Should you remain true to a troubled college?
Leaving is an obvious strategy for reducing misery if your work seems pointless or overwhelming, your colleagues are incompetent or conniving, and you feel underpaid. Yet people stay at badly run colleges for many of the same reasons they stay in bad relationships: economic dependence, fear of uncertainty, the misguided belief that things will get better, and desire to protect the children.
Like a bad relationship partner, a bad workplace can convince you that you are unworthy of anything better. That may be one of several reasons why you have failed to make a move. Even in this era of great turmoil all around us, and especially in academe, it’s important to ask yourself why you are staying put and what it means for your career.