Recently, I announced that I had accepted an offer from the University of Florida to be on research sabbatical during the upcoming 2023-24 academic year and then to retire as Professor of Law and relinquish my related appointments there at the end of June 2024, with the expectation that I will then be appointed as Professor Emeritus next summer. I did all of this even though I consider myself too young to retire and until recently had no intention of leaving UF. In my announcement, I added that academic retirement can be a bit of a misnomer, with plenty of scholars accepting retirement offers from one institution and then moving on to another institution, sometimes in less traditional roles such as part-time or non-voting faculty.
Typically, this type of news would be of interest only to a departing professor’s family, colleagues, and students. Because the State of Florida has become a major political battleground in the culture wars, however, the announcement of the departure of any educator—and I am hardly the only person who has decided to leave the Sunshine State, which is seeing an unprecedented “brain drain”—carries with it two important questions. Are you leaving specifically because of the Republican Party’s attacks on education in Florida? If so, why didn’t you stay and fight rather than getting out?
I will not be coy. Although there are always various idiosyncratic factors that weigh into a decision to change jobs and uproot one’s life, Florida Republicans’ increasingly open hostility to professors and to higher education more generally was as close to a but-for cause of my decision as one could imagine. In that sense, it is fair to describe my situation as one in which “the other guys won.” The departure of a left-leaning legal scholar and economist who studies inequality and who argues that government debt and spending can be good is hardly going to make the people running the show in Florida shed a tear. They have shown in every way possible that they want to get rid of people like me. In this case: Mission accomplished.
But what about that second question, that is, the choice between staying and fighting the good fight versus getting out while the getting is good? That requires much more discussion.
And this question is even more pointed in my case because I have departed not only from the state of Florida but from all of the United States, at least temporarily. During my sabbatical from UF in 2023-24, I will serve as a visiting professor in Toronto, but it is hardly news that I have been thinking for some time about the possibility of leaving the US on a permanent basis at some point. That is yet to be determined, but it could be where this is headed. That, too, brings up the stay-and-fight-or-get-out-now question, but on an even larger scale.
