My Exit Strategy from Academia
Some thoughts about responsible exit from organising for change inside a university
Image: UT Sustainability Dialogues session on Research, Partnerships and Fossil Fuel Relations. Enschede, the Netherlands, April 2023. That’s me in the back, trying to capture everything discussed.
“I have witnessed – up close and personal – many, many promising ideas, initiatives, projects, programmes and change efforts being tried out and then failing.
All that under-realised, overlooked talent, and potential. All that hard work.
The blood, the sweat and the tears. Converted into nothing through tactical deflection and diffusion; disintegrated on the underside of the bastard glass ceiling of vested power and interests. Interests invested in keeping the system fragmented, black-boxed and ignorant.”
I wrote this journal entry two years ago when I was still managing a student-driven sustainability change agency called Green Hub Twente. I’ve been triggered to share it, and the thoughts that came up revisiting it now that I’m out. Part of why I started this Substack was to process and share more about my recent career and personal transition. I’m sharing in the hope that it resonates with some of you who may feel similarly trapped, unsupported and overwhelmed in your current organisation or situation - particularly to those of you who are (neuro)divergent or from marginalised communities that have to fight and mask in order to simply exist in these spaces. I’ll have more to say about university transformation from my background researching how this works from the inside, and having navigated its politics, which I’ll share separately - from neurodivergent and strategic perspectives.
Green Hub Pivot - 2022
Since stepping out of university sustainability coordination early this year, my perspective has changed drastically, partly due to gaining clarity from no longer being embedded in the academic institution, but also due to the vantage point of psychological distance and recovery with which I am able to view my former circumstances.
Two years ago, I was in a dark place; very much in survival mode, where I lost myself through over-adaptation, masking and strategising in an unhealthy work environment. My strategy at the time was to let the actions and behaviour of the university, and its leadership, determine our organising approach from Green Hub, and the spectrum of organisations for climate action and sustainability transformation that we tried to facilitate and organise. I felt much more accountable to the community below and around me. I was not motivated so much by the system above me, as having witnessed behaviours I’d have expected to be out-of-place in my own teams, and much inaction and chicanery in countless directionless meetings, gave me little to feel purposeful about.
Believing that their benefitting from not defining key objectives and actions when it came to climate was untenable (they could not have their cake and eat it, I thought), my strategy evolved into drawing them out into a position where they would have to substantiate non-committal statements into true intentions that could potentially galvanise a community - if, indeed, their intentions were as genuine as many of their words suggested. Then, one way or another, we could avoid a cycle of gaslighting where progress on sustainability would not be dependent on our performance at Green Hub, or other sustainability and climate organisations, but on theirs – as was the way I had witnessed years before. Sustainability transformation should be driven by cultures and community, not management and metrics alone. Culture eats strategy for breakfast as Peter Drucker remarked. I was also still on the powerful, workaholically-fuelled, ‘how can I change the system from inside’, ‘I’ll prove them all wrong’ train, which has taken me this long to slow down and get off. Academia, indeed, is a lot of ego. It does reel you in on that.
I had been thinking a lot about my roles, my purpose, and my power. When I talk about power, I mean the power afforded to me by my place, privilege and position in society due to being white, heterosexual, cisgender, male and British. I also have my intellectual and educational privileges, which allowed me to find less trodden routes and third options when presented with reductive binary choices; although, I did have to fight for these too being neurodivergent. To be honest, this is where my very misguided (and yes, quite narcissistic) ‘I’ll turn myself into a trojan horse to infiltrate and change the system!’ came in. I noticed a long time before how easy it was for me to get into these spaces, realising it was largely because I looked the way I did, said the right things (sometimes), acted the right way, and at least on the outside, was part of the received norm. This, of course, collided with reality in a myriad of wonderfully painful ways - and was more than inconvenient for the colleagues and administrators who’d had me pegged for someone else.
A long time ago, having been constantly underestimated and misunderstood for as long as I could remember, I decided that if I couldn’t change how people related to me in the moment (when I am often defenceless and clueless) then I would use their assumptions about me as a guise to get on with doing the things I believed were right based on my values and education. That’s why I thought I could use my privileges, know-how and access as a vehicle for change, making the mistake of not asking for help myself when the inevitable pressures and adversity came due. Life.
