Failures in academia (1) - the Spring season: Education

Tells the story of the two most significant career failures in the first stage of my academic career, as well as their unexpected upsides

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Tue 4 Aug 2026 13:18)

In my January 2020 blogpost Be proactive, resilient & realistic! I talked about the challenges that even very famous academics have faced in their academic careers. Moreover, in our recent article Every Little Action Counts (Harzing & Sathish, 2026), we include being open about our failures as one of the example micro-practices under the “resist a hero narrative” label, in itself a specific representation of the more abstract concept of humility.

  • Now that I am semi-retired (see Retirement), I decided to “walk the talk” by reflecting not only on my own career failures, but also on the unexpected upsides that were associated with each of them. Whilst I am not claiming that there are upsides to every failure, our failures often represent cross-roads that can help us to reflect more deeply on the best path through the maze of our academic careers.

Before we start though, let’s get one thing straight. I am privileged! I am white and was born in an affluent Western country (the Netherlands) in the 1960s, an era characterized by wide-spread optimism and belief in social and economic progress. My education was largely free; even at tertiary level there were generous grants available for students who – like me – came from families with low incomes, and only a part of these grants had to be repaid. I did two full tertiary degrees, so received these grants for 7.5 years. This seems incredibly generous now but remember that at that time only about 5-10% of 18-year-olds went to university.

This certainly gave me a much easier start in life, but it doesn’t mean that my academic career was universally smooth. That said, I do not claim the set-backs in my career were unique or even particularly dramatic, although some of them – such as my all but failed PhD and my first redundancy – definitely felt like it at the time. However, I sincerely hope my story will help ECRs to realize that things that appear like major problems at the time can also have unexpected upsides, and might even be positive turning points in your academic career.

I will tell my own career story in four seasons: education, early career, mid-career, and late career. Your own challenges, set-backs, or failures will be different or may appear at a very different stage. But I do believe that the four morals that I derive in this white paper have some general applicability. And remember, this is a story about major cross-roads in my career; it is not about the many daily set-backs that we all experience as academics. Here are three universals that you may not be fully aware of:

  • Every academic gets rejections all the time; for instance, everyone experiences paper rejections, even editors of top journals see their own papers rejected.
  • Everyone has difficult colleagues/collaborators; in fact, you may well be “that difficult colleague” for others. We all have different personalities and preferences.
  • Every academic I know feels undervalued in their own university; especially research-active academics often receive far more recognition outside their university than within.

So, with that in mind, please join me on a journey through the seasons. If you want to skip to a particular section, just use the Tables of Contents below. If you are curious about what happened before my academic journey even started see This little girl: message to my younger self.

Failure 1: I didn’t go to university

There was no “Grand Design” or strong purpose behind my academic journey. Unlike many other academics, I never had a strong passion for a particular academic subject when I was young. Foreign languages, however, had always fascinated me, possibly because we never really travelled abroad when I was a child.

At secondary school, I studied six languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Latin and Greek. I graduated in five of them, adding Geography and History to my selection, and took Business & Economics as an extra-curricular subject. It was – and apparently still is – rather pejoratively called a “pretpakket” in Dutch, literally translated as “a fun curriculum”.

It was seen as “the easy path”, taken only by pupils who had no ability in the supposedly more difficult Science subjects. In my case, a lack of ability in Science subjects was probably not the main reason for choosing languages; I was quite decent in Mathematics, did well in Biology and Chemistry, and – despite spectacularly failing one exam with a 4 out of 10 – would have managed more than a bare pass for Physics.

But I didn’t really enjoy the Science subjects and my grades for my non-Science subjects were definitely higher; I eventually graduated with 9 out of 10 for most of them. So as soon as I could, I dropped not only Biology, Chemistry and Physics, but also Maths. The latter might have been due to my grumpy Maths teacher who didn’t think Maths was for girls; yes, it was the seventies... But then again, the careers advisor never batted an eyelid either, even though he must have known that dropping Maths would close the door on most university degrees.

