A Guide to Navigate the Retirement Wilderness

Retiring from the faculty can be an overwhelming experience. Professors must be prepared financially, of course, but they also need to figure out what to do when the professional role that has for so long defined them comes to an end.

To help with the transition, the University of California at Los Angeles created a faculty-retirement liaison. In this part-time position, a retired professor serves as something of a guide for faculty members considering retirement, helping them to navigate the complexities of their departure from the professoriate.

David Lopez, who retired as a sociology professor and department head in 2010 after 40 years at the university, started in the new role last year. He spoke with The Chronicle about how he measures success in his job, what negotiating advice he gives faculty members, and the need for flexibility in retirement agreements. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are professors considering retirement from UCLA worried about?

Their primary concern is not, Will I have enough money to last until I die? Their primary concern is how they can continue involvement with their profession and often with UCLA. They’re thinking about how to maintain their research.

Who are you hoping to reach?

The UCLA faculty has more than 300 faculty members who are at retirement age or well beyond and have the financial resources, as far as we can tell, that they won’t in any way suffer financially if they retired. That’s kind of my target audience.

You’re charting a new path with your job. How do you measure success?

I’m paying attention to two metrics. One is just the overall number of people retiring. A key part of this is also helping the planning process of retirement, which has been chaotic. We’ve seen very substantial increases in the number of faculty members sitting in on a series of retirement-planning workshops. Last year we saw a threefold increase in the number of faculty members signing Pathways to Retirement agreements. [The program allows UCLA professors to map out the end of their employment, which also helps the university with planning; see main article.]

What do you think is responsible for the increase?

A lot of this is teaching faculty the nuts and bolts of what it means to retire at a big place like the University of California, like the details of your pension plan, how your medical coverage changes, and just sitting down and connecting everything together. A lot of my time is spent helping people work out the various bits and pieces and make sure they don’t mess up the process.

One interesting thing I found is that some very eminent researchers might have no sense of how much money they have in the bank or in retirement accounts, because they haven’t opened their statement since 1995.

A big part of your job is helping faculty members negotiate with deans and department heads. What sorts of advice do you give?

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Based on my sense of the department involved, I try to get people to ask for a little more than they think they can get, but not too much more. A department chair is not going to guarantee you can have your office for the rest of your life, or give you $100,000 a year to finance whatever personal research you want to do. Negotiating is the only way to really get a sense of how much an institution can actually do.

You have the experience of being on the other side of the negotiating table as a former department head.

Yes, so I do have a sense of what’s possible. But I don’t try to tamp down people’s expectations. If someone wants a very particular thing, I suggest to them that they may have to ask for a little less of something else.

I often hear the frustration of professors who worry that a colleague is getting a better deal than they are. They wish the process of negotiating a retirement agreement was more fair and transparent. How do you balance transparency and flexibility?

The F-word — “fair” — is a word I try to avoid. Nothing is fair at a competitive research university. You’re not going to be treated like everybody else. There are certain things faculty have in common, like our wonderful defined-benefit pension. But the circumstances of faculty members will vary a great deal. Someone retiring from the theater-arts department doesn’t have the same kind of professional life as someone retiring from neurology. For some people, $10,000 is a lot of money for research. For others it’s a rounding error. At a diverse institution like UCLA, where faculty have the basics of their financial future pretty much worked out, there has to be a lot of flexibility.

Do you see your role as creating opportunities for faculty to remain engaged after retirement, or as connecting faculty members with opportunities that already exist?

A little of both. I’m trying to literally make space for emeriti. But I’m also figuratively making space for emeriti. And there’s also kind of a bully-pulpit quality, too. By asserting that people can have a fulfilling life on campus after retirement, I’d like to think that people will believe that retirement is a natural part of a professor’s career at a place like UCLA.

That doesn’t mean you walk into the forest and die for the sake of the tribe. Quite the contrary. That means you continue to run a lab or write books about obscure poets or teach undergraduates. But at the same time, you’ve made space for other people to start climbing up the ladder of faculty careers.

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.