I finished my PhD a while ago but, long story short, got screwed over by my department and wound up entering industry rather than continuing my academic career as I had wanted. My degree and background are in pure math, which industry really doesn't care about (and I'm not interested in the NSA or finance), and thus I don't see any way of moving from industry into academia. I've considered getting a second PhD, but that raises the obvious question of why the first one wasn't enough, and I'm unlikely to get into as good a program coming in from industry as I had immediately after undergrad. (My argument would be that I would have done fine if I had had a different department or even advisor, but there's really no way of proving that, or even politely discussing it, in any sort of application.) What I want is a place where I can do research and churn out papers in my field to build up a nice CV for future things, and that idea doesn't seem feasible outside of a postdoc or grad school. I can't get the former, so my thought was that I could go through grad school a second time.
So, here's my question: Can I somehow revoke or renounce my degree? It's not useful to me; and in retrospect, I should have quit or transferred instead of finishing. (I did try to transfer at one point but wasn't able to arrange anything useful.) It seems easier to go from industry to grad school than from grad school to industry back to something academic again, and it certainly looks weird to apply for a second doctorate a substantial amount of time after the first. Obviously I don't want to lie and claim that I never got a PhD in the first place, so is there some way of officially getting rid of it and forgetting it ever happened? What I want at this point is to start over from scratch, and I'm not sure how to arrange that.