I must take issue with Michael Ruse’s most recent post, “A Prof at 70: Having Fun, Feeling Guilty.” Forgive me if I sound intemperate, but since when has it been hunky-dory for philosophically inclined, erudite people (aka professors) to celebrate the rule of, “If it feels good, do it”? I’m not talking about sex, drugs, or rock and roll. I’m talking about hanging onto your teaching job past the normal retirement age—an action that prevents younger faculty from moving up the academic ladder. Professor Ruse is a 70-year-old philosophy professor, not some bashful bride marrying against her family’s wishes. When he confesses to feeling guilty, there’s probably something substantive there that he should feel guilty about.
This past fall, I did something that’s become not all that unusual at Hofstra: I signed an irrevocable retirement contract with the university whereby I promised to retire in five years, when I’ll be sixty-six and a half. In exchange, Hofstra, following our union contract, gave me a sum that amounts to about one and a half year’s salary divided into equal installments that have been added to my regular paychecks and will continue until I retire. Obviously, the university saves money by getting rid of a full bull like me, and, just as obviously, I was lured into this not-all-that-early retirement partly by the bonus they offered me.
But I did not make this decision lightly. And I am under no illusion that this will be easy financially. It won’t be poverty, but I won’t have the ready cash I enjoy now. And I’ll lose something I deeply value in life—teaching. More worrisome to me than the downturn in financial security and the loss of medical coverage when I retire is the loss of that powerful emotion professors experience in the classroom, where young minds continually putting us on the spot push us to heights of intellectual agility and suppleness we didn’t know we had. Like Professor Ruse, I am still vigorous. And like him, I love teaching and am “having fun.” Anyone who knows and loves teaching, anyone who hungers for it, and is good at it, feels the exhilaration of leading a group of students through a course—or even through a single, exceptional class session where everything comes together and the excitement of teaching and learning burns the air. I will miss these things.
Although I give out among the lowest grades in my department, I receive among the highest course/teacher evaluations, and my courses frequently have waiting lists. The worst insult I’ve ever endured as a professor was being called an “über-bitch” (it’s right there on RateMyProfessors.com) which I rather take as a compliment, seeing as it came from a bad writer who fancied herself a great one and was immune to coaching. But in deciding to go out now, while the teaching muse is still showering me with her blessings, I weighed what was good for me, my husband, and my daughter. Just as important, I considered what was good for Hofstra’s students, its younger faculty coming along, and, yes, what was good for the university as a whole. Sometimes the money numbers aren’t the only indicators of the right thing, personally, for you to do.
Think of the retirement issue in terms of this analogy: I’ve lived through several droughts in my lifetime, each of which resulted in a public call to conserve water. Yet I always had a friend or two who willfully ignored all the pleas and continued to take blissfully long showers. Considered individually, of course, one long shower made no difference to the reservoir. But if you add together enough individuals taking enough long showers during a drought, you end up with a severe water shortage. The geezification of faculty on American campuses presents a similar situation. Professor Ruse’s decision, taken by itself, doesn’t hurt anybody at all. I suspect he’s an excellent teacher, and I take him at his word that he needs the money and bennies. But multiply Professor Ruse by the thousands, and the American college and university system will have yet another prod to go into crisis mode. Save for the extraordinarily exceptional scholar (and I mean exceptional—the E.H. Gombrichs or Steven Pinkers of the world), professors really ought to retire by age 70.
Coincidentally, a few months after I signed my agreement to retire, I saw Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. With my final act as a professor now laid out in countable semesters, I was in a philosophical mood. As I listened to Prospero’s final speech, I felt the words as if they were coming from my own lips:
“Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint …”
To experience with grace the last full measure of this speck of dust we call our life requires that we professors depart the college or university island we call home before, not after, we begin our inevitable decline. Throwing aside the plush academic blanket—with its cozy tenure, its guaranteed income, its extravagant medical benefits, its adulatory students, and its countless other privileges that cocoon and protect us from the twists and turns of living that most of the rest of the world endures—requires a combination of reason and will. With any luck, professors who retire by 70 will enjoy their final years—years in which they can write that book they never had the time to write while they were teaching, or figure out the solution to that math problem they never had the time to do. And isn’t it nice—as pure consolation, if nothing else—that in doing these things, they just happen to make way for the young?
