"Do You Regret It?"

My recent adventures back in US academia.

Photo by Neal Kharawala on Unsplash

At the end of March, I flew back to the U.S. for my annual disciplinary conference in Chicago and to see family back in the southland. It had been a minute. My partner and I left Texas and the U.S. fairly publicly—I wrote about it here and talked about it openly—so I knew the trip would involve more than panels and catching up with old friends.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was how many people would seek me out to subtly ask a question that had been circulating in their minds. No one asked outright, “Do you regret it?” —but the question was there underneath so many of my conversations.

They wanted to know if leaving academia and the country had broken something in me. They seemed to be afraid to find out that it had but were relieved when I confirmed the opposite. They asked because they wanted to know if an intellectual life that had been reconfigured was worth what I lost.

My dear readers already know the answer to the regret question: “Hell no!” But I want to talk about why they asked it, because I think many of you will recognize yourselves in them.

The scholars I spoke with are navigating an extraordinary convergence of pressures.

The Trump administration’s attacks on higher education — slashing funding, targeting any program that touches diversity, equity, and inclusion, and wielding federal dollars as a weapon against academic freedom — are landing on top of trends that were already destabilizing: declining enrollments, the chronic devaluing of humanities programs, and a job market that was brutal long before any of this started.

Layer onto that the personal stakes, such as a trans child whose safety feels uncertain, a partner whose immigration status is precarious, or a department that might not exist in two years. You begin to understand why so many people I spoke with looked like they were holding their breath.

These are not people who want to leave. They love research. They love teaching. They love the scholarly networks they have built over years of painstaking work. They want to remain close to family and communities. But they are also clear-eyed enough to recognize that loving something does not make it sustainable and that the forces bearing down on them are not ones they can will away with passion or persistence alone.

What struck me most was not the fear itself but the desire to avoid paralysis. Smart, capable people who can see the trajectory but don't want to feel frozen because every option feels impossible. Stay and endure conditions that may worsen? Leave and lose the identity that has organized your adult life? The uncertainty is its own kind of suffering, and it compounds daily. What people want is a way out of what feels like an impossible binary—and I think there is one.

One conversation about drawing a line in the sand stuck with me.

A friend who teaches courses on race, gender, and difference—the very subjects under political siege right now—told me she had already decided where her limit was.

When they start interfering with how I teach my courses or how I do my research, that’s when I exit. Until then, I love this work, so I will keep at it.

I found her clarity bracing. Not because I think everyone should draw the same line, but because she had drawn one at all.

Your line might be different. Maybe it’s when your family or you personally feel threatened by your institution or the public climate around it. Maybe it’s when you are forced out because of declining enrollments. Maybe it’s when the intellectual freedom that drew you to this work in the first place has been so eroded that the work no longer resembles itself. The specifics matter less than the act of naming it.

I want to suggest that this is something each of you can do, even if you are nowhere near your limit yet.

Determine now what your line is, not in a crisis, but in whatever fragile calm you can find.

What conditions would cause you to seek employment elsewhere?

What circumstances would prompt you to consider life in a different country, a different sector, a different relationship to your intellectual work?

You do not have to act on this. You may never need to.

But defining the line in the sand for yourself transforms a shapeless dread into something you can hold and examine, and that alone can quiet a nervous system that has been running on alarm for months.

People at the conference wanted to know what my transition was like, so let me be transparent, as I always try to be here at PNP.

For three years before I finally decided, I carried an anxiety about leaving that I could not put down. I cycled through the same questions endlessly, never arriving anywhere.

But once I made the decision — once it was actually made — a clarity settled over me that surprised me. That is just my experience, and I am not suggesting it will be yours. But I think the uncertainty before a major decision is often worse than the decision itself, and that is worth knowing if you are living in that uncertainty right now.

But here is what I want you to hear: dramatic life changes are endurable. They can even be great. The intellectual life I have now — coaching scholars, writing this newsletter, building something on my own terms — is more sustainable than what I had before, and I say that as someone who genuinely loved being a professor. Leaving did not mean losing the life of the mind or my community. It meant reorganizing them.

If you are sitting with this paralysis, I am not going to tell you to quit your job or buy a plane ticket.

But I am going to suggest one small, concrete thing: talk to someone who has already made the leap. Find a scholar who left academia and ask them what the first six months looked like. Find someone who relocated abroad and ask them what they wish they had known.

These conversations will not make your decisions for you, but they will crack open the sealed chamber of your imagination just enough to let some air in. The fear that there is nothing out there for you beyond what you are doing right now—that fear is louder than it is accurate, and other people's stories are the fastest way to turn down the volume.

When I left the U.S. this time, I felt understood and validated by the people I spoke with—they saw my choices and reflected back that those choices made sense.

But I also carried a deep concern for friends and colleagues who feel this stress on the daily, who do not have the distance I have, who are waking up every morning inside the thing I got to leave. I cannot fix that for you.

But I can tell you what I saw at the conference: a community of scholars who are deeply concerned for their futures, yes, but who are also thinking clearly, asking hard questions, and refusing to let fear be the last word.

That gave me hope. As do all those who ultimately chose to stay and fight the good fight.