“So, when are you going to retire?”
I’ll be honest: That’s not a question I ever imagined receiving. But I’m turning 60 this month. And in connection with that inauspicious milestone, at least three people have recently asked me when I’ll hang up my cleats — or, more precisely, my tweeds — and ride into the academic sunset.
The answer might surprise you: When I know I’ll be replaced.
And not with a couple of adjuncts who would teach my courses for a few thousand bucks apiece. No, I’ll retire when my institution pledges to hire a full-time, tenure-track professor in my place.
I’m not in any kind of rush, mind you. I’m a youthful 60, or so I like to think. (Don’t we all?) I still love teaching and writing, and I’ve continued to be productive in both realms. But I’d happily promise to retire by age 70 — that is, within the next decade — if my institution commits to hiring a full-timer in my stead. And if all of us “senior” (cough) professors did the same, we might reverse the greatest moral blot on academe right now: adjunctification.
We’ve all seen the statistics: A hefty majority of college teachers work in contingent, nontenure-track positions, either full or part time. Some of those faculty members have full-time careers outside higher education and teach as a sideline, while others live at or near the poverty level, trying to make a career out of adjunct teaching. Either way, they do not enjoy that key privilege of tenure: academic freedom. (How long the tenure-track and tenured folks will continue to enjoy it remains to be seen.)
Meanwhile, those of us in the tenure system get grayer and grayer. According to a 2020 report on the “aging of tenure-track faculty,” 37 percent of those professors are 55 or older, as opposed to 23 percent of all American workers. And 13 percent of tenure-track faculty members are 65 or older, whereas just 6 percent of U.S. workers have reached that ripe age. Nearly three-quarters of over-65 faculty members are men, by the way, and roughly 80 percent of them are white.
A little history: In 1978, Congress outlawed mandatory retirement for American workers under 70. But as life expectancy rose — and with it, concerns about age discrimination — critics asked why we should have any age-related mandates at all. In 1986, Congress outlawed compulsory retirement in most sectors but exempted higher education. Colleges and universities were allowed to keep forcing professors to retire at age 70, while the National Academy of Sciences studied what would happen if they were allowed to keep working.
Its 1991 report was cheery … and wrong. At “most colleges and universities,” the report predicted, “few tenured faculty would continue working past age 70 if mandatory retirement is eliminated.” That made sense at the time, given the patterns the National Academy had observed among institutions that had done away with compulsory retirement. So in 1993 Congress ended the exemption, effective in 1994.
Now you could teach forever, if you wanted to. And more and more academics did — or at least announced that they would.
Economic and social changes affected retirement decisions in ways that the National Academy had never anticipated. For example, the Great Recession of 2007-9 caused many faculty members to delay retirement. By 2011, indeed, only a quarter of professors said they were planning to retire by the age of 66. Others found themselves supporting adult children who couldn’t find jobs in the tight economy, even as those same professors were caring for their own aging parents. As the lone breadwinners for multiple generations, they had to keep bringing home the bacon.
And today? It’s anyone’s guess. Many faculty members have married several times and created new families, which means more mouths to feed. And while our retirement accounts have recently shot up in the red-hot stock market, nobody expects that to continue forever. Best to retain our tenured lairs, even as the adjuncts suffer in destitution and anxiety.
In a just world, we’d step aside and they would get our jobs. But we all know that in the world as it’s constructed right now, we wouldn’t be replaced at all. The administration would simply hand off our courses to adjuncts, without our wages or health benefits attached.
A mass retirement by senior professors wouldn’t derail the adjunctification train; if anything, it would speed the train up.
But suppose, instead, that we actually put our bodies in front of it? If we all said we’d stay put unless we were replaced by full-timers, our institutions would be forced to hire tenure-track professors instead of starving itinerants. I realize that all of this will be a lot easier for fabulously rich private universities — like my own — than it will be for many public institutions, which are struggling with declining enrollments and budgets. But that’s all the more reason to rally faculty members around the retirement issue, at every type of institution. I don’t know if it will work, of course. But I can assure you that nothing will work — or change — unless all of us raise our voices and demand to be replaced. We could leave with our heads held high, knowing that we had done something important for the generations that would succeed us. Our students would get some fresh blood in their classrooms, instead of the decaying oldsters who teach them now. (Look in the mirror, my friend. I just did.) And the new professors would almost certainly be more diverse than the mostly white, mostly male faculty members they replaced.
I know what you’re thinking: This would never work. Not enough professors would pledge to retire under those conditions. And even if they did, how would they know that their institution would keep up its end of the bargain?
That’s where our faculty associations come in. At colleges that are unionized, professors could use collective bargaining to demand retirement packages that included the hiring of replacements. And even at institutions where contracts are negotiated individually, not collectively, faculty associations could circulate sample retirement agreements. That would put the replacement provision on the table, for all to see. More important, it would put our employers on notice that we would stand behind any colleague who took the deal.
Colleges lately have tried to lure us into retirement by offering paid leave and other goodies. I won’t say no to those, of course, and they might even persuade me to hit the road at 68 or 67. (My wife is pushing for 66.) But unless there’s also a guaranteed job for my successor, I’m not going anywhere. They’ll have to wheel me to class in my semi-senility, like those geriatric geezers on The Chair.
That’s the last thing our employers want, of course: for us to hang on, and on, and on. They want us to move out, so they can move in another crop of low-wage laborers. But that won’t work if we sit tight — and stand together. The train will stop.
And since every movement needs a slogan, here’s mine: If You’ll Hire, I’ll Retire. Say it loud, and say it proud! If enough of us say it, and mean it, we can use our departure to make a real difference. I’m ready to take the deal. Are you?
