Challenges of becoming non-academic outside the university
It is not easy when one has been communicating only to one's peers. Don't ask me why many former academics are never heard of again when they have left academia. If you asked me, I would tell you that they never prepared themselves for the real world.
By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
Academic is the Opposite of real. The academic world is different from the real world. The real world is where you find everybody except the academics. However, once one has left the academic world, one should know that one is no longer an academic. One must struggle to fit in the real world where one’s peers are absent. One’s communication must change so that one does not appear strange.
It is not easy when one has been communicating only to one’s peers. Don’t ask me why many former academics are never heard of again when they have left academia. If you asked me, I would tell you that they never prepared themselves for the real world.
Even then many former academics can no longer communicate or interact with their peers they left behind at a university campus. Sometimes academics are forced to leave the academia and enter the real world once they reach 60 or 70.
Others decide to leave the academia on their own accord. However, without preparing themselves well for the real world, they find it extremely difficult to survive away from the academia.
It is not uncommon for many to suffer loneliness. Having stayed away from their relatives for even as long as 40 years, they are strangers to their relatives and in the rural areas where they grew up. They are likely to find many of their relatives too young to relate with. Those who were agemates when they left their rural areas may already be dead or do not feel comfortable interacting with the new previously academic individuals.
The universities do not emphasize sociality. So, academics end up being asocial when they get out of the gates of the universities for ever. There is even no counselling for the outgoing academics to prepare them emotionally and psychologically for the strange real world.
Having been too close to books and laboratories while in their universities, they are poor family men or women. This means they have been poor family men or women, living as strangers under one roof with the members of their family. Because members of their families may not know them very well, they may live exclusive from them in the real world. This complicates their lives outside the universities.
Besides, many academics do not marry, or have their families breaking down even before they permanently leave the university campuses.
It is extremely difficult to start life alone outside university after so many years in the enclosure called the Ivory Tower. No wonder a good number get mentally deranged and succumb to psychological problems. Unfortunately, former academics in the real world are hardly studied by sociologists and psychologists to establish their mental status.
In Uganda, where studies show 14 million mentally deranged people out of a population of 49 million exist, many of these might be academics. Some former academics may be seen taking a lot of alcohol and illicit drugs, hopefully to conceal reality from themselves. In the process they damage their mental faculties and end up mentally deranged.
One other problem that may confront the former academics in the real world is that some leave the university when they have not built houses in their rural areas, or even in the urban or peri-urban areas, to retire in. Because they have no houses in their rural areas, they frequently decide to stay in the urban areas or peri-urban areas where they have to rent rooms, apartments or houses. This is often not sustainable. They have to pay for electricity and water, and perhaps maintain house helpers. This can be challenging with no regular income. Their retirement benefits may dwindle before they build domiciles. No wonder many die early or become mentally deranged.
Universities, through their retirement schemes, should have in place arrangements to remain in constant touch with their former knowledge workers. For some, they may offer part-time roles within their precincts, or where they have branches in the periphery; and use some of them to act as their emissaries to the populations where they stay or to market and popularize their programmes.
Even the government should have a programme to integrate or reintegrate the former academics in society once they have left their universities. It is good to have educated people living among the population. They may help the citizens to understand and appreciate government programmes or projects.
It is shameful and wastage to see many academics, who have done a good job nationally educating citizens, streaming off to foreign countries to work there as knowledge workers during their post retirement period because they cannot fit in the real world. The human brain tends to be very productive after a person strikes 60. While the body is degenerating meteorically, the brain is growing supersonically and forming new synaptic connections. Unfortunately, in poor countries such as Uganda, authorities tend to take people at that age and beyond as useless. Yet many national leaders are that age bracket.
Yes, becoming a successful NON-ACADEMIC outside the University is tough, but is not impossible. Family members can help. The universities can help. Government can help. Society can help. But the former academics must struggle to fit in the real world even before they leave their university campuses.
