Deciding to Retire: ‘I Wanted to Get Out While I Was on Top’
When James B. Maas arrived at Cornell University as a graduate student in 1964, little did he know that he would be at the institution for nearly half a century.
When he retired on the last day of December 2011, Mr. Maas had taught Psychology 1101: Introduction to Psychology to more than 65,000 students. It took Mr. Maas almost a decade to decide to leave. Until the end, he kept honing his lectures and sought to embrace new technology to better convey concepts to his students.
“I have had so many students tell me that my course changed their life,” says Mr. Maas, 73, a professor of psychology who is known as a pioneer in sleep research.
Mr. Maas’s first exposure to what would become his most popular course was as a teaching assistant filling in for a professor who left abruptly to take another academic job. The psychology department at Cornell asked him to teach the class for a year while he finished his Ph.D.
At age 65, Mr. Maas says, he began thinking about when he should retire. But then he learned that Cornell was going to renovate the concert hall in which he taught and he couldn’t bear to leave without having the chance to to work in the new facility. When the hall was complete, Mr. Maas was 68. “I had to try it for a year,” he says, “and then, before I knew it, I was 73.”
His course, which started out with about 400 students, quickly grew to about 1,500 as students learned of Mr. Maas’s penchant for using audiovisual material to bring his lessons to life. Even with the help of 35 teaching assistants and tutors, it was a labor-intensive course. Mr. Maas answered nearly 100 e-mails a day from students and would often write as many as 200 letters of recommendations for students each year. Despite having taught the course for decades, Mr. Maas also prepared or revised his lectures every night.
“Even though a lot of basic psychology doesn’t change that much, for me to be excited about the material and teach it well, I had to do that,” he said. Mr. Maas says he missed just one class in 48 years, due to a bout of laryngitis.
In the years leading up to his retirement, it became harder for Mr. Maas not to crumble under his workload. He was scheduled to take a sabbatical in the spring of 2012, but that would have obligated him to teach another academic year. “I wanted to get out while I was on top,” he says.
In the end, the key driver in his decision to retire was his wife, Nancy, a professional artist with a doctoral degree in art history. She wanted to put Ithaca’s harsh winters behind her and pursue work in a larger city with a flourishing art community. The couple have traveled to Arizona and Florida in an attempt to find the right locale for their new home. After 32 years of marriage, Mr. Maas says, it was time for him to make his wife’s career a priority.
“She sacrificed her career so that I could spend that kind of time on mine,” says Mr. Maas.
In the fall, Psychology 1101: Introduction to Psychology will be held again, with a new professor at the helm for the first time in nearly 50 years.
Michael Okoniewski for The Chronicle
Joe Regenstein, a food scientist at Cornell (shown here in a campus kitchen), travels around the world sharing his expertise in kosher and halal regulations.
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Staying On: ‘Why Quit Now?’
At a time when some of Joe M. Regenstein’s peers are thinking about retiring, the professor of food science at Cornell University is adjusting to life in the spotlight.
His expertise in kosher and halal food regulations continues to draw global interest. In February he was invited to speak in Saudi Arabia at the first international conference on halal food control. He’s the co-editor of the first English-language, peer-reviewed food-science journal to originate in China. And, back in Ithaca, his “Kosher and Halal Food Regulations” course has become so popular that enrollment is now capped at 200.
“My career is moving along, and it’s more and more exciting,” says Mr. Regenstein, 68. “Why quit now?”
Mr. Regenstein came to Cornell in 1974, straight out of graduate school at Brandeis University. He’s noticed how gray the faculty is in his department, but he and his colleagues don’t talk specifics about their retirement plans. One professor has made it clear he “plans to go out on a gurney,” Mr. Regenstein says. For him, a more appealing option would be phased retirement. Cornell allows professors to work half time, for half the pay, for up to five years before they have to officially end their careers at the institution.
“At some point I would look at that,” says Mr. Regenstein, who would like to continue teaching his kosher-and-halal course even in retirement. His wife has already retired as the associate vice provost for computer services at Carnegie Mellon University, but Mr. Regenstein says she “recognizes that I’m not going to.”
Although Mr. Regenstein hasn’t reconciled how he’ll end his career at Cornell, he’s certain that his exit will mark the end of an era in the university’s commitment to meat science, and that makes it harder to leave.
“At one point you had four people working in this arena; now I’m the last man standing,” says Mr. Regenstein, who heads the Cornell Kosher Food Initiative. “It’s pretty clear that I won’t be replaced.”
Besides his kosher-and-halal course, Mr. Regenstein also teaches other courses, among them: “Introduction to Animal Welfare,” “Chef’s Chemistry,” “Environmental Stewardship in the Cornell Community,” and “Food Law,” an independent-study course. And he’s an adjunct professor at Kansas State University, where his kosher-and-halal course is available online.
Next fall he plans to teach a new course, “A Good Meal: A Window Into Diversity,” that he developed. It’s slated to be held in a community center near the university’s freshman residence halls and will feature lectures on food and culture. The dining hall will serve food related to the topic, and students in the class will eat as a group.
“That’s why it’s hard to think about retiring,” Mr. Regenstein says. “I just keep thinking of things I want to do.”
