A few weeks ago I read Joshua Kim’s blog entry The Great Remain, and thought of several responses. Joshua wonders about “some [large] number of people who work in higher education who remain in their jobs, even though they have saved enough money to stop working.” His guess is that this number considerably exceeds those who have left in the widely-proclaimed Great Resignation of 2021 (and likely 2022).
My first observation focuses on “even though they have saved enough money” —this is a condition that is hard to specify further. I’m over my officially designated “retirement age” (66) and in talking with my trusty TIAA representative, “enough” is a moving target.
I was surprised that TIAA’s actuaries suggest that I should plan for “enough” until I’m 98, or 2051. (Social Security Administration indicates estimates 85.4 years, so I don't know what accounts for the difference.) This is a lot longer than retirement planning used to consider feasible. Unless I put it all into a guaranteed annuity now (or soon), I have to consider how much more some of my funds might grow in that roughly 30 year period. This is tough: my anticipations of the next 30 years fluctuate between “growth” as the world economy shifts to a more sustainable basis, disaster (we’ll never pull off that shift), or muddling through (that shift, but only sort of). What do you think will happen?
So “enough money to stop working” is really hard to quantify for most of us except those in the upper income echelon amongst academics, who will always have enough. “Partner income” (where applicable) as a consideration is also frought: how healthy is that person? What does the partner do, and for how long?
At any rate, I share Joshua’s perception that in fact many people in academic who could retire from their present positions and present income instead choose to remain. Joshua suggested three large reasons for remaining: mission, identity, and “institutional rigidity.”
“Mission” is a tricky one, especially for those of us in private higher ed. Even at a more “liberal” (read: mainstream) Catholic institution, the concept of mission has become rather dented in the past 15 years. Does higher education in fact drive increasing social and economic stratification? Do we inadvertently contribute to an increasingly technocratic “winner take all” society and hence forced into the culture wars? Is this what I signed up for 40 years ago? My sense is that a lot of the missions of higher education (which vary significantly) have changed since the 1970s, and my own sense of participation in that has diminished.
“Identity” can be especially tricky: Joshua points out the way that in academic job and identity become conflated. This is especially difficult for the clan-like identities of academic disciplines: “I’m a sociologist, historian, virologist, medievalist.” It can be less difficult for those whose professional identities run concurrent to other significant life commitments, such as family, social service, or religious commitments. I surmise that more than a connection with a specific academic role (professor, dean, librarian, counselor), connections to specific kinds of responsibilities (teaching, research, consultation) bind identities significantly, and are expressed with reference to one’s academic clan. I know at least two retired Provosts who describe themselves as a “historian” or a “biologist,” even though neither has published in some years. Neither would call themselves "retired Provost" (assuming anyone else even knows what that means) or even "retired administrator" or "retired VP."
The loss of identity upon resignation from academia reflects the wider loss of identity all retired persons face in a society that assigns economic and moral weight to activity: working, producing, earning. I read one person, a significant leader in a growing industry who retired, who said “I went from being Who’s Who to who’s that? in a week.” Ageism and the denial of worth and even (at extreme) humanity of those who are older –especially if they are not healthy in ways that show—will become a growing social issue as Baby Boomers swell the number of retired (and has already become a more contested issue than some years before).
Finally, what Joshua calls “institutional rigidity” (I prefer “inertia”) is a push-me/pull-you. I know individuals who should retire, but whose habits and fears keep them in place, even at the cost of their own greater happiness. I know several who hang on because they know that their institutions will discontinue their positions and maybe even their departments or disciplines, after they leave, and they value their own contribution enough to want to continue to make it. The vaunted “change of priorities” as academia is “disrupted,” or whatever the flavor-of-the-month bureaucratic language is.
Institutional inertia does indeed make stepping down feel like stepping off a cliff, rather than taking a single stair step. Academic work doesn’t have to be a binary role: you do it full time or you don’t. But it has certainly evolved that way. Just try telling that to human resources departments and university attorneys. For all that some individuals refuse to retire, academic organizations refuse to make it any easier. One inertia begets the other.
I wonder how long the “great remain” will last. Already I know of four academic library deans or directors in the small state of Connecticut that have retired in the past 18 months. I know of many others in the various clans of academia who thus far have wanted to hang on in their jobs to see their organizations through the pandemic until “things get back to normal”—and now no one knows what that will look like. Do we all face an endless parade of COVID-19 virus mutations? A whole new pandemic from a different virus or some other cause? I wonder how many will retire and leave with regret between January and June 2022, out of sheer exhaustion. The last two years have been very hard, by any measure.
I expect that most full-time positions will be filled in the future by contingent workers, whether in teaching or elsewhere, as the institutional drive for so-called efficiency, economy, and agility trumps most institution’s former academic mission. I expect that the increasing precarity, and economic and social stratification in academia between the haves and have-nots, will intensify and come to resemble the combative polarization of the culture wars. Whether I leave my own position or not, I can’t figure would whether the time is right, or will be permanently wrong beyond anything I can fix.
It's not a happy time to retire, but then, when would that be?