It's illegal for colleges and universities to pressure us--but why hasn't the pandemic sparked conversations about what would make retirement attractive and clear the way for younger faculty?
fantsstic thiughtful piece. I particularly underline the need to open up jobs to younger PH.Ds - the academy is skewed too old, and the stark inequality of a half starved adjunct work force waiting for positions to be posted is something professors —professing to be concerned with justice — need to focus on.
Like your suggestions for helping people transition. I retired relatively early (64) due to toxic dean and department. I was tired of being part of the PPOWs (permanently pissed off women). "Institution - free", I still conduct research and evaluation, write for publication, and present at conferences (costs are now consultant business expenses). Miss the teachable moments in the classroom. Don't miss the corporatization of academia.
As a person who has taught Spanish and writing freelance for, what? Thirty years now? I warmly recommend continuing to teach by forming your own groups, if you miss that at all. I don't know what your field is, but I know there are opportunities at retreats, fellowships in summer programs, and, now that everyone is Zoom savvy, you can organize your own online programs for fun and money!
Great suggestions Claire--esp. RE travel (office space would also go far, as many emerita have no room at home for all their books). I will say, however, that academics work on a different clock than most professionals. It would be far better to ask people to retire after a certain number of years in employment with benefits. Many of us may not have had deferred income--social security or a retirement/pension fund--until our 30s, and thus have "banked" 5-10 years less of a retirement fund than our professional peers. So, rather than an arbitrary age, why not say "after 45 years on the tenure track"....
Like Supreme Court judges :-) -- yes, I get that. But that would take people to 75, which means the most senior people in the university who are setting policies and making personnel decisions would be septuagenarians. Perhaps universities should recognize this, and pair limited-term tenure to higher contributions to retirement savings? It could also be cheaper in the end.
When I decided to retire, I found the responses completely gendered. Women said, "Do it, you'll love it" and men said "Don't, retirement is death." For many of them, I think it was, as their job was their life. But most women have more strings to their bow. I'm a poster child for retirement -- I was able to write a new book, which I couldn't have done under CUNY's course load. Bonnie Anderson
I agree--I also think some of those men aren't very well liked by their spouses. I have found that the men who retired on a reasonable schedule were those who had a plan that they were looking forward to, which often included spending time and traveling with a spouse.
More reason to have a vision of careers throughout that encourages people to develop their lives in tandem with careers--"burnout" has a lot to do with people (mostly men, but not entirely) who have understood themselves to be sacrificing something on behalf of institutions that honestly don't care very much about what's supposedly being given to them.
I agree: and some people (men and women, in my experience) devote themselves to such labor and are dramatically under-compensated for it: one thing that would help address that is an honest reevaluation of how the work of universities is done, and how those expectations are unevenly conveyed across faculties.
I am sad to say that the "work as sacrifice for company and family" is very common among men I know. I wonder if it is thus in other countries, and I tend to think the answer would vary a lot. But in Germany and France, for example, places where I have actually lived for short periods and still have friends, the model of 1-2 months of vacation annually during the work life allows people to develop a life outside of work, something that the insane always-working, work is all that matters, exploitative, capitalist American society does not foster. I mean, really: If you never get time off when you're in your prime working years, how can you develop any passions to pursue when all that is over? This is likely more true in the non-academic world where such benefits as sabbaticals are nonexistent.
I think you are absolutely right--and university professors are often overworkers, and have become more so in the last couple of decades as our employers have shifted more work onto us through adjunctification and cutting staff.
In some sense, so are all professionals--this is something I was going on about last week (not for the first time). This is what the financialization of professional institutions and the spread of neoliberal styles of management has produced, in fact--undermotivated, unrewarded overworking as a near-universal habitus of professional life.
Good piece, Clare. As you indicate, “senior” faculty vary a lot; but i suspect that finances are a big worry for many. I have heard that Columbia faculty tend to retire at much older age than other universities because we live in rentals and have no equity in homes. (Yes, our privilege includes staying in our apartments, but the rent continues to go up...). I myself cannot imagine going to school for another degree; but I am tired both physically and mentally from the stress of institutional BS. I have my plan—I’m out soon! But have projects that I will continue to pursue.
Congratulations on your plan! I actually think subsidized housing has always been a mistake: instead, universities should resist colonizing the neighborhood (soon I will read Davarian Baldwin's book on this exact topic) and pay people a wage that allows them to live in the city. But it would be interesting to see if it makes a difference in retirement, and I am not sure it does. I would bet that at least a third, if not more, of my own faculty is over the age of 65; and the department I left to come to the New School has at least 5 faculty who are 70 or older (one in his 80s.) And neither university has subsidized housing (I am told some of my current colleagues were wooed with housing subsidies, but I don't know that for a fact.)
I just think the current, informal ban on discussing retirement then prevents a real conversation about how people imagine the next chapter of their lives will look and how the university could help them transition to that.
