Invisible Adjunct is pulling the plug--on one of the best blogs on the web, and on the (invisible, adjunct) academic career that was the occasion for it. I'll miss IA terribly--hers is the first blog I check in the morning and, at the risk of revealing too much about my excessive web use, I'll confess that it's also the last one I check at night. Always smart, ever temperate, able to leap tall issues in a single post, IA has been the wise and witty keeper of one of the blogosphere's most comfortable and canny corners.

I've valued Invisible Adjunct enormously--but I also respect the reasons why the blog must come to an end, and I admire the courage it took for IA to make the decision to leave behind the life academe so abusively doles out to the growing legions of its dispossessed. Though the structural agoraphobia of the academy tries to pretend otherwise, the world is ever so much larger than the ivory tower, and full of opportunities for talented, creative, dedicated people to find meaningful, rewarding work that makes a difference.

I've been chasing a number of those opportunities myself this year, having slowly come to realize, over the last three or four years, that academe is not a place where I can do work I truly believe in and respect. Though the process of deciding to leave was agonal, the decision itself has felt incredibly freeing and right. I still plan to teach; I still plan to write; I still plan to read as much as it is humanly possible for me to read. But I plan to do it in a setting that feels less ethically compromised, more grounded in reality, and thus more likely to permit me to do work that actually matters. The prospect excites me no end, and it gives me a kind of hope that academe never did.

IA, I hope you are feeling hopeful, too. There is a place for you.