Without Maths, the only things I could really study were languages, Law, Classics, History, and Geography. Despite preferring them to Science subjects, none of these appealed to me for further study, the only subject I really liked was Business & Economics, but that had Maths as a prerequisite.

This was one of the reasons I opted for a vocational degree. The other reason was that none of the older generation in my family and only a few of my 35-odd cousins had even tried university, let alone finished a degree. So, university just didn’t feature on my horizon.

I therefore did a vocational degree in Business & Languages for 3½ years, learning how to hold a conversation and write business letters in French, English, and Spanish, but also learning the basics of Marketing, Finance & Accounting, and Management. This degree was offered in only three places in the Netherlands, but I could get a place in only one of them, three hours away from my home-town. So, I had to move away from home and live independently.

Upside 1: Personal joy & growth

Doing a vocational degree and not going to university might seem like an odd start to a career as a university professor. However, leaving home at 18, living independently, and doing a degree that was easy for me meant that – as a very shy girl – I gained both confidence and independence. This was made easier by finding a group of friends who were a bit like me, quiet and not into big rowdy parties with lots of drinking. We had small parties at which we talked till late at night about life.

I also had the great fortune to meet my now husband – an electrical and later computer science engineer – at a classmate’s birthday party. He has not only been the biggest source of personal joy in my life, but also the most amazing source of career support. First, he expertly tutored me in Mathematics so that I passed a “deficiency course” in Mathematics with a 10 out of 10 and was able to go to study Business & Economics after all.

He also recommended me to start my website late in the 20th century, when the internet was still in its infancy. Not only that, he maintained it for me for quite a few years and in 2016 even custom-designed a content management system for me. Finally, in 2006 – when I was turned down for promotion – he developed the Publish or Perish citation analysis software, which we have continued to provide for free to millions of academics and students for 20 years now. Most of all, he has been a listening ear and a source of advice for more than 40 years.

Doing a professional degree ultimately gave me the courage to go to university after all. I soon realised the professional degree was a bit too easy for me and didn’t challenge me. The school-like teaching, with 30 hours of class-time a week also didn’t suit me as I love independent study. Moreover, interacting with my husband and his fellow students at the university campus – where I spent a lot of my free time (see pictures on the left below) – made me realise that I really did want to go to university too.

But I hedged my bets and did finish my professional degree, including a practical training period at Texas Instruments in the UK (in Bedford, a place that – ironically – we are now only a short train ride away from). My husband joined me for the last couple of (Winter) months, and we experienced the joy of living in an English bed-sit in the mid-1980s (see pictures on the right below), living with half a dozen other people in a big - and not very well-maintained - Victorian home.

Paying a bit more for our room than the others, we were fortunate enough to have our own kitchen, rather than a one-pit stove on a table with a wash-basin as a sink. But the décor so garish that we put up posters to cover up part of it, and the toilet and shower were in an outbuilding outside. As our rent was inclusive of energy costs, the landlady only provided heating for a few hours a day on a time-clock. So, the reason I was wrapped up in all my clothes and a duvet was simple: a power cut over Christmas meant that the heating was only on during the night :-(.

After 3.5 years in a vocational degree that didn't really excite me, I now had the motivation and confidence to go to university. But I still wasn’t keen on being one of 500 students in big lecture theatres, which was the norm for Business & Economics in the Netherlands. So, when I discovered that a new degree – based on problem-based small group learning – had just started, I was immediately attracted to it.

And when it turned out that one of the specialisations was International Business, allowing me to continue to combine my interests in Business and Languages, I was sold. So, after finishing my professional degree and working at the ITC (International Training Centre, see also Technology in the decade before my PhD) I started my university degree at Maastricht University (then called Rijksuniversiteit Limburg).

Failure 2: I didn’t get any exemptions

Normally, students who did the type of vocational degree I had done (HEAO: Higher Economic and Administrative Education) would get a 1.5-2-year exemption when embarking on a 4-year university degree in Business & Economics. Even those who had done a hospitality degree qualified for this. But as my HEAO degree was so new, and it had a strong focus on languages, I didn’t qualify for any exemptions despite having studied Economics, Finance & Accounting, Marketing, and Management. This policy changed a few years later, when the degree became more established, but obviously that was too late for me. Hence, I had to start my university degree from scratch.

