When It’s Time to Say ‘Goodbye’

I resigned from one job in New Jersey and wrote a 2-page letter describing the problem with student affairs and large lecture courses. The chair told me he intended to look into the problem and fix it. I think I did the right thing by writing an honest letter even though it aired some unpleasantness. It was focused on a specific problem and offered suggestions about how to improve.

A different job I left, in New York, was much more complicated. They knew I was going on the job market because of my spouse’s situation. When I got the job offer from the school in California very early, in January, I was then doomed to spend 8 months working (including summer school) at a school that knew I was leaving. The nastiness was palpable and there were all these catty and underhanded, passive-aggressive games going on. I did write to a few deans to mention some problems I had with the lack of help about day care and spousal support, but other than that, I realized, after long and drawn out conflicts, that the people in the department thought I was a jerk, assumed I was gloating about my new job no matter what I said, and nothing was going to be solved. They dumped the job of organizing the graduating senior dinner on me, refused to help, then complained about everything that went wrong.

I was never so glad to be gone as when I could finally leave. This was the one job that I have never tried to contact anybody from, and luckily I have never run into them at conferences or anywhere else. I never even wrote a resignation letter. I wrote an email to the chair with a CC to the dean stating that I would not be teaching in the fall. Because my office was on a different floor from everyone else, and I cleaned out my office two weeks before the end of semester anyway, I didn’t even see anybody from the department face to face for three months prior to leaving to my new job. I left my office keys in a drop box to the secretary (whom I liked), and then I left.

In some ways I think a resignation letter with some details about what you disliked on the job is a good idea when your experience was good overall. When it’s a total train wreck, then I don’t even believe in writing resignation letters anymore. Send a one-line email with as few people as possible cc’d, avoid seeing anyone, and do an Irish goodbye. My reason for concluding this is that toxic work environments will only linger longer and longer in your head, the more you try to engage the department about why you were unhappy. For your own good you need to leave and cut loose–and if you are smart, you will never send an email to anyone from the department; in fact, duck behind a plant if you are at a conference and you see one of them. Renewal and emotional cleansing are healthy things.

Don’t these organizations run exit interviews?  One of my all-time heroes is the African-American faculty member who told the president, in her exit interview, “You will never achieve the faculty diversity you say you hope for as long as you encourage the worship of Robert E. Lee.”  He’s part of our legacy–not going away–but it’s a matter of emphasis.  Since her departure I believe that the Lee idolatry has been toned down.

My own experience with having left a bad organization was negative in terms of offering feedback.  It was unwelcome, and everyone higher up made that clear.  After eleven years of employment there, it was no mystery to administration/HR why the turnover rate was like a revolving door.  They were callously indifferent and even hostile, as was the experience of countless others who had previously made a hasty exit.  Many of those were also blackballed in their new job searches . . . it was human bondage.  The institution is still known to be quite corrupt.  Somebody else here made the comment that administration did not care, as they were getting the desired results.  I’ve encountered more toxic narcissists in many different places than I even care to remember.  Somehow one has to have the courage and fortitude to “stare down” the enemy, or else better yet, to see through bad people and bad situations and move on towards personal fulfillment, thus focusing more on the work and less so on the people.  That is extremely challenging and requires a strong inner will to do so.  

Oh yeah, I wrote a 3-page doozy to the dean, provost, and president regarding institutional dysfunction from (and especially) my department on up.  It wasn’t a rant but was framed as a caring insight to critical problems needing immediate attention, full of specifics and apt metaphors; hard (honest?) but not nasty.  Then I let it sit–never sent it.  Writing it was an excellent catharsis for the anger, disappointment, frustration, embarrassment, and overall bad experience of those largely wasted several years.  Writing was very useful, but sending it would have been stupid and unproductive, perhaps even damaging to me (an ironic last skewering that I did not need).  Admonishing a dysfunctional group to get its act together is no more effective than telling a 4-year old to “grow up.”  In the end, my resignation letter was a timely and simple 3-line notice, ending with a pro forma thanks.  So, I recommend writing those self-satisfying letters and even keeping them as future reminders, but never, ever send them. 

I agree that resignation letters should be tactful. I also agree that if the administration wants your opinion, they will ask for it–volunteering your opinion is not appreciated even in the best of situations. However, I disagree with the response of the “big boss” in the article, whose advice was for her to keep the letter so that others wouldn’t think she wasn’t “smart enough to navigate the situation.” Why was the writer to assume that he was aware of the problem? His nonchalant attitude towards the repeated problems the writer mentioned in her letter is galling, and suggests absolute bone-laziness and inertia on the part of the company/institution as a whole. It is difficult for me to imagine that such an institution is achieving its full potential. At the very least, he should have politely thanked her for offering her opinion–and then tried to do something about it. 

