Editor’s Note: What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation on faculty retirement, and when to say when, between William Pannapacker, a professor emeritus of English who retired from Hope College at 54, and Claire Bond Potter, a professor emeritus of history at the New School for Social Research who retired this year at 65.
How did you know it was time for you personally to retire?
William Pannapacker: I wrote several essays about that, but essentially, I realized that my department was being downsized because of declining enrollments and that I would soon have no disciplinary colleagues. Most of my generational cohort was gone or leaving, and there was little left to teach besides introductory writing and repetitive service courses. I was still young enough, at 54, to attempt a career change, since finding a new tenured position in my discipline is all but impossible.
Claire Bond Potter: I still felt I could adapt to the intellectual challenges, but not the institutional ones. During the pandemic, I realized that the daily problem-solving of academic life was increasing, and it put increasing pressure, not just on my writing and time for reading but on my private life. I believe that students deserve teachers who are fully invested in the classroom and in the institution, and I just wasn’t anymore. On top of that, The New School is entering a strategic-planning phase, and at 65, I don’t have another institutional transformation in me.
Between my retirement savings and Medicare, I could do it financially: It was like giving myself an endless fellowship.
How much do late-career professors talk amongst themselves about the retirement decision? Or is it one of those things people hesitate to bring up?
WP: I have heard many senior professors — older than 70 or even 80 — declare that they will never retire. They view perpetual employment as an entitlement or a duty, but that has had consequences for budgets and job opportunities that have affected all of us and dramatically changed the profession since the uncapping of mandatory retirement in the ’90s. The conversations I have had with many faculty members in their 50s or 60s suggest frustration with never having had a chance to be a senior member of a department and possibly to bring about changes that might have prolonged their department’s viability.
CP: My conversations with colleagues occurred after I announced my decision, and they fell into two categories. People older than me were shocked because I was, in their view, too young to retire. Most of them are reluctant to take this step: While I can’t read their minds, they are making decent money, and have more choices about how to spend their time than younger colleagues do.
But millennial and Gen X colleagues are, almost, to a person, envious. They are actively interested in retiring early, but can’t because they don’t have enough money saved, and they need their institution’s health insurance. Many started families late because of graduate school and the tenure clock. They often still have student loans, as well as their children’s college and maybe grad school, to pay for. So here’s the insight: Instead of offering buyouts to people in their 70s, invest in young scholars in ways that will allow them to retire comfortably at Medicare age.
What specific factors prompted you to make this final leap? Was it changes in the profession? In the students? Or was it personal burnout with teaching/service, etc.?
WP: I think the main factor was wanting to move from a small city to a major city with all the opportunities that affords. My children were grown; I could sustain myself financially for a time. I had done everything I wanted to do as a professor, and — in the absence of new opportunities — I couldn’t spare any more time for that way of life. Of course, that has come at a significant financial and personal cost.
CP: I started to think actively about retiring early in the pandemic. My university was reeling financially, and I wondered what cutbacks — including even my own job — might be necessary to save it. More important, I had a new book contract, a project I was really excited about, and I was doing a lot of writing for general-audience outlets.
But I, and my partner, also paid a high personal price for my career, something I had time to think about when life slowed down in 2020. I’ve commuted between cities for decades, which takes a real toll on intimate and family relationships. Going at 65 potentially gives me two decades to chart my creative and intellectual path, spend time with my spouse and family, and not be driven by other people’s priorities.
How much did the financial aspects of the retirement decision affect the timing of when you could retire? What sorts of money questions did you have to resolve?
WP: I tried to ignore those considerations. There was no severance package. It was a financial leap of faith, and I trusted that I would be able to find employment of some kind. It has been harder than I expected. I have regrets sometimes. But there’s no going back: Once you leave higher education, for some reason, the decision seems to be permanent. If I’m living on ramen, so be it. Retirement is not in my mind so much as the day-to-day of building a new life and career right now.
CP: Life in the United States is so poorly supported by the government that it’s always a leap of faith to abandon a regular paycheck, no matter how much you have saved or how old you are. But my partner and I figured it out. We have an affordable home and we live modestly. There’s Medicare, and at 67, a decent Social Security payout. I called the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (known now as TIAA, but formerly as TIAA-CREF), which gives free advice, and the representative was very helpful and encouraging. I make a little money writing, and if short-term work opportunities emerge that appeal to me, I’ll take them.
Was there much help on your campus with the retirement decision, either the professional or financial aspects?
WP: I assume help was there, but I did not seek it out. I was relatively young, so I wasn’t in the mind-set to ask for retirement support. Faculty members in their 50s considering early retirement are on the rise, but not really expected by institutions that are mostly concerned about getting tenured professors to leave at something close to the traditional retirement age.
CP: None — except for the nice people at TIAA, and the dean’s office, which managed the paperwork. There wasn’t anything on the HR webpage that gave direction to someone thinking about retirement. As I said to my dean: Maybe people don’t retire because they don’t know how?
While I appreciate the sensitivity of university leaders to age discrimination, taking retirement off the table as a stage of life that we talk about — to the same degree that we talk about tenure and promotion — is just dumb and costly. And too often, retirement is perceived as an exceptional decision, made under exceptional circumstances. In Year 1 of the pandemic, my university offered a buyout. It wasn’t a great deal, but they had a mathematical formula for eligibility: You had to have been there for X years, and your age plus time of service had to be Y. It was utterly random, and I didn’t qualify.
