Modeling Retirement

I have been thinking a lot about retirement. I have accrued the necessary years working as a faculty member and administrator in higher education. I have reached the age required to receive the governmental retirement benefits I have earned through the mandatory contributions from my paychecks since I held my first job as a teenager. I have no shortage of plans for projects and adventures I want to have with my husband, children, and friends once my schedule is my own. I have writing projects I want to pursue. And I have the requisite level of frustration with the direction higher education is headed in this country to know that it is time to leave the struggle to faculty whose patience has not yet been completely exhausted by those who wish to dismantle the US university system and whose Orwellian rhetoric scarcely masks their ill intent. I know I am not alone in my thinking. A quick review of articles published in Academic Leader and other higher education publications in just the past two and a half years reveals the following nonexhaustive list: ● Katherine Mangan, “What Keeps Higher Ed Up at Night” (2026) ● Sean McAleer, “Professor Hamlet Contemplates Retirement” ( 2026) ● Rebecca Pope-Ruark, “Succession Planning for Impossible Jobs” (2025) ● William J. Rothwell, “What I Learned from Advising 120 PhD Students” (2025) ● James C. Witte, “How to Rewire Retiring Faculty” (2025) ● Donald H. DeHayes, “The Existential Leadership Question: When Is It Time to Move On?” (2024) ● Gretchen Oltman and Vicki Bautista, “Stay or Go? Thinking about Your Place in Higher Education” (2024) ● Rob Jenkins, “Five Good Reasons to Leave Administration” (2023) . I wrote in 2023 about the value of Lisa Jasinski’s Stepping Away: Returning to the Faculty After Senior Academic Leadership, which remains a valuable resource for its thoughtful consideration of how to transition out of a leadership position and into a faculty position when retirement isn’t quite the right career move. Jasinski’s work helped me make the transition from academic dean to professor, a decision that was right for me when I made it three years ago. My point here in listing all these articles is that they fail to fully explore the broadest scope of the personal and biographical dimensions of retirement planning. A joint Chronicle of Higher Education–TIAA report, Preparing for a Graceful Exit, presents a neatly sanitized summary of the ways in which we typically write about such concerns: Ending a career remains a tough choice for many professionals, whose personal identity is often inextricable from their work, whether that be in teaching or research. For many older faculty members, retirement means more than cleaning out a desk, being the guest of honor at a going-away party, or getting more time off. It can represent a final separation from much of what has mattered to them, including the vibrant life of a college campus. Such statements capture the broad psychological considerations many faculty members face when contemplating retirement (assuming they are fortunate enough not to need to consider their own or a loved one’s health issues), considerations that N. K. Schlossberg and colleagues’ transition model research concisely summarizes and categorizes. As such statements must, they generalize when the realities of faculty experiences are so much more nuanced. They ignore the deep impact that our individual personal histories have on our behavior and how we perceive our options. (Schlossberg’s transition model unites the factors I want to discuss into two categories: “socioeconomic status” and “psychological resources.”) More specifically, our childhood experiences significantly influence our thinking and our approach to retirement decisions. As in so many areas of our adult behavior (both professional and personal), the way we approach considering our options and possible decisions is deeply influenced by the behavior modeled for us when we were children. This is an area in which class differences likely constitute a significant influence. Allison L. Hurst and Sandi Kawecka Nenga’s edited collection, Working in Class: Recognizing how Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work (2016), provides some lovely and complex analyses about the ways in which nonelite backgrounds influence how we conduct research, teach our students, and interact with our campuses. None of the essays, however, address how faculty from working-class backgrounds think about retirement. In my case, my parents worked in white- and pink-collar positions that kept our family in our 1,000 sq. ft. 1950s tract house. They both took early unplanned retirement while I was in high school, and they were in their late 50s when my mother’s health prevented her from continuing in her teaching job. My husband’s parents similarly worked outside the home and both retired when their health no longer permitted them to work. All four of these wonderful people felt the need to keep working for as long as they could. Their retirement years were spent living close to home, not engaging in extravagant travel (or much travel at all), and pursuing quiet lives reading, going to church, and spending time with their children and grandchildren. They owned modest homes and lived simply, and when they passed it was primarily their love and memories that they left behind. If they could have kept working, they would have. Indeed, in the case of my mother’s retirement, I remember her crying one evening after she realized she would need to leave her job, saying, “If I can’t work, what good am I to my family?” I am thrilled that I am financially able to support my retirement, and from a financial standpoint, there is no reason why I shouldn’t retire from my current position and simply work on the projects I want to work on when I want to work on them. I don’t have any illusion that by maintaining my tenured position I am preventing a younger academic from being hired into a tenure-track position; one might even argue that it is important for senior faculty with tenure to stay in place to maintain as many tenured slots in humanities departments as possible. There are other, less cynical, reasons to not retire. Joe P. Dunn listed a number of them in Academic Leader over a decade ago, and several remain valid considerations today. His Letterman-style countdown list culminates in the following: “Is there anything that can replicate the opportunity to shape a life, to see a freshman grow through her senior year, and know that you contributed to her becoming? And every fall spawns a new batch of fresh minds and personalities.” In fact, Dunn has recently reiterated his commitment to remaining an active family member in “Teaching as a Sacred Life.” His title nicely summarizes the point of his article. Dunn’s passion for his continued work at a small liberal arts college is moving, and I am glad his health permits him to continue to be an active member of his institution. I share his enthusiasm for supporting the academic growth of undergraduate students. It is a rationale that carries weight as I consider my options. The teaching is fun, the students are engaging, and it is a privilege to help them learn to make sense of complex literature as they simultaneously come to understand themselves. But the grading, the department meetings, the silly administrivia, the requirements that I be in particular places at specified times (the nerve!) are not something I have daily patience for. And the future I see for higher education in this country makes me despair. I haven’t made a final decision yet. I am weighing all these professional considerations, but I am giving weight as well to what I wish my parents had been able to model for me by their retirement and, more importantly, the example I want to set for my own children, who are adults establishing themselves in their professional lives. I want to give them a hopeful model for their own futures, one they will be able to reflect on long after I have gone. Constance C. Relihan is a professor of English and the former dean of University College at Virginia Commonwealth University.