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On retiring

Brian Leiter

An apt comment, from the earlier thread, from philosopher Paul Guyer (recently emeritus at Brown University) that deserves special notice:

We have it good in philosophy and other humanities fields: retiring does not necessitate the end of research and writing, as it might for natural scientists dependent on maintaining a lab, including continuing to get grants. On the contrary, it can mean more time for one's own work, if one wants to continue doing that. And since philosophers often think about what we owe to future generations in the abstract, it is good to think about it in the concrete. In a non-expansionary period for philosophy and other disciplines such as we find ourselves in, at some point, which can no doubt not be determined mechanically, one should think about making room for younger people — if indeed retiring will facilitate that, which is not always the case. This was hardly my only reason for retiring, but I did think that after fifty years of enjoying the benefits of good positions and perks in leading universities, it was time for me to let someone else have a crack at a job and a career (which did indeed happen at my well-off university). Otherwise, what have we been training new PhDs for?

This point seems to me well-taken; does anyone disagree with it?  If so, why?  Note that it is premised on the thought that one's position will be filled by someone else, which is not always the case obviously.

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17 responses to “On retiring”

  1. Daniel Kaufman

    Guyer is spot on here. Glad he said it out loud.

    Reply
  2. V. Alan White

    Yes I totally agree, having just published my first co-edited book last year after teaching a 4/4 for 37 years and publishing only articles here and there. My only regret is that I'd hoped to have opened up a position for someone else by retiring 6 years ago, but instead my department was closed and now no philosophy is taught in-person on my old campus. Because of the absorption of my campus by UW–Green Bay the additional oddity is that I am now emeritus of a campus I never taught for!

    Reply
  3. going nowhere soon

    First, congratulations to Guyer, for making it to retirement.
    But, not all of us are in a position to retire. I was one of those who took 5 years to get a TT job, and I had to make some big moves along the way (which are costly, even with very little furniture). Further, for the past decade I have been partially supporting an aging parent (who has since died). All of this means that I do not have savings that would carry me very far into the future … so I will continue to work. I think there are more of my type out there than one would like to think … and there will be even more us in the future.

    Reply
  4. More grist for the mill

    There's some relevant discussion of this issue in Brian Rosenberg's book "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education" (Chapter 6, on tenure). Some of the data he cites suggest that colleges and universities have had to spend more on faculty salaries in recent decades precisely because a significant number of faculty have been retiring later. The key fact is that late-career faculty are typically paid significantly more than new junior faculty would be paid, so that for each year someone over the "expected" retirement age puts off retirement, they effectively tie up the salary of *more* than one potential new hire. Rosenberg claims, in fact, that, when mandatory retirement ages were abandoned, no one expected it to make much difference; but it in fact made a significant difference. My hypothesis, then, is that colleges and universities simply didn't budget for these later retirements, and have consequently been forced to reduce hiring in order to keep total spending on faculty salary within (or not too far above) their targets.

    I say "hypothesis," though, because I really know very little about the details of college and university budgets. But Rosenberg knows quite a bit, and seems to think that later retirement is a strain on budgets, so it's hard for me not to think that there's something here.

    To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that there aren't also other things going on here (e.g., Baumol's cost disease). But I do think there's good reason to suspect that faculty who don't retire by age 67 or so are in effect hoarding resources that would otherwise support new hiring at *greater* than a 1:1 ratio of new hires to retirements. (Of course, resources are constantly being shifted between units, so it's always possible that a retiring member of the faculty will be replaced by a new hire in another unit, or an administrator, etc. If you *know* that that's what would happen, I suppose you could argue that, even if you still count as hoarding resources, you're doing so in order to prolong the life of your own department. But it's also possible that focus on that sort of possibility just serves to provide an excuse for faculty who would otherwise retire to keep collecting their salaries.)

    Reply
  5. More grist for the mill

    going nowhere soon makes a good point: We're now in the middle of a vicious cycle. It was begun decades ago, and it's not entirely clear now how we can get out of it.

