the paper accepted after the third revision, my name edged up an author list. Somewhere I mistook the wanting for who I was.

That feeling is not a quirk of temperament but a clue to how academic life is built, and the most honest word for it is “dependency.” Many who succeed in academia become reliant on the recognition of its gatekeepers—tenure committees, journal editors, prize juries—until that recognition becomes the currency of existence. That reliance, more than pay, is what makes leaving feel unthinkable. If we saw the same pattern in someone outside the academy, we would not call it dedication. We would call it something closer to addiction.

This is not a clinical diagnosis but a structural likeness—a claim about shape and experience, not severity or moral equivalence. Chemical dependencies carry a pharmacology and a bodily toll no rejection letter can match. The love of scholarship is not the disease; the monopoly on validation is.

My leaving was a retirement, but the mechanism is not confined to it—and in American higher education it is sharpening. Tenure, the promise that recognition once won could not easily be revoked, now covers a minority of the professoriate: Roughly two-thirds of faculty now work off the tenure track, up from under half in the late 1980s, on contracts that can end without cause. As secure positions contract, more people compete for a recognition that is rationed ever more tightly—precarity makes it scarcer, and scarcity makes dependency stronger.

Strip the word of its moral charge and, as the psychologist Mark Griffiths has argued, what unites substance addictions with behavioral ones is not a drug but a family of features: salience, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, relapse. You know the rituals from the inside—refreshing the journal portal, watching a citation count climb, waiting on the second reviewer. Nor is this merely hard work. Studying junior doctors, Wilmar Schaufeli and colleagues defined workaholism not as long hours but as an irresistible inner drive to work excessively—the pathology is in the compulsion, not the time sheet. If the structure is shared, what separates a workaholic, a person dependent on a substance and a tenured professor is not moral worth but two axes we rarely examine: who controls the supply, and whether the culture claps.

Take the supply first. A workaholic’s reward is internal to the activity—the absorption, the narcotic of the full calendar—and so it travels: Change jobs, change countries, retire into compulsive committee work and the reward stays intact.

Academic validation is different, because its supply is licensed. The reward is not the work itself but recognition handed down by a closed set of gatekeepers, minted with an authority few outsiders can reproduce. Pierre Bourdieu called the university a field built on symbolic capital—the standing that comes from being recognized by the recognized. Alasdair MacIntyre named what then goes wrong: Every practice has internal goods, like the understanding of a hard question, and external ones, like status, and the danger is that the institution teaches you to mistake the external goods for the practice itself. Among professors, as the legal scholar Patrick Schiltz observed of his own field, the analogue of greed is prestige—counted not in billable hours but in publications.

There is no over-the-counter substitute for “respected scholar in the field.” Few outside the institution can confer this status with the same force, and it can seem to vanish the moment the university address does. That is what makes the melodramatic language of disappearance intelligible. The workaholic’s prison has portable walls; the academic’s is the campus itself.

The first axis explains why leaving can feel fatal; the second explains why we so seldom recognize the dependency from inside it. A culture applauds some dependencies and stigmatizes others, and respectability runs very nearly opposite to harm. The achievement dependencies are the celebrated ones, dressed in the moral costume of virtue: discipline, rigor, vocation, service. “Publish or perish” circulates in our departments not as warning but as creed. A person with a drinking problem at least lives in a culture that has a language for the danger; we live inside an institution that works like an enabler with letterhead. The adjunct refreshing an inbox and the person organizing life around any other source of relief may not share a diagnosis, but they can share a structure. One is told to get help; the other is told to be patient and keep submitting.

This is not a private weakness fixed by private willpower, and the cost is not only personal. The dependence need not even wait on recognition arriving: Some are held by what they have won, and others—the adjunct, the postdoc, the early-career scholar—by the promise that it might finally come, which the system keeps alive and unpaid. A 2014 survey of Flemish biomedical scientists found that publication pressure was associated with the severity of self-reported scientific misconduct. The same machine runs both ways: It hands out the grants and quietly degrades the science they are meant to buy.

I would rather lose the argument than pathologize every committed life. Picture two scholars. One has kept the same question alive for a decade because it grips her and would go on asking it in a shed with no audience. The other cannot begin a project without first asking whether it will count— whether it will be noticed, indexed, rewarded. From the outside they look identical; inside, one is free and the other is not. Someone who would grieve leaving has a vocation. Someone for whom leaving means ceasing to exist has something else.

If any of this is right, most advice on leaving academia treats the logistics and never reaches the dependency underneath. You do not resolve a dependency by finding a more convenient source of the same validation; you treat it by rebuilding a sense of worth that does not run through a single set of gatekeepers. I can’t believe I lived like that, people say afterward— the very words those in recovery use about the years they organized around a supply.

None of this is only the individual’s to fix. If recognition is the supply, the institution controls its distribution—and it could distribute it differently. Departments could stop romanticizing overwork. Graduate programs could teach, plainly, that a scholarly identity resting entirely on publication rests on sand: Inquiry is the internal good, the citation merely its receipt. Mentors could name the difference between loving a question and needing to be seen asking it. A profession that made its exits honorable—treating leaving as a passage, not a vanishing—would have less need to keep anyone dependent.

I write this from the far side of the door. I am 72, attached to no university, answerable to no committee. For most of my life I moved within recognizable territory: surgery, then vascular surgery, then evidence-based medicine. Even when I was rejected, I was rejected in a language I understood. Now I write on ethics and education, and I have none of that standing. The rejections are no longer merely editorial; they reopen a question I thought I had closed—who am I, when the field that once knew how to recognize me no longer speaks for me? The only honest consolation is that I am learning again. At 27 a rejection can feel like initiation; at 72, after a life of mastery, it can feel like demotion—unless I read it as evidence that the work is still alive enough to make me a beginner again.

And yet I will not let myself off so easily. I have no committee left to satisfy, and still I submit, still I want the essay read, still I feel the small lift when a stranger writes to say it mattered. Is that the residue of the old dependency, or the ordinary wish to be understood, which is no sickness at all? I cannot always tell. The line between wanting to be read and needing to be validated is real, but it is not always visible from the inside, even at my age. So I do not claim to be cured—only to keep watch. The emails still arrive, with their two sentences and their old power. The only question worth keeping is whether I still need one of them to tell me that I am here.