The upcoming birth of my daughter compelled me to rethink and reassess where and how I could make the most effective impact, and how on Earth I could make sure I would have enough energy, emotional bandwidth and attention around my work to tend to her needs. I had normalised being constantly exhausted and burnt out, having just come out of a phase of extreme focus and application required to run an innovative new unit full-time whilst finishing a PhD. The context was my journey as a soon-to-be parent trying to break the cycle of generational trauma, whilst at the same time pulled by a misplaced (itself rooted in trauma) sense of duty towards an organisation and team of young diverse sustainability professionals I had built from the ground up.
Image 2: Green Hub Twente Opening event. October 2020. Me and the founding team all masked up with the speakers1 who kindly joined us to kick off our efforts in the community during lockdown - a challenge in itself!
So in May 2022, I sat down in the Green Hub office during the holidays, with an empty room to assist my reflection, and started to write out some questions, which evolved into feelings and advice. I underlined and reread them time and time again as I arrived at my decision, whilst thinking about how I could responsibly set things up to continue without me; the question of how was very much in the air. I had responsibilities, but I also had the impending, life-changing one of becoming a dad. It was all very raw, subjective and fighty, but at the same time I want to share it to show how it actually goes down; this personal reckoning of messy internal contradiction, emotional maelstroms, and then clarity that is so rarely spoken about:
“How much more time? How many more years of mine and others’ lives am I willing to waste? How many more teams, units, and organisations will I have to fight – tooth and nail – to build within organisations that are not open to inquiry themselves? That are not willing, ready or able to confront the bitter yet necessary truth?
I cannot do what I am trained to do the way I would like to, at the standard and quality required when I am forced – through lack of time and capacity – to cut corners.
I swear: I will not waste my daughter’s time with me by overinvesting in a system that is not willing to do some work on itself. This time is too precious. This time is more valuable to me than the extra time I put into failed units, unfulfilled promises, unrealised initiatives, and disregarded proposals.
I have dedicated ten years of my life to this work, and learnt many hard, valuable lessons.
If I were to distil all of these into one bit of advice for those just starting out in this field, and those coming after me, it would be this:
Know your power. Know your worth. Know what you will do with your power, and know what you will not do.
More importantly: know where, how and when it is best to invest your time, energy and spirit.
You cannot cultivate in a barren, unsupportive, neglected earth if it is too far gone.
Look for the grains, the seeds. Cherish and nurture them. And if you have to – if you have the means and the ability – take them with you to more fertile soils, where they may grow and flourish. To where the impact necessary – in the years we have left to avert catastrophe – can be realised.
Go to wherever you can make the deepest, most lasting dent in that bastard glass ceiling.”
Looking back at this intention I set, and the anger I was channelling from seeing too many young people and experienced staff depressed and disenfranchised - despite the massive challenges the time since has presented - I have zero regrets about my choice to leave. I also have a lot of gratitude for those who helped me with their time and advice to divest and disembed myself from a system that makes people like me ill. When I say people like me, I need to be clear; my personal transformation has unfolded to reveal a truer sense of self: my neurodivergent - or as Rebekah Borucki of Row House Publishers put it wonderfully - neuro-riotous self. More on that later.
This piece will probably be the first in a series on organising transformations for sustainability at and around universities, and in education generally. Education transformation is the red line that traces my experiences back to struggling as a working student in Manchester in the late 2000s, doubly enraged by climate disinformation and the global financial crisis. Now that I’ve found the right place, more of what I’ve already written and still have to say will be coming out; how I extracted myself, the conditions that led me to do so, and why I’ll remain at the door holding them accountable for their lauded sustainability and climate transitions.
I researched that system, came up close and personal, and came away with some interesting insider knowledge that I strongly believe is transferrable – not all of it was possible to put in my PhD, by dint of the same structural barriers I’m now highlighting, as well as my neuro-riotousness. I am driven to share my perspective, and the knowledge and lived experiences we strove to honour and implement, to develop the collective intelligence and inclusivity our movement needs to catalyse systemic change from the bottom up. This is the work that reconnects, as Joanna Macy would put it, in terms of active hope, but for me, there’s a fair amount of rage in there too. And that’s alright as well.
From left: Green Hubbers: Fredrika Åström, Xavier Roosendaal, Saikiran Samudrala, Gijs van Leeuwen, Speaker & Ally: Anete Veidemane, Green Hub: Devesh Gulhane, Speaker: Peter-Paul Verbeek, Me, Speaker: Paul Ehrenhard, Green Hub: Mrudala Shashikumar, Speaker: Klaske Houtsma.
Top Image - Green Hub colleague and XR member: Benny Jabold - critical for the transformation strategy we ran from 2022 onwards.