    Reply
  6. Steven Hales

    I haven't read Rosenberg's book, but I've been in this business a long time. There is an increasing gulf between the wealthy schools (like Brown, which could afford to keep Guyer on until the end of time) and poor schools like mine, which are jettisoning philosophy and not known for lavish salaries even for senior faculty. When I retire I won't be making way for some up-and-coming junior person. I'll be turning off the lights on philosophy on my way out the door.

    Reply
  7. Joshua Mozersky

    I think it is not quite right that the retirement of a senior professor financially justifies the hiring of more than one junior professor. The reason is that the latter is paid less now but not in 20-30 years when they have achieved similar seniority. Hence, if one hires, say, 1.5 juniors for each retiree, then one will be in serious financial difficulty soon enough, unless one has accelerating sources of income. As we know, the opposite is usually the case: less and less money, at least for the humanities. So, in addition to personal circumstance, senior professors need to work through opposing considerations: will their retirement lead to increased opportunities or become an excuse to downsize or eliminate programs? Alan White’s experience may become typical.

    Reply
  8. Eddy Nahmias

    Has anyone had success relling admin that they would retire iff their university committed to dean and Chair to replace the position with TT hire? If we could do that, the argument to retire for future generations would be much stronger.

    Reply
  9. More grist for the mill

    To clarify: I'm assuming that the Budget Planners are accounting for the increased cost of junior faculty over time. What Rosenberg's data suggest is only that they might reasonably have been (and perhaps continue to be) accounting for it only up to a certain point, e.g., age 67. So my hypothesis is that they will have under-budgeted for faculty salaries by the difference between salary of the full Professor working beyond retirement and the salary of the Assistant Professor who might have replaced them, for each additional year in which the full Professor keeps collecting their salary. My own toy calculations suggest that, while the numbers here won't be enormous, they'll still be significant. (If my math is wrong, I hope someone will make that clear.)

    From what I know about general accounting practices (not much, but not nothing), the above assumption continues to strike me as eminently plausible. Certainly, if I were the Budget Planner, I'd take pains to work out how much money I'd need to have on hand in order to maintain a given number of faculty indefinitely, and taking into account a "standard" package of raises across a "standard" career (say, from 30 to 67) would be the first step I'd take. That would allow me to calculate how much I would end up paying a "standard" member of the faculty (in a given department, etc.) over the whole of a "standard" career. Of course, I wouldn't necessarily be paying out exactly that sum every year, so I might need to have more money on hand in some years than in others (though perhaps I could "borrow" it from other units — so long as everything averages out across the whole collection of units I'm budgeting for, I'll be okay).

    Given the resulting complications, I'm not sure I'd blame the Budget Planners if, now in 2024, they still hadn't updated their retirement-age projections — or even noticed that those projections are potentially relevant to a general increase in mean (or even median!) faculty salaries. There's a lot to take into account, much of which no one fully understands, so it doesn't seem like it'd be all that hard to overlook this one little assumption.

    But to be clear: none of this is meant to suggest that there isn't in fact less and less money for the humanities (or for philosophy in general), or (to Steven Hales' comment) that later-than-expected retirement is having the same effect at every institution (indeed, it's at least theoretical possible that, at some institutions, it's had no effect at all). Nor do I mean to suggest that later-than-expected retirement has had a larger effect than anything else. I have literally no idea how it compares, not even at any one single institution. All I meant to suggest is that there are plausible mechanisms by which later-than-expected retirement might have led, in recent years — and might continue to lead — to unexpectedly high average faculty salaries, and therefore pressure to cut back on hiring.

    I should also say that, even if what I've said is correct, and even if the resulting pressures are significant, I don't think anything immediately follows about what any individual should do. For all I mean to be saying, it could turn out that every single individual academic who works past the "normal" retirement age (by which I really mean: whatever "average age of retirement" is being used in the budget-planning process — again, I assume there is one, even if it's only implicit) has impeccable reasons for continuing to work, among which I personally am inclined to include those given above by going nowhere soon. But, by the same token, there could easily be people working past the "normal" retirement age who *don't* have sufficiently good reason to keep working — and, in some cases (I don't know how many), the mechanisms I've tried to describe above would seem to raise the bar (I don't know how much) for what a sufficiently good reason is.

