You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they’ve served their purpose.
But you’ve got to learn to throw things away eventually.
Death, in «Sandman: Dream Country», by Neil Gaiman
For the last ten years, I worked at a German university after completing my PhD in psychology at another institution. My position sat at the intersection of psychology and technology — human–computer interaction, «media and computer science» (German: «Medieninformatik»), whatever label you want to give to developing digital products with and for people.
It was a natural fit: a tech-heavy environment that still relied on psychological theory, methods, and an understanding of human limitations.
My informal motto during those years was: «Let’s build something that doesn’t suck, for people who are not like us.»
For a long time, it worked. The first seven years were excellent: intellectually rewarding, professionally coherent, and personally meaningful. The last three were something else entirely. It is important to me to record why. Not as «quit lit», but as an attempt to clarify:
- why the early years felt like alignment,
- why the later years felt suffocating, and
- why I ultimately chose to leave.
What follows is my reconstruction of events and patterns — necessarily selective, inevitably contested by others, but true to how I experienced those ten years. Given how emotionally charged this topic is for me, I used ChatGPT to help me clarify the writing, in an attempt to preserve the light while removing the heat.
The Good Years: When the Institution Made Sense
I began with teaching psychology-related courses for media and computer science students. I have always enjoyed teaching, and translating psychological theory and methods into something practically useful for HCI felt natural. The challenge was rarely the content itself, but conveying why it mattered — answering the refreshingly honest student question: «Why do we need to know this shit?»
Over time, I took over a statistics and methods course entirely. The content improved year by year, and so did the satisfaction of seeing students actually use what I taught. Because no suitable HCI-focused material existed, I wrote a 500+ page script covering the full arc from scientific reasoning and theory to literature search, study design, data collection, analysis, and academic writing.
Beyond teaching, I did research and project work: publishing papers, attending conferences, and co-writing grant proposals, some successfully. Working with students was a highlight — several theses and projects led to publications and even a best-paper award at a national HCI conference. The colleagues I worked with during those years were similarly committed and intellectually alive.
Overall, the early phase felt like alignment: my curiosity, my competence, and my institutional role pointed in the same direction. Even though I had no interest in becoming a professor, I began working on my «PD» («Privatdozent», a requirement for becoming one) simply because staying there would eventually have required it.
When the Ground Shifted: Three Levels of Suffocation
Around 2020, the ground underneath my work began to shift. Academia itself did not suddenly «become bad», but a pattern emerged on three levels — university, department, and students — that made the place increasingly unrecognizable compared to where I had started. What changed was not one dramatic event, but a cumulative drift: a loss of openness, a hardening of group dynamics, and a growing distance between the institution’s stated values and its decisions in practice.
1. University Level
I see the telos of a university as «the search for truth, knowing you can never be sure you have found it». That requires openness, intellectual humility, viewpoint diversity, and a willingness to engage dissent.
1a) Covid and Coercion
During the early Covid phase, uncertainty was high and moving teaching online made sense. But when vaccines arrived and society shifted from 3G to 2G rules, the pressure to vaccinate escalated sharply. At our university, this pressure took a form I had not expected: in a lecturers’ meeting we were told to make the situation for unvaccinated students «uncomfortable». Later measures did exactly that — socially, economically, and organizationally. Eventually the pressure extended to staff as well.
I saw this as a violation of human dignity and bodily autonomy (article 1 of the German constitution): treating students’ bodies as instruments for institutional or political ends. I criticized this internally in the teaching forum and on this blog. A few colleagues supported the criticism (some publicly, more privately), most said nothing either way, leadership did not change anything. On the contrary, one reaction by the institution during that time was a joint letter from university leadership and the student association questioning whether my private blog adhered to the university’s guiding principles («Leitbild»), based on complaints from unnamed «status groups». I cannot know which specific posts triggered the complaints; I can only note the timing and the overlap with my criticism of the university’s Covid measures.
To me, it was not my criticism but the university’s actions that departed from its stated values. And it seemed to me that what really mattered was the institutional narrative, not the search for truth. This episode was the first major fissure.
1b) Internet Filtering and Informational Control
Universities traditionally stand for open access to information — within legal boundaries. Security measures are understandable; censorship of legal content is not.
At some point, the university implemented Cisco-based filtering that blocked sites such as 4chan, Gab AI, or even Urban Dictionary. Attempting to access them produced security warnings and a redirect to an internal IT page that showed the attempt, including the user’s IP address and a category like «adult» or «Hate+Speech», in the URL.
