Letter Thirty-Nine: Will the US Recover From This Brain Drain?

And I think that lays out important work for us who produce research, are academics, teach or lecture. Think about the success of your work outside of the ivory tower, outside of the stunting and unsustainable set up of academia, and instead consider what it would mean for it to be successful in your community.

We may not on the individual level be able to change the course of the brain drain, but we are not powerless to show people why these policies and choices matter in the day-to-day. We are not powerless to bring our work out from behind the paywall and consider how it would benefit a teacher, a medical assistant, an electrician, a therapist, a director, a retail shop owner. How do we share why it matters? How do we tell the story of our work?

Letter Thirty-Eight: Dear Academics in Suspended Adolescence

The life of an academic, whether you are in a liberal arts subject, medicine, or beyond, is rife with rejections, being underpaid, cruel comments disguised as feedback, a manufactured sense of urgency, and an instability for funding, for courses, for tenure, for location.

I can’t say those conditions bring out the best in anyone.

In fact, one could say, those are conditions that activate people’s fight/flight/freeze systems and color the world as less safe and the people around them as more dangerous. And what happens when people don’t feel safe and the world feels dangerous? The answer is certainly not know how to navigate relationships, power, and repair with a sense of maturity, kindness, and accountabilit