Leaving Academia: The Shifting Terrain of Higher Education

Leaving academia, this essay joins a steady chorus of reflection now thinking backwards over the last half century of extraordinary transformations in higher education. The industry is booming, more students than ever are entering universities, yet the academy is seen as increasingly in crisis. Staff workloads keep mounting, student debt soaring, and staff and student anxieties alike are multiplying, even as government underfunding, imposed managerialism and commercialisation threaten to reduce the underlying logic of higher education to market principles. In this context it is more urgent than ever to record the half century of struggle that opened up and enriched academic life, gradually ensuring the entry of hitherto excluded voices and topics into research and scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on my own involvement, I recall some of these always-incomplete attempts to challenge the fault-lines of intellectual life in the academy, knowing that we need always to cherish the value of teaching, research and learning, simply for its own sake.