    Reply
  10. Tom Hurka

    My understanding of the system at my previous university, in the days of mandatory retirement, was that the savings from replacing retiring senior professors with lower-earning junior professors paid for the merit raises for all the other professors in between. Remember that, given merit raises, the pay of all professors other than those retiring goes up a certain amount each year and funds for that have to be found.

    I didn't retire until 71 — isn't Guyer even older? — so perhaps I shouldn't say this, but mandatory retirement had many merits, not least that of keeping a lid on total university salaries. And the "ageism" it supposedly involved is nothing like as objectionable as other forms of discrimination, e.g. by race, gender, or religion, because it doesn't treat people differently in their lives as a whole, as those other forms do. Mandatory retirement gives everyone a somewhat better chance of an academic career when they're young, since if careers are shorter there will be more people who have one. And it requires everyone who has such a career to retire at the same time when they're older, i.e. it again treats everyone the same. The costs of ending mandatory retirement, when it happened, fell entirely on those younger scholars who would have had an academic career if it hadn't been ended but didn't have one when it was. And the benefits went entirely to fortunate people like me who had a career and could continue in it longer than we otherwise would have. Not an obviously just transfer.

    Reply
  11. James C. Klagge

    Guyer's considerations are important, but it is noteworthy that he only considered them after a 50-year career. To whom is he speaking? To those with longer careers? The considerations are much harder to weigh for those who have been teaching for 35-40 years. Why didn't he consider retiring back then?

    Reply
  12. Daniel Kaufman

    Steven this is a very fair point. It looks as if my department is not going to replace me, and right after I retired, they merged philosophy with political science.

    That said, as a general matter, I still think it best to retire when one can (no one is suggesting a person retire themselves into poverty), especially given the wretched job market in philosophy. Even if at my school or yours it doesn't help newly minted PhDs get jobs, it will elsewhere.

    Of course, there is the further scandal of the overproduction of PhDs, which has been well-rehearsed but which, alas, doesn't seem likely to change.

    Reply
  13. Tim Maudlin

    I have seen several different graphs showing allocation of resources at universities over time, all of which show that the ratio of administrative spending to spending on faculty has dramatically shifted in favor of administration. Indeed, in some cases spending on administration has grown considerably while spending on faculty is static or shrinking. it seems to me that the focus should be on that dynamic rather than pitting older versus younger faculty. And even more so in philosophy which is—as most humanities—a much less expensive endeavor to support compared to many sciences. I would refrain from actions that undermine solidarity within the philosophical community while there are much, much more salient causes for the shrinking of resources than this one.

    Reply
  14. David Wallace

    I think this is complicated by tenure.

    If I'm highly research active, writing influential work, my teaching is well received, students want to work with me, I pull my weight in service tasks, and my department and university value my contribution, I don't see why it matters if I'm 47, 67, or 87. I'm not employed as a favor to me: I'm employed because there is a job that needs doing and I'm doing it well.

    However, given the strong job protections that tenured academics have, it's possible to become increasingly ineffective at your job (perhaps, though not only, due to age) and yet keep doing it because there's no mechanism other than retirement to compel it. That's a genuine problem.

    I would be entirely content, when and if I get to retirement age, to swap tenure for some kind of rolling performance review framework (every 3 years, maybe?) But I don't feel any moral urge to retire just because of my age, if I'm still doing my job excellently and my colleagues agree.