In general, I agree. When I left my last position, I submitted a brief, formal letter of resignation, with a few positive and honest comments. I ended with an offer to meet and discuss transition; exit interviews weren’t common at that institution. The dean scheduled a meeting, during which we talked about how I’d hand over projects, etc. I was the third person to resign from that department in a month; the dean asked if I had any suggestions for improving retention. I pointed out that I’d proposed several innovations at the institution I was leaving, that most had been implemented, but that implementation was always done by senior faculty members who received both the credit and the satisfaction of challenging work. I was very careful not to name names or rant, I simply mentioned that like many people, I enjoy new challenges and was looking forward to them at my new institution. The dean blinked a few times, then commented that it didn’t seem fair to ask junior faculty to take on big projects when they needed to focus on tenure. I didn’t comment on that, simply thanked the dean for taking the time to talk with me. Based on what I’ve heard from former colleagues, nothing’s changed there – you still need to have at least 15 years in the department to get opportunity to do anything new. I didn’t burn any bridges, had pleasant chats with former dean and others when I attended a workshop there this year, and am thoroughly enjoying the challenges of my now-not-so-new position.

So it would be impossible to find someone who could “get the results that I need” who also treats other human beings humanely? (Or does the big boss not want to do the work?)

Many institutions have been in existence close to 100 years or longer. It would be foolish of anyone to think practices, visions, interactions, etc. would change just because one of us accepted a job at a particular place. My belief is that if it becomes clear that the institution is not a good fit for one’s character, skills, and personality, the resignation letter should be written and the tone should be cordial. One’s honest appraisal of the institution will not result in changes, but will result in bad feelings. It’s simple enough to just move on and enjoy life.

I daydream about my resignation from my current position, but I never really consider writing a ranting indictment of the university.  I have decided to write a letter of the polite “thank you for the opportunity” type, but I would love to follow up with an email to the dean offering to sit down and discuss issues.  I am stopped, however, by the recent experience of meeting with one of my own former student workers who decided that I needed to know just how unfairly he felt he had been treated by me. I don’t want to be like that student.  Once I am on my way out the door, my perceived injustices are no longer problems for me. Now I just need to get a new position!

Oh, and I never considered just saying no thanks to the “required” exit interview with HR. I will remember that!

Larger organizations will always win. It’s their (assuming
organizations are sentient beings) position to ignore your problem.  Yes, it’s your
problem, not theirs. That unfair individual holds that position because the
organization wants him or her there.  End
of story.  Perhaps younger individuals
feel the injustice more and more experienced ones become inured to it. Go out, find a better job. Leave. Smile and let them wonder how much you really know.
One individual’s action or opinion will fail
to change the organizational position. 
Been there, done that. Let it go. The t-shirt isn’t worth wearing.

Not in the business of burning bridges, I never ever thought of spoiling relationship, regardless with what it had been composed of but just the joy of teaching and research for the sustainable students in my class. However, I recommend a terminal interview is an important aspect of keeping the workplace healthy and vibrant for the nexy generation.

After six jobs in five universities over twenty years, I sort of agree and disagree (isn’t that a familiar trope with academics?).  At the second to last job I left from, I wrote a tersely cryptic letter of resignation, three typed lines only: because this was a small university in a small town, the reasons for my leaving were fairly well-known.  Now, this “university” was possibly the most absurd phenomenon in higher education I’d come across (in a majority Black country, the majority of faculty were unreconstructed white racists of the crudest sort BUT claimed to be liberal; in a town with a population of 120 000 of whom 110 000 were unemployed, the self-styled faculty Marxists were property barons renting accommodation out to their own students; the philosophy faculty came to ‘debate’ whiteness in 2011; the dean of humanities, a ‘radical social scientist’, once held genetics to be responsible for the lack of representivity in national sporting teams with cheers from his PhD spouse; a graduate student in English was told she ought to know her responsibility and not mess up as she was the first Black person in the department’s graduate programme, by a professor who in 2005 confessed he’d never thought Moby-Dick was about either sexuality or ‘race’; prior to the arrival of the university’s first Black vice chancellor, several senior faculty poked fun at his name in the print newsletter sent to all staff, because it wasn’t Anglophone), but because of the rumours, they asked me to give a ‘seminar’ about my reasons for resigning (I really wasn’t that special; people were leaving, enraged, in numbers to cause concern).  I was my usual critical, honest self (it was a seminar), challenging the catalogue of nepotism, mediocrity, white supremacy, and hypocrisy which in my analysis was the norm for praxes at this organisation.  They all applauded, and regretted the truth of my description, before going on to ‘explain’ WHY they had to be that way … courtesy of the tax-payers of this developing country!  Sigh …  At least my letter was not the sort they could use against me: my very being it seems did that quite adequately.  You live, you have to laugh, they never learn!

These are all good points about the problem of student debt, but there’s something you don’t seem willing to take on:

WHY ARE TUITIONS SO HIGH?

