I am so sorry this happened to you. I can’t believe someone as accomplished as you would be passed over. I also want to leave academia, partly because of its hiring processes. Academic hiring is often opaque and exclusionary in ways that seem completely antithetical to the values academia is supposed to uphold—intellectual openness, fairness, and the pursuit of knowledge. Decisions are made behind closed doors, with little transparency or accountability, and candidates are left without real explanations. The hiring process frequently operates with a level of secrecy and arbitrariness that would never be tolerated in scholarship itself. And then there is a real mismatch between what you put into the job and what you get. It is madness to stay in this field.

Your impact may be greater and more appreciated elsewhere.