Like many colleges and universities across the country, my institution recently launched a retirement-incentive program for our faculty members. We didn’t call it a “retirement incentive program” because no one liked the sound of “UA RIP,” and only in higher education would a program limited to people 65 and older be referred to as an “early” retirement plan. A respectable 22 percent of those eligible applied for the package, but a great many more wanted to take the deal, but couldn’t get their head around the idea of saying goodbye to the life they had known for so long. One still highly productive faculty member well north of 70 summed up the struggle well when he said, “It’s not about the money. I just don’t know what I’d do in the morning. I don’t have any hobbies and I don’t have any friends who aren’t here. This is really all I have. Does that make me pitiful?”
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