There has to be better management of the higher education industry. Our culture has to change, which is the hard part, because it is no longer feasible to treat university education like a special mystical experience where you break away from home, journey off to a Cordoba somewhere, and gather with other geniuses. Those are champagne dreams and we Americans are living on a beer budget. Now that college is a close to universal experience, we have to make the entry-level phase of higher ed — the Associates and Bachelor’s degrees — more like a blend of community colleges and basic training for the military. That is to say, there should not be a wide price differential, students should go to the institution that is closest to where they live, and they should be grouped in learning units (i.e., classes) with people of all skill levels. In the military, basic training is a “reset.” No matter how much you learned about drill & ceremony or rifling at your Junior ROTC program back home, you still have to go through the new training with everyone else, regardless of how frustrating it is. 

At this point, there is not a sincere distinction between private and public universities since so much federal money goes to private colleges (grants, backing of student loans, tax write-offs for their endowments) that charge exorbitant tuitions. The price tag must come down and the psychological apparatus of elitism that frames the current system has to be broken down. 

If you are one of the best and the brightest, it isn’t the job of a college to make you feel that way at the age of 18. You have a whole working career to prove yourself and excel. At the age of 18 you are a newbie and need to be initiated into higher learning with the millions of other newbies across America.

While I feel great sympathy for people who carry enormous debts right now, the fact is that there is no way to strip them of the title they paid for, with the debt. (This is why Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution forbade that the US should confer titles of nobility, which it is doing de facto by allowing federal money to support elite schools.) Hence this debt is not like underwater mortgages — you can foreclose on a house.

To help people in massive debt right now, I think it is a good idea to find ways of refinancing so that the monthly payments are reduced in tandem with the person’s financial struggles.

Other than that, the solutions people are proposing seem to make the problem worse. Debt literacy seems like indoctrination into an imbalanced system without pressuring colleges to scale back tuition. Debt forgiveness is wildly irresponsible and simply allows graduates of elite schools to keep their noble titles at the expense of the taxpayer.

One of the reasons tuitions have escalated is the presence of the student loan and the impetus it causes which leads to students being viewed as a exploitable source of extractive wealth. And yes this is a management problem. In the 60′s with the creation of programs such as senator Pell’s and the GI bill college became available for larger sectors of the population and began the concept that college was a necessity rather than a limited access potential. And unlike our current leadership the postwar and post depression poltical leaders were quite aware of the advantage to providing public support to enhance that publics ability to elevate itself.
However by the late 70′s the pragmatism and admirable idealism of the system represented by such as the Pell and GI Bill was grossly undermined by those who perverted that system for corporate profits. The crossing of that toxic rubicon was arguably the privitization of student lending and the attended preferance for non loan aid and direct aid to schools. This lead to a conceptual divorce by academe and governmental leaders from the need to manage budgets with some restraint, and the unfortunate need to propagate glitz because students were now a financial profit engine and no longer a population to be served.
You have some good concepts regarding the use of introductory academe as a proving ground of more equal opportunity. However without resolution of the debt crises, finally made in consideration of student debtors rather the financial sector lobbyists, there will be no de-escalation of student debt. That can only happen when this system is no longer viewed as the only means to fund academe (and gods know enough countries do not use and are horrified by the US system). Essentially until this ill considered system is ended (and its consequences of ruin for an entire generation are also ended) reforms such as you advocate will be veneers for the same old debt for education scheme.

I would still argue that facilities assignments are based on the expected participation, regardless of money or mission. If we turn this argument on its head, and remove sports from the equation, do we still schedule a student’s interpretive dance based on the writings of Diablo Cody in the auditorium at 7pm on Wednesday, and schedule the talk by the Nobel Laureate for 11pm?
I know I am being facetious, but the idea that crowds and attendance are irrelevant is, to my mind, irrational.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

gringo_gus is right.  The regime in WBS is a stain on your reputation as a critical thinker and forward looking university leader. You have thrown the university to the sharks and sacrificed many cherished and valuable principles of academic life in the process. Readers, go to http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=6084 and offer words of solidarity.  This cannot continue.

There is clearly something badly afoot now at Warwick. On the blog I first posted on, neoMcCarthyite accusations are being levelled at named junior faculty who are also union reps – repeated attribution of extremist political goals, including branding the one of them “Red Jimmy”. There also seems a concerted campaign to fill the blog with quasi spam – repeated nonsense messages, cutting and pasting huge amounts of texts.

Thrift must distance his university from this McCarthyism, which to any reader seems to be a thuggish response to disputes about points of fact, and indeed confirm that there is a real problem with the managerial style.  Given the union reps have been named, and indeed responded, he has a duty to likewise identify and “out” the red-baiting faculty and administrators; or convince himself, and us, that it is non-Warwick related trolls.