I'm starting to suspect my work is incompatible with a full-time academic job

I’m an aging (60s) academic and I’ve found that the old assumption of our world offering a “life of ideas” that any talented person would want is no longer true. If you’re coming in now or came in in the past 30 years, it’s liters just a job. Not necessarily a bad job, but certainly not a calling.

The tenure system is necessary for it to function, because wages are so low relative to skill level and the job market is so unreliable, but it also makes things worse because the old hands mostly don’t fight evil changes (and there have been tons of evil changes recently) of only the young will be affected.

Of course, the current state of the US government and the rising anti intellectualism don’t help.

> Well, obviously the part-time thing will bring a reduction in my institutional teaching and admin duties. I have to say there is uncertainty about how much relief will arise in practice

As someone who has tried something similar, institutional bureaucracy expands to fill all available time. People engaging in bureaucratic empire-building will still happily consume your personal unpaid time. And splitting attention between multiple lines of work creates some legitimate additional overhead, which doesn't help.

I'm not sure what the winning strategy is. I think it is necessary to either get out entirely or play the bureaucrats' "system-game" to some degree, but not on their terms and not fairly. When the bureaucracy demands useless work, maximize their costs and minimize yours. Many academics constitutively cannot make themselves do a lazy, poor job, but is a useful skill to deploy defensively so that you can fulfill your education and research responsibilities. Often you'll find that the bureaucracy only cares about the superficial appearance of compliance; the actual actions performed are irrelevant to them. Shift responsibility to some other part of the bureaucracy and use LLMs to generate boilerplate. If the bureaucracy never attempts to punish you in any way, that may indicate you're being more compliant than necessary. This approach is safest if your retirement plan is fully funded and you don't truly need to keep the job. It is also helpful if at some part of what you do is visibly important to someone who does have power; this helps deflect consequences when you accidentally step a over a line. Everything depends on context and execution though; I hope the part-time approach works out for you.

This kind of thing is blowing up all over the place, see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg

Academia is a cesspool of entitlement, corruption, and back-rubbing. It's been holding back science and logical discourse for decades now. I hope the entire university system falls to its knees.

As a postdoc with a background in NLP, I've come to the same conclusion. I feel like I'm stagnating in academia and have decided to quit my postdoc and self fund research that I can hopefully monetize in the future.

It certainly doesn't help that the pay is atrocious — I make less in inflation adjusted dollars than my first job straight out of school nearly 20yrs ago, in a higher cost of living place.

You sir are having a mid-life crisis. You may need to change your career but do not give in to the urge to buy a sports car. It won't fix your career aspirations nor make you any younger.

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