92 New FormatioNs Leaving academia: the Shifting terrain of higher education Lynne Segal Doi: 10.3898/NewF:102.06.2020 Abstract: Leaving academia, this essay joins a steady chorus of reflection now thinking backwards over the last half century of extraordinary transformations in higher education. The industry is booming, more students than ever are entering universities, yet the academy is seen as increasingly in crisis. Staff workloads keep mounting, student debt soaring, and staff and student anxieties alike are multiplying, even as government underfunding, imposed managerialism and commercialisation threaten to reduce the underlying logic of higher education to market principles. In this context it is more urgent than ever to record the half century of struggle that opened up and enriched academic life, gradually ensuring the entry of hitherto excluded voices and topics into research and scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on my own involvement, I recall some of these always-incomplete attempts to challenge the fault-lines of intellectual life in the academy, knowing that we need always to cherish the value of teaching, research and learning, simply for its own sake. Keywords: knowledge, engagement, managerialism, pleasure, teaching and learning Out in the nick of time, many say. Fifty years teaching in higher education, and I am finally retiring – just when teaching moves online, workloads double, redundancies loom, managerialism intensifies, and staff and students’ anxieties alike explode in the wake of a global pandemic. It is the final twist, and a very ominous one, as I look back on a working life encompassing half a century of astonishing metamorphosis in higher education. Context is all, with changes in academia proving quite as surprising as they were profound. It is the reason I want to reflect on my own unexpectedly rewarding working life, throughout which I learned quite as much as I taught. Over the decades, I witnessed so much energising evidence of the impact that committed teaching can have on the lives of students – not necessarily on graduates’ market value (although that too), but on the choices they later felt able to make. Painfully, though, I leave this career worried that right now my own fortunate trajectory is becoming as difficult, if not impossible, for most graduates today as it seemed implausible to me fifty years ago. Yet, initially I was ambivalent about even joining academia. I began my