26 Responses to When It’s Time to Go
luther_blissett - April 12, 2010 at 5:00 pm
I applaud this sort of thinking. The only problem is that retiring is no guarantee you are helping younger scholars. Administrators are using the economic downturn as an excuse to hire adjuncts to replace tenured faculty. So be prepared for your courses to be taught by several part-time teachers for nearly no money or benefits once you retire.
rab1960 - April 13, 2010 at 7:13 am
I became an assistant professor at my university 35 years ago. Along with other faculty members, I worked hard to improve the department’s research and teaching capabilities serving as Chair for two terms as well as countless other duties. It was a rare event for us to receive a new position to fill. But, as the focus of the department changed new people were hired as old people moved on to other positions at other universities. I had always assumed that when I retired, the department would be able to take those funds and hire two excellent assistant professors since our new reputation allowed us to hire some very good faculty by this time. When the time came for my retirement, the Chair asked me to not retire since he felt that we may lose that position. But, after two heart attacks, I expressed my regrets and retired. Sadly, we lost those two assistant professor positions for which I had dreamed. It’s a great department now and I do not regret our work to accomplish our goals. But, sometimes retirement leads to a lost position.
jffoster - April 13, 2010 at 7:50 am
And adding to Mr. Blissett’s note, your department will be deprived of your experience both intra- and interdepartmental and your influence on crucial committees — such of the latter as may be left remaining. I’m curious though? Does Professor Fendrich think that Justice John Paul Stevens should have retired long ago to have made way for a younger jurist? And if not, on what principled basis deos she distinguish between the academic and judicial robes?
mbelvadi - April 13, 2010 at 8:01 am
I find this attitude of guilt and responsibility regarding macroeconomic matters to be very odd, and entirely inappropriate. There are people who essentially control the economy (notwithstanding all the ‘free market’ rhetoric), the policy makers in the legislative and executive agencies, and it is their responsibility, not individual older workers’, to ensure that there are jobs in various sectors for younger people. You and Michael Ruse have as much right to your job as anyone else; age is irrelevant. Your example of drought is a telling one. I lived in Calif during one of those drought periods, and learned the utter hypocrisy of the policy makers who encouraged us to make serious individual personal sacrifices while at the same time doing absolutely nothing to rein in the utter wasting by the agricultural sector of amounts of water that mathematically dwarfed the savings even millions of individuals collectively could accomplish. That’s when I first realized I needed to understand how society works at sociological and economic levels, not anecdotal personal ones, and that those who try to force a sense of individual responsibility for problems that are macro-political in nature are manipulating the public, not actually trying to solve the problem.The whole “guilt the older professoriate into retiring” trick is exactly the same kind of manipulation. The other two posters before me suggest a very plausible motive. While you make personal sacrifice for the good of some vague faceless “others who come after”, the people in real power (univ admins in this case) cynically use that guilt to arrange to reduce the full time faculty (with all of its shared-governance power, not just salary costs) to increase their control (which they call “flexibility”) via hiring untenured replacements. Maybe I’m too cynical, having read this story immediately after the one about Missouri State U’s reassignment of faculty without due process. My own faculty only just recently won an administrative/legal decision against a mandatory age 65 retirement policy (which is being appealed). If the admins want the older profs to retire, they can do what yours apparently did – use direct economic incentives. It should be your decision, your calculation based on what is best for you, and it sounds like it mostly was. But “guilt” should play no role in it.
goxewu - April 13, 2010 at 9:16 am
1. ‘Twas Prof. Ruse who brought up feeling guilty. He’s a professional philosopher–of science!. If he’s feeling guilty, there’s probably something to feel guilty about. Between the lines of Prof. Ruse’s post, one reads that he knows he really should retire but he’s fathered all those kids so he can’t afford to. 2. To hang on to one’s teaching job as putative selfless service to students because the administration might replace, or in certain anecdotal cases, has replaced a retiring full-time faculty member with part-time adjuncts, is a transparent rationalization. (Stand the situation on its head: Could it be that part of the reason for the excessive use of adjuncts is to counterbalance the salaries of the full professors over 65 or 70 who won’t retire? Humanities departments I’ve visited recently seem to consist of a top layer of $125,000 a year senior full professors and $7500-per-course adjuncts, with no “middle-class” of associate and assistant professors). When Prof. Ruse is 75 or 80 or 85 should he still not retire because he might be replaced by adjuncts?3. Ask yourself this question: In a time when very few humanities departments are adding full-time faculty lines, where will the assistant and associate professors who will eventually have to lead the department come from, if 70-year-old full professors don’t retire and make room for them? 4. “Your department will be deprived of your experience both intra- and interdepartmental and your influence on crucial committees.” Yes, and when superannuated full professors finally retire (tenure does not yet include immortality), there will be no one behind them who has been feathered into the system, who has been brought along in “influence on crucial committees,” who can take over. In any organization, transition from the old order to the new is best done gradually, and that can’t happen unless there are up-and-comers in the pipeline. And there won’t be any up-and-comers in the pipeline unless the oldsters give way well before their last gasps.5. Justice Stevens is the proverbial “exception that proves the rule,” and the Supreme Court itself is something of an exception. And “judicial robes” are quite unlike “academic robes”: SCOTUS Justices don’t teach young people (save for the individual clerk), don’t serve on across-campus committees, don’t attend and vote at faculty senate meetings, don’t grade dozens of papers, don’t go to professional conventions such as the MLA or give papers at them, don’t…need I go on? (There are, to be sure, humanities departments in which a handful of senior members meet in chambers, discuss things in camera, take forever to make decisions and don’t socialize in their professions with anybody but themselves. Yep, academe needs more of that.)5. 70-year-old full professors who hang onto their tenured teaching jobs (from which they cannot be let go because of diminishing performance) do so for the same reasons that dogs lick their private parts: because they can. At least dogs don’t compare themselves to Supreme Court justices or say that they’ll be replaced by cats if they don’t continue to lick.