As a retired historian (at 68) I say brava to this piece. Like my friend Susan Reverby (we were in grad school in the 80s) I like to say I am repurposed not retired. I do regret that my line disappeared and that I didn’t open up a job for one of the wonderful scholars out there seeking a full time position
The problem at the entry point is not I think a consequence (mostly) of people working too long--that concedes far too much to the people who have choked the entry point to death. Nobody should accept the proposition that some group of people should just go to the Soylent Green factory so that their fixed, constrained places can be taken by another group of people who will be Logan's Runned to death in short order. That said, we have almost no vision of what a creative, constructive, generative last third of a career could look like for faculty who are not book factories or who do not move into administrative leadership. My colleagues and I at the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore are profoundly convinced that one thing we're completely squandering is the deep knowledge that long-serving faculty have about how their institutions work. Why anyone hires the standard consultants who have little to no direct experience with higher education over potentially turning to long-serving faculty who know a great deal about it is either a mystery or it's perfectly explicable (e.g., those who hire consultants aren't actually hiring knowledgeable experts on purpose).
Totally agree: it isn't age qua age that I am concerned with--it is the failure to have conversations about what the span of a career looks like, for those who are book factories and those who are not. I do think the failure to draw in more young people is a problem, but I also think it is a problem for tenured people in their 60s to have layers of people senior to them who thwart efforts for change and reform that can refresh and renew higher education. This is linked to another phenomenon, the crushing workload on associate professors, has something to do with the portion of the faculty that is aging out as well--in my experience, absent the few who are still working at full-throttle, students and administrators migrate towards younger people who are more likely to do the task at hand (whether advising or committee work) in a thorough way.
I do occasionally feel--hence the Aydelotte's thought on consultancy--that some administrators also migrate away from older faculty who know too much about how the sausage gets made. It is easier to manipulate outcomes when folks haven't gone round and round a few times. But also that gravitation is partly because of what you observe: that knowledge sometimes deprives people of their equanimity--and that in turn sometimes curdles into just being terminally frustrated with everything at the expense of younger faculty who need to inhabit the institution as their own.
Note here that at its inception, Brandeis University saw the forced retirement at Harvard and other schools as an opportunity to recruit some great profs.
Good point--but incentivizing people to move on and have a second chapter in their lives would refresh faculties too--the vast majority of people, I suspect, work at the same institution for their entire careers, which makes it not a mystery why internal reforms are so hard to accomplish.
fantsstic thiughtful piece. I particularly underline the need to open up jobs to younger PH.Ds - the academy is skewed too old, and the stark inequality of a half starved adjunct work force waiting for positions to be posted is something professors —professing to be concerned with justice — need to focus on.
And students are quite young--having younger faculty in charge of perceiving and acting on that is important at moments of great change.
Like your suggestions for helping people transition. I retired relatively early (64) due to toxic dean and department. I was tired of being part of the PPOWs (permanently pissed off women). "Institution - free", I still conduct research and evaluation, write for publication, and present at conferences (costs are now consultant business expenses). Miss the teachable moments in the classroom. Don't miss the corporatization of academia.
Egg-zackly how I feel!
As a person who has taught Spanish and writing freelance for, what? Thirty years now? I warmly recommend continuing to teach by forming your own groups, if you miss that at all. I don't know what your field is, but I know there are opportunities at retreats, fellowships in summer programs, and, now that everyone is Zoom savvy, you can organize your own online programs for fun and money!
Great suggestions Claire--esp. RE travel (office space would also go far, as many emerita have no room at home for all their books). I will say, however, that academics work on a different clock than most professionals. It would be far better to ask people to retire after a certain number of years in employment with benefits. Many of us may not have had deferred income--social security or a retirement/pension fund--until our 30s, and thus have "banked" 5-10 years less of a retirement fund than our professional peers. So, rather than an arbitrary age, why not say "after 45 years on the tenure track"....
Like Supreme Court judges :-) -- yes, I get that. But that would take people to 75, which means the most senior people in the university who are setting policies and making personnel decisions would be septuagenarians. Perhaps universities should recognize this, and pair limited-term tenure to higher contributions to retirement savings? It could also be cheaper in the end.
When I decided to retire, I found the responses completely gendered. Women said, "Do it, you'll love it" and men said "Don't, retirement is death." For many of them, I think it was, as their job was their life. But most women have more strings to their bow. I'm a poster child for retirement -- I was able to write a new book, which I couldn't have done under CUNY's course load. Bonnie Anderson
I agree--I also think some of those men aren't very well liked by their spouses. I have found that the men who retired on a reasonable schedule were those who had a plan that they were looking forward to, which often included spending time and traveling with a spouse.
More reason to have a vision of careers throughout that encourages people to develop their lives in tandem with careers--"burnout" has a lot to do with people (mostly men, but not entirely) who have understood themselves to be sacrificing something on behalf of institutions that honestly don't care very much about what's supposedly being given to them.
