Exit Stage Left: Quitting Academia

It has been a couple of months now since I made the decision to quit my PhD. I was close to finishing, but life happened. More than anything, I felt completely burned out—and I’ll have a separate blog post about that soon (still working on it). What has become very clear over the past few weeks, though, is that I made the right decision when I left my academic career behind.

There were many reasons behind my decision, but three in particular stand out. I wanted to write about them because, of all the things people warned me about when I started my PhD, these three were ones no one saw coming.

1) A TECH MOGUL BOUGHT AND DESTROYED

ONE OF MY RESEARCH PLATFORMS

Over the years, I developed a deep fascination with John F. Kennedy—and also RichardNixon. I spent years searching for new angles to analyze their media presence: how they opened (and tried to close) the door to the White House, how they were portrayed in popular culture, and how their ability—or failure—to establish a relationship with the media shaped their legacies. I wrote several essays on the subject, and some were even published.

But focusing on media meant also keeping up with its evolution. From the printed press to mass media to what now plagues our phones and screens: social media. President Barack Obama was the first to recognize its potential for campaigning, but even with an official White House profile, he didn’t yet use social media for serious campaigning. Still, slowly but surely, Twitter became one of the most widely used free platforms for political discourse in America.

I had charts, data, and numbers on how congressional and senatorial candidates used Twitter to campaign—and I loved doing that research. I was always online during presidential debates. Twitter functioned like a massive live chat room, with celebrities and friends reacting in real-time. It felt like being in a big room, discussing history as it happened. It was an incredible time. Seeing a random social media platform transform into a free forum where voters could reach their elected officials (and vice versa) was a sight to behold. I loved researching this.

But then social media changed—and right in front of my eyes, my research platform became… unavailable. First, President Trump created his own social media site, which wasn’t open to users outside the U.S. for nearly two years, making analysis much harder. News sites and pundits quoted his posts, of course, but conducting unbiased research meant accessing the material firsthand. Second, came Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Since then, content moderation has changed significantly.

People have left Twitter in large numbers, migrating to Meta’s Threads or the more independent Bluesky. But as of now, neither platform has reached Twitter’s scale. It’ll take time to see the numbers. Many influencers have already said Bluesky “feels like old Twitter,” but I’m not sure that’s enough to persuade people—especially political figures who benefited from Twitter’s free and open interface for so many years—to make the switch.

So whether my research can be continued remains uncertain. There are promising studies tracking how users move between platforms. But even if we believe Twitter played a significant role in Donald Trump’s re-election, just last week, despite Elon Musk’s efforts, the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat remained in Democratic hands.

The only real conclusion right now is that it’s too early to draw any real conclusions. More time needs to pass. We’ll see whether social media remains a collection of echo chambers or if free public discourse can return—and with it, candidates encouraged to use these platforms again. These echo chambers have continued to mislead us, as we saw clearly in both the 2016 and 2024 elections.

2) THE TOPIC OF MY DISSERTATION WAS MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

When I started my PhD, I left behind the topic of Presidents and moved on to migration. There were several reasons for this—not only was my advisor well-versed in the field, but I also saw an opportunity to combine my other major, Italian, with my existing knowledge of American culture. The focus wasn’t just migration itself, but the representation of migration.

I worked extensively with Italian Americans, a group that fascinated me. From the first Italians who made the trip, to the fourth and fifth generations who still proudly identify as Italian today—everything about that trajectory blew my mind. I loved doing this research. I still love it. I can talk about it for hours. So many people told me I’d grow tired of it by the time I finished my PhD, but for me, that never happened. I was incredibly lucky in that way. It’s also part of why I didn’t want to quit. The stories I wanted to tell felt important—needed to be told.

Still, even when narrowing my focus to a small slice of the broader picture, I had to keep an eye on the whole thing… and parts of it are rotting. Right in front of my eyes.

When I heard that a father had been wrongfully deported to El Salvador—after a judge ruled he should not be detained, and despite his legal right to be in the U.S.—my gut reaction was disgust. This came on the heels of a similar case involving a Lebanese teacher, also wrongfully detained and deported. Every week brings another horror story: gross mismanagement, wrongful deportations, all from a racist government in power. And frankly, I can’t stomach it.

I can’t, in good conscience, just focus on past migrations. Trends must be analyzed; waves of movement have to be compared over time. But I can’t simply zoom in on the parts I enjoy researching. It’s impossible to do this work while ignoring the daily decisions being made by the Trump administration about migrants—both legal and undocumented. I wish I could just focus on Italian migration in the 20th century. But that’s not how this field works.

All of this is to say: I’m angry. I do love my research. Even after seven years in a PhD program, I never came to hate it. I never got bored. I just cannot, at least for now, bring myself to dig deeper.

3) ChatGPT

Here’s a hot take on academic writing: it’s boring, repetitive, and written in a style we like to call formal—when in reality, it’s just about stretching a five-word sentence into fifteen. There have been multiple studies showing that the mandatory academic articles we’re forced to write are read by, on average, 2–3 people. Can you imagine that?

Can you imagine having to publish just to get your PhD, to move up the academic ladder, to even be considered for a full-time teaching job—when virtually nobody reads the work? There’s a whole saying for it: “Publish or perish.” This pressure is so widespread that it birthed its own grim motto, yet each individual article gets read by two or three people. It’s ridiculous.

And it’s even more frustrating because not everyone is suited to endless publishing, presenting, and researching. Some of us—like me—are meant for teaching. And others should never, and I mean never, set foot in a classroom.

As ChatGPT became more well-known, I saw students experimenting with it. A few tried to cheat (thankfully not in my classes—and for that I’m grateful; it showed me they understood that writing skills matter, and this wasn’t just another class to pass and forget). Unlike many of my colleagues who panicked and assumed everyone would cheat, I wanted to explore the tool myself. I wanted to see how it could be integrated into the classroom.

But then I started using it… and it wrote, in seconds, a chapter that was better than anything I’d written for my dissertation. I was left feeling… empty.

What’s the point of forcing people to churn out publication after publication when, one: nobody reads them, and two: AI can do a better job? I was already struggling to convince myself that the conferences and papers were worth it—just so I could keep teaching in higher education. Because the fact that I was a good teacher—that I consistently had 30-33 students apply for a seminar that could only seat 15—meant nothing. My teaching ability, my connection with students, the work I put into making class engaging—none of it mattered in academia. And that makes me incredibly angry.

I knew the system from the start, but the workload expected of professors is beyond unreasonable. It's unsustainable. The result? Mediocre research. Mediocre teaching. Every student who complains that university sucks? They’re not wrong. The system is broken.

And insisting that publications still matter in the age of ChatGPT? In my humble opinion, that’s a scam.

Dear reader, this blog entry—this very one—was reviewed by AI. And I can tell you: it made it better. I know my limits as a writer. I love writing, but now I have a tool to help refine it.

So what’s the conclusion?

Nobody could have predicted these changes when I started my PhD. I don’t regret leaving academia—it’s a system that requires extensive reforms. But I do miss the classroom. I miss the energy of a lively discussion with students. And it breaks my heart to know that as long as the system values obscure papers more than human connection and effective teaching, there’s no future in higher education for teachers like me.

That deeply saddens me.

Still, we move forward. Some time has passed, and I know I made the right choice. I just hope I can recharge—and find my potential again.