goxewu - April 13, 2010 at 9:18 am
Sorry, that last item is No. 6. (I was a humanties professors, not a mathematician.)
goxewu - April 13, 2010 at 9:18 am
Sorry: “professor.” (I need more coffee.)
11182967 - April 13, 2010 at 9:33 am
It’s unfortunate that we seem to think of retirement as an all or nothing choice. Phased retirement works well in many places, often involving reduced responsbilities at a reduced salary in such a way as to open up slots for younger employees. This option will remain especially attractive until the working out of the messy details of providing all of us with decent health care regardless of employment status. And then there is the option of consulting or working on special projects after official retirement. At our university we have waiting in the wings several of those “big projects which, if completed, would save a lot of time and money but can’t be done by someone who is also involved in a daily routine”–implementing online degree audit; implementing an online job application process. Pay a retiree on a contract basis to get the work done–he/she provides a real service, continues to use his/her expertise, and has a legitimate reason to continue to hobnob on campus. Another option might be to let faculty teach as long as they want to but to put a cap on salary–or even begin to reduce it a a predictable rate–at, say, whatever age the individual can begin to collect social security without losing other income. Medical coverage following retirement is often a combination of Medicare and ongoing state or institutional coverage. Why not do the same with salaries? Let the old coots keep teaching, but at a reduced cost to the university by paying only enough to top up social security–and a modestly declining overall salary.
jimward3 - April 13, 2010 at 10:19 am
I just retired at age 70. There’s an academic good citizenship requirement – well, imperative – that you get out of the way and make room for younger people (they can probably hire two of them for what they pay you). It’s the way the system works. That “never retire” advice works for people who have their own businesses, but not for people who work in academia. Longfellow wrote “age offers no less opportunity that youth, though in another dress”: stop taking yourself so seriously and go and find it!
dank48 - April 13, 2010 at 10:21 am
The old show-business advice, “Always leave them wanting more,” surely seems appropriate here. I’d far rather depart to the sound of poignant regret and reasonably sincere assurances I’ll be missed than have to pretend not to hear the sighs of relief that I’ve finally figured out that it’s time to get the hell off the stage.
carolineroberts - April 13, 2010 at 10:39 am
You should copyright the word “geezification”!I agree with all of the above, but regarding making way for the young, it seems that fewer universities are actually hiring new people to replace those who are retiring. On the bright side, that makes for one fewer person to compete with for fellowships and research funds.
