Higher Education and academic research

The desires to pursue personal goals, escape university pressures or get off the grant-writing treadmill convince some US professors to leave the security of a tenured post.

At the beach in Mantoloking, New Jersey, in summer 2011, the possibilities of Colin Purrington's sabbatical year stretched out before him. Purrington, then an evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, intended to stay on campus and was almost giddy thinking of all the undergraduate research projects he had planned, with no teaching or service duties to interrupt them. And then it hit him like a 600-page textbook. When the year was over, he did not want to return to those duties — duties that had led to miserable all-nighters and family strain. (...) - Naturejobs, by Kendall Powell, in Nature 491,627-629, 21 November 2012