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I’ve been thinking about academia and becoming an academic. It was something that I longed for early in my life when I first started at university. I wanted to go all the way through to PhD and then become a Professor. Life had very different ideas and it wasn’t until 20 years or so later that I had an opportunity to undertake that path again.
By then however, academia has undergone significant changes and it is now an institution that serves big business which I could see creeping in when I returned 10 years later at first, and then 10 years later again and the landscape was completely different.
From my point of view, what I wanted to pursue for my PhD was something that was not politically accepted by the Professors in charge of approving my application. It was an idea that I thought if proved or disproved would actually substantiate their position, but the fear that I may be right and they wrong was enough to keep me without my PhD.
Since then I have pivotted many times and tried to gain a PhD but to no avail. At 55 years old, I now believe that it is folly to pursue this and also strongly question whether a PhD is actually necessary now to undertake a life of academia.
When most of the Western world has access to every piece of information that we can dream of, it is only my own discipline that stops me from purusing expertise in…