    Reply
  15. Dean C. Rowan

    I disagree. Retirement is a function of an agreement, an understanding that one will receive this compensation and these benefits for performing certain tasks. Absent a mandatory retirement age, the agreement allows the bound employees to choose when they will retire. Absent an agreement to "make room for younger people," any decision to do so will promote exploitation. Younger people are cheaper, more vulnerable, and less capable of navigating the system. Even if "retiring does not necessitate the end of research and writing," it surely must necessitate the end of something: job security, access to resources, membership in a community of engaged scholars, mentorship…

    It is not the job of the scholar to remedy institutional dysfunction. It's fine to think that one's retirement gives somebody else "a crack" at a comparably cushy job, but if I were the retiree, I would not assume that my decision had in fact done so.

    Reply
  16. Charles Pigden

    While I am in broad agreement with Tim Maudllin, it is still worth pointing out that retiring or semi-retiring can sometimes help especially in a crisis situation I'm 67, and later this year I will be dropping down to 0.5 FTE, planning to fully retire at the end 2028 after forty-years' service. This has meant that a somewhat junior colleague – only 'somewhat' as she is about fifty with a big academic reputation – could go up from 0.5 FTE to 1.0. This rights a wrong as for a complex of reasons I think her 0.5 FTE appointment represented an HR injustice. However (important context) the squeeze is definitely on at my university, though not specifically with respect to philosophy. One reason that Philosophy unlike some programmes has not had to face forced redundancies and that my going down to 0.5 means that say colleague can go up to 1.0 is that *another* colleague has just retired (not to be replaced) at sixty.

    Why am I not fully retiring right now? Well in my case that *would* mean retiring into relative poverty, specifically selling my house (which currently accommodates my daughter, a struggling young academic, plus her husband and young children) and drastically downsizing. It would certainly impede my ability to buy books which I really need given that I do not intend to 'retire' from writing and thinking about philosophy until I am no longer capable of doing so. .

    Ascending from the personal, I think it would a be good idea if universities made it easy (as some them do) for senior professors to remain part of the community whilst working on a part-time basis. If they have paid off their mortgages and have saved for a reasonably comfortable retirement I suspect the many of them would be happy to work as researchers and maybe even teachers on a part-time basis for a relatively modest reward. A case in point is my late colleague Jim Flynn (the discoverer of the Flynn effect), who was active as a researcher to within six months of his death at age 86. During the last 24 years of his career he was nominally retired, teaching a sequence of undergraduate courses as an hoc lecturer, and for much of the time working out of an office that his friends used to describe, with only a little comic exaggeration, as a broom cupboard under the stairs. Yet during this period he published a sequence of books and articles many of them in top academic presses and with top academic journals (specifically in psychology). Jim’s formal retirement in the 1990s was (if I rightly recall) partly motivated by a desire to reduce the financial pressure on the Department of Politics ,of which he was the chief.

    And of course there are some who are keen to keep up the research for no reward whatsoever (except perhaps royalties). About half Annette Baier’s books were written after she had retired from Pittsburgh and returned to her native New Zealand.

    Now Jim and Annette were basically doing their research for free (and in Jim’s case his teaching for not very much) . But there are probably quite a lot of slightly less unworldly souls who could be persuaded to keep going on a part-time basis for very modest amounts of compensation plus a little prestige. whilst forfeiting the massive professorial salaries that they would otherwise receive and freeing up resources for the younger generation. But if universities want this to happen they have to plan for it, for instance by funding part-time senior research fellowships available to emeritus staff. .

    Of course what I am assuming is that the background situation is at least a little better than that bemoaned by Steven Hales and Daniel Kaufmann.

    Reply
  17. Dan Dennis

    Here are some relevant papers:
    Gerald Lang (2014) ‘Jobs, institutions and beneficial retirement,’ Ratio
    Saul Smilansky, (2005) ‘The paradox of beneficial retirement’ Ratio.
    James Lenman (2007) ‘Why I have no plans to retire: In defence of moderate professional complacency’ Ratio.

    A recent paper addressing the main arguments concerning mandatory retirement and adding a couple of new ones is:
    Nancy S. Jecker (2022) ‘The dignity of work: An ethical argument against mandatory retirement’ Journal of Social Philosophy.

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