A request to unblock a site for legitimate work purposes was refused. IT claimed it was not allowed to change the settings; the presidium emphasized that the filtering policy had been a unanimous decision.
In my view, this crossed from infrastructure protection into content-based restriction of legal information, created a chilling effect on inquiry, and conflicted with article 5 of the German constitution. It was another example of an institution drifting away from intellectual openness.
1c) Political Drift and Loss of Neutrality
In the last years, I noticed a clear institutional lean to the political left — for example, a university-wide email promoting protests against a specific opposition party, based on a highly contested news story. The issue for me was not the personal political views of employees, but the erosion of political neutrality at an institutional level.
My position is simple: universities should be unequivocally against political violence from any side. Beyond that, they should uphold neutrality and viewpoint diversity. When this neutrality erodes, research and teaching risk becoming — or being perceived as — partisan. Even careful work becomes tainted if the surrounding institutional climate selects for certain viewpoints and excludes others.
University-Level Assessment
The drivers of these developments seemed obvious: groupthink (visible in unanimous decisions on complex issues), funding incentives aligned with political priorities, and career paths that reward ideological alignment. The effect was that human dignity, truth-seeking and viewpoint diversity became subordinated to image management, ideological cohesion, and funding security. All understandable pressures — but detrimental to the university’s telos.
2. Department Level
When the institute director retired in 2022, leadership shifted to a «prof round» — a committee of professors that collectively made decisions. In principle, this sounds more democratic. In practice, it diffused responsibility: decisions could be attributed to «the prof round» rather than to any person who could be reasoned with. Some time before that, our department moved into a separate building about ten minutes away from the rest of the institute. The new setup relied heavily on shared offices and widespread home office days, which meant that much of the time I worked physically alone in a shared room, cut off from the informal exchanges that had previously sparked collaboration.
Structural changes alone are rarely decisive. But three incidents made the work environment untenable. Each erased substantial work without prior discussion. Taken together, they revealed a pattern: decisions delivered as faits accomplis, no dialogue, no acknowledgment of contribution, and a leadership culture that preferred administrative convenience over professional respect.
Once is misfortune. Twice is a warning. Three times establishes the system.
2a) Statistics & Methods Course
Over seven years, I had built the statistics and methods course for our media and computer science students: refining the structure, iterating on the examples, writing a comprehensive 500+ page script, and updating the course continuously. It was one of the most substantial teaching contributions I made.
In October 2022, at the end of a meeting, I was informed that the course would be handed to someone else to solve a teaching-load problem. There had been no prior conversation, no attempt to find a workable solution, and no acknowledgment of the years of material and infrastructure built around it.
The work was not evaluated; it was simply erased. For me, this was a straightforward leadership failure and a punch in the gut — not because the course changed hands, but because of how the decision was made. Years of work — much of it outside normal working hours — were erased by fiat.
2b) Writing Template
Scientific writing was a recurring struggle for students. To address it, I created a thesis template that combined informal, student-friendly explanations of scientific writing with guidance for different phases of a project (conceptual work, analysis, evaluation, etc.). Students responded extremely well; many used it voluntarily, and the feedback was consistently positive.
At the start of a new semester, after a student recommended the template in a course session, I was told to stop distributing it in the course. The initial justification was that some student had «used it wrongly».
When I asked the prof round for details, the explanations shifted: first stylistic objections, then «we don’t want templates; students should figure it out themselves». Shortly afterwards, my boss instructed me to no longer contact the prof round directly; all communication had to go through her.
Again, the issue was not the decision itself — it was the unilateral disposal of a tool that had proven effective for students, without any substantive prior engagement with the work, its rationale, or its author.
2c) Viewpoint Diversity Workshop
I had planned a workshop on viewpoint diversity in HCI for a national HCI conference in 2025. My motivation was simple: effective HCI requires perspective-taking, and I had observed strong ideological blind spots in the field. The proposal focused on identifying possible blind spots (you can read the proposal here).
I informed my boss at every stage. She gave the initial green light, and the conference accepted the workshop based on the written proposal.
When ethics and survey-related aspects required her involvement, her stance changed abruptly. She demanded the proposal, prohibited the planned survey (claiming there was too much ChatGPT influence), and required a post-acceptance internal review by the prof round — a review that, due to timing, would stall or effectively cancel the workshop.
