Aaron Tam A01 Week 7

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For this weeks blog, I chose to write about the reading called "How to Leave Academia" by Rani Neutill. In this reading, Neutill documents her story of how she left the world of academia behind. This story is very similar to many of the other accounts we have heard of not only in this book but during lecture. Her story is very similar to Professor Valverde's in the fact that she was unable to obtain tenure as an asian American female in academia. A female was unable to obtain tenure over 350 efforts as well as a degree from arguably the number one public university in the nation. The simple fact of the matter however, is that she was an asian American female. This trend continues on each and every story I read and it ends up infuriating me. The fact of the matter is that this trend has become universal for asian American women in academia and shows that academia is the problem. The only way to overcome this issue that Neutill and many others have endured is to reveal this issue by calling out bias in institutions and dismantle as Professor Valverde has said. In this story however, Neutill gets on to reveal her opinions and account certain details that she learned along the way throughout her journey. While ultimately leaving the world of academia after sixteen or so years, she became a waitress. Some might wonder if all of that schooling and hardship she faced was worth it, however I think the bigger question should be why is academia forcing this upon people? Despite all of these accounts that we have read about in the last couple weeks, why has there been no significant change?

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REFERENCES

Constante, Agnes. “After 50 Years, Asian American Studies Programs Can Still Be Hard to Find.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 3 July 2019, www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/after-50-years-asian-american-studies-programs-can-still-be-n1022331.

Neutill, Rani. “How to Leave Academia.” Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars' Resistance and Renewal in the Academy, by Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis, Rutgers University Press, 2020.