I felt this unfairness even more keenly after I had started my degree. In the first 1.5 years of the degree there were no exams; Maastricht University operated with what they called a “progression test”. It covered all the knowledge that was taught in these first 1.5 years and passing it was a hurdle requirement for the final 2.5 years of your degree. Students would take it four times a year. Obviously, you were expected to improve gradually and pass in the middle of the second year.

The initial benchmark test - at which you were expected to fail miserably - was conducted in the first month of the first year of the degree. I passed it! That was not entirely surprising given that my professional degree had included most of what we would be taught in those 1.5 years. But rules were rules, so I was told I had to formally complete the 1.5 years I had just passed.

Upside 2: Time to grow more confident

Starting in the first year meant that I was four years older than most of my fellow students, which made it quite hard to connect with them. However, the age difference had unexpected advantages too. Being older and much more knowledgeable than my classmates, and a hard worker, I was a natural choice for student jobs at the university. Even before I started my degree, I worked at the secretariat for 6 weeks. At that time, it was the hub of the academic community, everyone would drop by several times a day for mail and coffee. So, I got to know my future lecturers and learned a lot about how universities worked.

The problem-based learning approach involved groups of 12-15 students engaging in self-directed discussions based on specific business problems as described in the course manuals. These groups were facilitated by a tutor who would help students when they got stuck. In the second year of my degree, I became such a tutor for 1st-year students. It was a role I really enjoyed and as I was five years older than them, I felt quite comfortable in it.

In my 3rd and 4th years, I worked as a student research assistant in the department of Management & Organization, helping academics with literature reviews, interview transcriptions, and creation of course manuals. At that time, I also worked with Geert Hofstede (yes, the cultural dimensions guy), first finding articles citing his work and then creating systematic summaries of them. This may seem like a mundane job, but as I have described in Doing research in an analog time, finding literature was by no means easy in the mid-1990s, and this was even earlier, the late 1980s.

Somehow, I also ended up as a student member of the Faculty’s governing board, sitting through the many manifestations of organizational politics with a poker face. This was not – as my PhD supervisor assumed – because I was sensible enough to keep quiet, I just didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. But I did learn the value of having a poker face, people attribute their own feelings to you. This can obviously be positive or negative, but in a professional context it has usually worked out positively for me.

All of this meant that even during my studies I had already experienced a taster of teaching, research, and service/leadership. I was thus able to find out – in a very low-pressure setting – what academic life was like. I am not sure that without these experiences the thought of becoming an academic would ever have crossed my mind. So, in the end, I am incredibly grateful that I was denied the extensions. It is very unlikely I would have felt comfortable taking on all these extra duties if my studies had required more time.

[Obviously, I am aware that these days most students hold a significant job next to their studies. But honestly, this wouldn’t have been possible in the Netherlands in the 1980s. Teaching stretched out over 40 weeks – not 24 as is common in many undergraduate degrees these days – and we were expected to read and digest a huge amount of literature every week, much of which consisted of academic articles, not textbooks. Moreover, in groups of 12-15 it was impossible to stay quiet, let alone be absent, and we were graded on participation].

Moral 1: Professional failures can lead to personal joy & growth

All in all, I think my experiences in the first 8 years after leaving secondary education were crucial in my journey to becoming an academic. The slower journey was not intentional, but it allowed me to gain confidence. Sometimes, it may just take a little longer for the egg to mature into a little chick.

I suspect the same is likely to be true for many other academics who are “first in the family” to go to university. Or even for anyone who felt they “didn’t fit the mold”, whether it was because of their ethnicity, gender, social class, or neurodiversity. So, ask yourself: what are/were your challenges at this stage, and can you see upsides to them as well as downsides?

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Copyright © 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Tue 4 Aug 2026 13:18

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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