I withdrew the workshop. Partly because of the timing issues the interference would have caused, and partly because I wasn’t willing to subject a workshop on viewpoint diversity to an extra internal political gatekeeping layer. Afterwards, I was told I «should have known» that such a workshop needed prior approval and should not be done by a single person — despite the fact that no one had objected earlier and I had never before been asked to seek this kind of pre-approval.
This moment crystallized something that had been building for a while: rules changed retroactively when ideological blind spots were touched. That is something I suspected could be happening in the discipline. It was a bit ironic to be caught off guard by it so close to home.
Department-Level Assessment
Across all three incidents, the pattern was identical: work erased without dialogue, decisions delivered as faits accomplis, responsibility diffused across a committee, and risk aversion wrapped in procedural language. The content varied, but the underlying message was the same: initiative is unsafe, and the institution will not protect your work.
After the third instance, trust collapsed. The rational response to such an environment is disengagement — but disengagement is incompatible with how I work. Once I understood the system, I knew I could not remain in it.
3. Student Level
We continued to have excellent, highly motivated students — some of whose work led to joint publications and even a best-paper award. Those students made teaching rewarding.
But over time, the proportion shifted. Fewer students came in with curiosity or ambition; more aimed simply to pass, often by any available shortcut. Plagiarism, unreflected AI use, and occasional attempts at manipulation became more common. Basic standards — punctuality in a block seminar, preparation, responsibility toward group members — had to be enforced as if they were unusual demands rather than the minimum requirements for professional work.
Teaching in German academia is structurally undervalued anyway: research and grant acquisition dominate careers, and every hour spent teaching is often regarded as an hour lost. I never shared that view — I considered good teaching a duty, because students will eventually make decisions that affect real people. But when the signal-to-noise ratio shifts too far, the return on that investment erodes.
What concerned me most was that the motivated students were the ones who suffered: time spent dragging the least engaged along was time no longer available for those who wanted to excel. At some point, the environment itself made it impossible to teach at a level that served the students who cared. And I could no longer be part of that dynamic.
Why I Finally Quit
I resigned with about a year and two months left on my fixed-term contract. For seven years, the job matched my values and skills; for the last three, it increasingly violated them. The pillars that had made the place worth staying — autonomy, integrity, intellectual honesty, collegial respect, meaningful teaching, institutional neutrality — were progressively dismantled.
For me, this work was never «just a job». I invest initiative, I care about truth-seeking, I value viewpoint diversity, and I want students to develop the ability to design products that actually help people. Those values require an environment where dissent is tolerated, initiative is not punished, and basic respect for work and human dignity is non-negotiable. I tried to practice these values in my teaching, in my collaboration with students, and in the projects I pursued.
We need environments that tolerate idiosyncratic thinkers, heterodox questions, and unorthodox approaches — not because they are always right, but because they prevent systems from collapsing into self-satisfied groupthink. I have, however, become increasingly skeptical of what could be called «Legacy Academia» — institutions optimized for funding, reputation, ideological safety, and control rather than for the pursuit of truth. Sociodemographic «diversity» is often used as cover for ideological homogeneity, and dissent is treated as structurally costly. Yet dissent is precisely what keeps inquiry honest. Ethics is supposed to be inconvenient, especially when an institution is convinced of its own virtue.
At my university and department, the shift was unmistakable: image management over truth, political alignment over neutrality, administrative convenience over intellectual autonomy, risk avoidance over honest inquiry, and erasure over collaboration. When an institution systematically moves away from the norms that make inquiry possible, individual commitment cannot compensate. You can hold the line for a while; you cannot do it alone indefinitely. Once it became clear that the trajectory was downward — less openness, less honesty, more narrative control — staying would have meant endorsing that drift through silence or burning energy on fights that had no chance of altering the trajectory. A glimpse into the future via the «Three Way Mirror» made the consequences of accepting these mismatches all too clear. Staying would have meant becoming a version of myself I did not want to be.
So I left.
I do not consider the ten years wasted. I learned a great deal about HCI, teaching, students, and institutions. In retrospect, I probably could have left three years earlier, but those last years clarified my boundaries. They showed me, in practice, what I will not work under: a system that violates its own stated values, suppresses dissent, and punishes initiative; an environment where political homogeneity substitutes for viewpoint diversity; a culture where ethical objections are treated as inconveniences; and a workplace where initiative and work can be unilaterally wiped away.
For now, I am taking a sabbatical, living off my limited savings, and working on projects I could never have pursued under the conditions of the last three years.
The last decade was a very good time. It was a very bad time. I am grateful for what I learned. And I am relieved that this chapter is now over.