A year later, I was 64 and jonesing for Medicare. I asked for the buyout, and they said: That was a one-time deal, why didn’t you take it? And I said: Because I didn’t qualify. And because there is no retirement policy, I had to negotiate my own exit. I took a year at half-pay for half the work, which represents no institutional incentive at all. And no one from HR ever contacted me to help with the transition.
Did you feel a responsibility to retire, to open up tenure-track positions for younger scholars? Why or why not?
WP: I didn’t expect that my tenure line would continue, or at least not one that reflects my academic subfield. I am not expecting those recaptured resources to be directed to the humanities, but perhaps my retirement will liberate enough money to make a junior faculty hire or two somewhere in the institution. I never saw English as a department that had to survive if the market shifted elsewhere. Disciplines come and go, and there is increasing demand for administrators and support-staff employees, but not for most kinds of faculty members.
CP: Many of my younger colleagues seem to presume that tenure-track work exists in a mercantile economy, in which a finite number of jobs ought to be transferred from generation to generation. But that’s not so and never has been: Tenure lines aren’t a legacy that the people who occupy them control. Faculty members’ work is a subset of a capitalist economy that isn’t interested in what workers want.
When I first announced my intention to retire on social media, there were so many people — senior tenured folks, job seekers, and grad students — who responded with some version of: “I hope you got a commitment to be replaced by a tenure-track line as a condition of your retirement.”
On what planet is this a rational thought? Who has ever accomplished this?
The deadwood factor. What can departments, colleagues, and chairs do to spur a faculty member who is resistant to retirement but well past their peak?
WP: I did not regard my tenure as some kind of personal property. It’s entirely up to the institution how those resources will be used. I think the refusal to retire to protect a tenure line is mostly self-serving. When senior professors won’t retire voluntarily, it places pressure on the entire faculty who become potential targets for elimination. Deans are under pressure to remove their more expensive faculty members to balance the budgets, follow student demand, and maintain a reliable pool of low-paid adjuncts for work that can’t be automated or outsourced. As one senior administrator told me, “Why would I improve working conditions when I want more faculty to leave?”
CP: I think what many faculty members are most worried about — often more than money — is having friends and purpose. The vast majority of us have spent most of our lives invested in collegial relationships and living by the rhythm of an academic year. So while universities must pay attention to individual, practical retirement needs, there are also collective responses that would reassure people that they won’t be isolated in retirement: They could have campus space to work in, a faculty dining facility that they have access to, and small amounts of money to support research and travel to conferences.
Life after academe. What’s next for you? What are your plans, goals? What kind of relationship, if any, do you hope to have with your former institution?
WP: I am exploring a variety of career pathways, such as development, grant writing, and nonprofit administration. But more and more, I am considering entrepreneurial and gig economy options, which will help me to stay in touch with what younger people have been experiencing for decades. Tenure prevents a lot of Ph.D.s from being realistic about the relationship between education and employment. If I ever find my way back to higher education, I am in a far better position now, than I was as a professor, to advise students about what they are facing in the job market after earning their degrees.
Overall, I am grateful to have had an academic career. Most Ph.D.s in my generation never had that chance. And my former institution gave me that opportunity, and a lot of academic freedom that is rarer nowadays in higher education. I’ve moved away from that community — and professors tend to be forgotten soon after they leave — so my ongoing connections to friends, colleagues, and former students are all that remain. As Mad Men’s Don Draper said, “It will shock you how fast it never happened.”
CP: I am happy to stay connected to my university through the friendships I have there. I had 35 years of teaching wonderful students, some of whom are friends and colleagues today. But I just love writing, and university work doesn’t fully support that commitment. I have a book due in about a year, and in the last 15 years, I have shifted to general-audience writing. I’ve got my Substack, my podcast, and relationships with editors.
So I’ll be busy.
How do you feel about the emeritus title?
WP: I’m glad to have been awarded emeritus status since it’s like an honorable discharge from the military, and it comes with benefits, such as tuition discounts or waivers that my children may still want to use. Otherwise, it’s just an honorific, similar to the way a former attorney general is still called “General.” In the real world, almost no one knows what emeritus means. In academia, it just means “retired.”
But I also remain William Pannapacker, a longtime observer of higher education, a resident of Oak Park, Ill., and a presence on Twitter. I have at least another decade or two (or maybe three) to build on what I have already done and to explore entirely new directions. I am not going to disappear, but the nature of my third act is not yet clear.
CP: I love the idea of an honorable discharge. There’s also the university library system and Adobe Creative Cloud, which are both essential to my work.
And while I don’t love the idea of getting old, emeritus announces a time of life: I am aging, there is no way around that, and everyone — me, my friends, my former students — needs to accept that new reality. In my heart, I am still that 30-year-old, freshly minted VAP [visiting assistant professor], scanning the job ads in the American Historical Association Perspectives every month.
But on earth? I’m getting gray, paunchier than I would like, I wear hearing aids and have had two knee replacements. And all of that is cool. In other words, I am a person who has had more than their fair share, and emeritus says that very clearly.