jffoster - April 13, 2010 at 11:42 am
Well, I wanted Prof. Fendrich’s view on the difference btwn academic gowns and judicial robes with respect to retirement, and got Goxewu’s (50) instead (or in addition?), which I am glad enough to have, particularly since he’s probly largely right. One exception — SCOTUS and other appellate judges do have to do legal research. Thurgood Marshall was one who pretty clearly stayed too long. Of cours I’d have been delighted had Justice Stevens retired some time ago to enable another Bush appointment, but if ifs were skiffs we could float a fleet. Just for the record, since I oppose a mandatory retirement age or undue pressure, I retired a year ago, age 65 yrs 6+ months, and after 39 years, 4 months, and one day. There was a relatively small retirement incentive of 1 quarter salary plus 60 days of unused sick leave. Re No 8′s last pgf., For medical insurance, our retired faculty, emeriti or not, are on their own. Many have Medicare — some of us who fell into a particular historical crack, did not. We could have stayed with the university faculty’s system, paying the cost ourselves, but that cost was exhorbitant and those w/o medicare could not generally have afforded to retire. In addition to the small payout above mentioned , I negotiated a codicil whereunder I was immediately rehired as an emeritus adjunct to teach two courses (it actually wound up being three because the dean wanted me to do an additional one.). I was three quarters short of the 40 needed for Social Security and MEDICARE. We lost SS/Medicare when we became a State University in 1978. But because I was rehired, I was allowed / required to pay the medicare tax and thus qualified myself and wife for Medicare. And eased the department’s loss of my courses, including three of our six ethnographies, I left the dept with two tenured faculty, one Asst Prof due to come up soon, and two very junior TT assistant professors and three adjuncts, one of whom has now become a Field Service faculty). We had done our best to groom these TT junior faculty for movement into responsible activity in the system, and were able to hire two new TT assistant professors for this year. But that appears to be a very unusual case, not only in our university but over all. I suggest that retirement decisions are highly complicated and particular to the individual, the department, and college, and I’m very reluctant to tell others when they oughta. Of course Cruse opened the door to being told.
jffoster - April 13, 2010 at 11:49 am
Sorry, it’s ‘Ruse’, not Cruse. I’ll join Goxewu in that additional coffee!
schultzjc - April 13, 2010 at 12:54 pm
I retired at 60 to take an administrative post at another institution. This gives me the opportunity to influence institutional function, mentor junior (and senior) faculty, and try out the ideas my administrators wouldn’t when I was faculty. In addition, I can continue to do research and even teach if I desire. I haven’t seen many comments to the effect of “giving back” so far. Retirement-age academics have a lot to offer, and given the frequency of complaints in posts to this site, I would think they’d have a lot they’d want to improve.
unemployedacademic - April 13, 2010 at 1:07 pm
If an older prof is feeling guilty about occupying a position, I would suggest that there are more productive ways to spend one’s academic ‘dotage’ than becoming involved in a dispute with younger academics about the correct time to leave or producing more research. Most older academics have very little to lose relative to younger workers. Start throwing around your tenured weight to change institutional and societal priorities. Write letters to the editor or op eds explaining the state of academia and its functioning to the public. Explain what those sports programs are really costing, or how those government-funded patents are handed over to private industry. Open up discussion of the value that different disciplines bring to society. Rate universities based on the number of contingent faculty they exploit. Please, do something constructive and be persistent about it.
amnirov - April 13, 2010 at 1:10 pm
There should be a mandatory retirement age of 64.
kittybware - April 13, 2010 at 2:12 pm
I just came from an institution where we had an emeritus faculty member who taught a course or two per year. He also was leading a major research project with students. He was 80 and more engaged and capable than his departmental counterpart, who was in his mid-forties. On the other hand, we had a terrible senior faculty member who made more than twice the assistant faculty members…and he wasn’t worth a hill of beans. No one size fits all.I say if you love teaching and still have the energy and knack for it — retire and teach part time.
stinkcat - April 13, 2010 at 2:26 pm
I think that there tends to be a kind of age discrimination that occurs in academia. Sometimes incompetent older faculty can get away with a lot. When I was a young assistant professor we had an 80 year old professor that taught the same thing regardless of the class. The chair knew he was incompetent and wanted to get rid of him, but the upper administration always resisted, with the same argument: he’s too close to retirement. At one point it was so bad that they paid him but never gave him any classes to teach.
11159995 - April 13, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Don’t forget all the examples of professors who have officially “retired” but then been hired by other universities for years to come. Examples from philosophy include such eminent scholars as Gregory Vlastos and Richard Rorty. if you are really THAT good, and you are not yet in your dotage, there are universities out there that would be happy to hire you post-retirement and pay you well also.
minnesotan - April 13, 2010 at 3:30 pm
What selfishness in these comments! There is a catastrophic job crisis in the offing, and the 65+ folks cling to their jobs because they don’t want to be bored? Well, then maybe it’s time you stop pushing for the enrolment of more graduate students to make your life easier, since you’re making theirs hell. You’re training people for 6-12 years of graduate study in order that they might manage an Applebees. Cultivate a little compassion, dignity, and empathy. Just because you control academia does not mean it should be all about you. Think of the “little people” for once.