I agree: and some people (men and women, in my experience) devote themselves to such labor and are dramatically under-compensated for it: one thing that would help address that is an honest reevaluation of how the work of universities is done, and how those expectations are unevenly conveyed across faculties.
I am sad to say that the "work as sacrifice for company and family" is very common among men I know. I wonder if it is thus in other countries, and I tend to think the answer would vary a lot. But in Germany and France, for example, places where I have actually lived for short periods and still have friends, the model of 1-2 months of vacation annually during the work life allows people to develop a life outside of work, something that the insane always-working, work is all that matters, exploitative, capitalist American society does not foster. I mean, really: If you never get time off when you're in your prime working years, how can you develop any passions to pursue when all that is over? This is likely more true in the non-academic world where such benefits as sabbaticals are nonexistent.
I think you are absolutely right--and university professors are often overworkers, and have become more so in the last couple of decades as our employers have shifted more work onto us through adjunctification and cutting staff.
In some sense, so are all professionals--this is something I was going on about last week (not for the first time). This is what the financialization of professional institutions and the spread of neoliberal styles of management has produced, in fact--undermotivated, unrewarded overworking as a near-universal habitus of professional life.
Good piece, Clare. As you indicate, “senior” faculty vary a lot; but i suspect that finances are a big worry for many. I have heard that Columbia faculty tend to retire at much older age than other universities because we live in rentals and have no equity in homes. (Yes, our privilege includes staying in our apartments, but the rent continues to go up...). I myself cannot imagine going to school for another degree; but I am tired both physically and mentally from the stress of institutional BS. I have my plan—I’m out soon! But have projects that I will continue to pursue.
Congratulations on your plan! I actually think subsidized housing has always been a mistake: instead, universities should resist colonizing the neighborhood (soon I will read Davarian Baldwin's book on this exact topic) and pay people a wage that allows them to live in the city. But it would be interesting to see if it makes a difference in retirement, and I am not sure it does. I would bet that at least a third, if not more, of my own faculty is over the age of 65; and the department I left to come to the New School has at least 5 faculty who are 70 or older (one in his 80s.) And neither university has subsidized housing (I am told some of my current colleagues were wooed with housing subsidies, but I don't know that for a fact.)
I just think the current, informal ban on discussing retirement then prevents a real conversation about how people imagine the next chapter of their lives will look and how the university could help them transition to that.
As a retired historian (at 68) I say brava to this piece. Like my friend Susan Reverby (we were in grad school in the 80s) I like to say I am repurposed not retired. I do regret that my line disappeared and that I didn’t open up a job for one of the wonderful scholars out there seeking a full time position
The problem at the entry point is not I think a consequence (mostly) of people working too long--that concedes far too much to the people who have choked the entry point to death. Nobody should accept the proposition that some group of people should just go to the Soylent Green factory so that their fixed, constrained places can be taken by another group of people who will be Logan's Runned to death in short order. That said, we have almost no vision of what a creative, constructive, generative last third of a career could look like for faculty who are not book factories or who do not move into administrative leadership. My colleagues and I at the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore are profoundly convinced that one thing we're completely squandering is the deep knowledge that long-serving faculty have about how their institutions work. Why anyone hires the standard consultants who have little to no direct experience with higher education over potentially turning to long-serving faculty who know a great deal about it is either a mystery or it's perfectly explicable (e.g., those who hire consultants aren't actually hiring knowledgeable experts on purpose).
Totally agree: it isn't age qua age that I am concerned with--it is the failure to have conversations about what the span of a career looks like, for those who are book factories and those who are not. I do think the failure to draw in more young people is a problem, but I also think it is a problem for tenured people in their 60s to have layers of people senior to them who thwart efforts for change and reform that can refresh and renew higher education. This is linked to another phenomenon, the crushing workload on associate professors, has something to do with the portion of the faculty that is aging out as well--in my experience, absent the few who are still working at full-throttle, students and administrators migrate towards younger people who are more likely to do the task at hand (whether advising or committee work) in a thorough way.
I do occasionally feel--hence the Aydelotte's thought on consultancy--that some administrators also migrate away from older faculty who know too much about how the sausage gets made. It is easier to manipulate outcomes when folks haven't gone round and round a few times. But also that gravitation is partly because of what you observe: that knowledge sometimes deprives people of their equanimity--and that in turn sometimes curdles into just being terminally frustrated with everything at the expense of younger faculty who need to inhabit the institution as their own.
Note here that at its inception, Brandeis University saw the forced retirement at Harvard and other schools as an opportunity to recruit some great profs.
Good point--but incentivizing people to move on and have a second chapter in their lives would refresh faculties too--the vast majority of people, I suspect, work at the same institution for their entire careers, which makes it not a mystery why internal reforms are so hard to accomplish.