jffoster - April 14, 2010 at 8:34 am
Minnesotan, Grading a stack of 60 papers of juniors and seniors who’ve had what is called “Freshman Composition” but a third of whom can’t write a coherent paragraph or even insert a page a page properly despite their acclaimed “computer skills” is not a way to avoied bordom. Or despair. Or disgust with English departments’ Freshman Comp. The typical faculty job certainly has its boring and tedious parts, as do most jobs. But a lot of it is indeed fun and rewarding. Moveover, there is very little reference to boredom avoidance in most of the above post and commentary. What would you then have us do? Reintroduce a mandatory retirement age like Anmirov wants (he may not be aware that general mandatory retirement ages are against Federal Law–certain specified occupations excepted.) A law by the way which I believe Minnesota supported. You’re wrong about training for managing an Applebees though — that’s starting to high for the preparation one typically gets in a Humanities (or any other except maybe business) Ph D. A lot of those doctoral programs ought be cut back or abolished. And we in my department didn’t try to entire enbody so far as I know into our MA program — and there are nonacademic jobs around for Anthropology postgraduate degree holders (even some for baccalaureates.) But the decision to retire is a highly personal, individual, and particular one and ethical honorable people are apt to decide it differently.
jffoster - April 14, 2010 at 8:40 am
My apologies, I still need more coffee. “insert a page break”, “too high”, “entice anybody”.
anonscribe - April 14, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Yeah, I’m just finishing my Ph.D. and I’ve found the oldsters in my department to be particularly helpful and engaged. They generally spend lots of time with their students because they aren’t on the hamster wheel trying to get to full prof or distinguish themselves. They tend to be interested in us youngsters partly out of some desire to pass on what they know, which is appreciated.Let’s say everybody retires at 65, and these departments hire back half those positions as TT. Does anybody think that will do ANYTHING for the jobs crisis in the humanities? Unless some mass retirements come from baby boomers, or departments put a moratorium on Ph.D.’s, or magically state public U systems get huge infusions of cash explicitly earmarked for TT profs in the humanities, not much will change. Begrudging Dr. Ruse’s attempt to keep healthy and active in his twilight years seems totally unwarranted.And, what about all those folks who don’t get their first TT appointment until they’re 40 or 45? They only get 20 years before they’ve got to get out? That seems unfair also.
goxewu - April 14, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Re #22:Prof. Ruse’s decision not to retire at 70 was indeed “a highly personal, individual, and particular” one. Until he himself made it public. Lesson: If one doesn’t wan’t people outside of one’s immediate academic community criticizing one’s decision to keep on truckin’ after 70, then one shouldn’t publish an Internet essay about it–especially one that contains feelings of guilt about the decision.Re #23:There are lots of ways for Prof. Ruse “to keep healthy and active in his twilight years” beside continuing to occupy a tenured, full-time university teaching position.
mcasto4 - April 25, 2010 at 9:15 pm
That’s dissapointing. I feel sorry for the students that won’t have the opportunity to learn from a teacher that is so enthusiastic about her work.Your class is my favorite this semester and I’m sure that if you were to poll your students they wouldn’t want you to retire, but that is your choice and I wish you all the best with it. I will say that I do believe that your class has improved my writing (hopefully you agree). Now I too read your reviews on ratemyprofessor.com and because of them I wanted to take your class. A teacher that loves what she does, teaches you a lot, improves your writing and makes you work for it. Isn’t that what any good student is looking for?As for making way for a younger generation, I guess I should say thats a good thing. From a student perspective though, more often than not new teachers are all excitment and new ideas straight out of college with no idea of what to do with an actual class. Older teachers have more to offer. Not just for the subject they are teaching but for life. It’s about educating the whole individual as you said in class. My high schools motto was “Non Scholae Sed Vitae” (this is the only latin I know) “Not for school, but for life” I take this attitude with all my classes. If the only purpose to school was to get a good grade on a test we would all be idiots. The point to educate yourself and to learn about life. And I don’t mean that in hippie, peace love and flowers sort of way, I mean it in the sense of being able to use what you learn in the classroom and incorporate it with everything you do. You are one of the few teachers that are able to do this in the classroom. You take the many many texts we read and show how they make sense. Thank You.(no this is not an attempt to suck up to the teacher)
jbricker - April 26, 2010 at 4:07 pm
This is an interesting thread and I’m surprised at the anger directed at a person that by all measures is an excellent scholar, teacher, and employee. The reason that age discrimination was ended in this country is because it has no merit. Older workers can contribute as much or more to a company or university as their younger peers. The employment difficulties of the current generation are the result of economic forces beyond the control of any one individual. Pointing a finger at older workers is nothing more than discrimination and should not be tolerated in any form.I have no answer for how to create more job opportunities in the humanities but I do know that singling out persons based only on their age is unconstitutional. I’m really surprised that the Chronicle would publish the kind of garbage featured in this and related articles.