My retirement at the age of 67 came earlier than expected. I had planned to continue for a few more years, but my endowed chair¡¯s guaranteed budget was cut and my university-wide interdisciplinary literary studies programme had to close. I could not continue. ?

But retirement was scarcely easier on the mind and psyche. Although I had planned financially, I did not have the opportunity to prepare intellectually or, especially, psychologically. Illness followed. I needed three years to redefine myself as an active public scholar in retirement ¨C including still both officially and unofficially advising students.

The transition has been more fulfilling than I ever anticipated, but I have not forgotten how painful it was. I also recognise that many more colleagues experience that pain.

Yes, some professors plan well for retirement intellectually and psychologically, as well as financially, with an advance timetable. Many do not, however. Those three dimensions interact differentially, but no one transitions overnight from a full-time academic career to a much more self-determined and lightly specified daily and weekly routine.

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Retirement is an often profoundly life-changing transformation for professors. Unlike most other professions, academia is experienced as a specialised, ¡°elevated¡± vocation, years in the making. There is little conception of either a clear beginning or, especially, a finite ending to that vocation.

We cannot dismiss financial concerns, but anxiety about loss of status and even identity is higher on the list of reasons that some faculty never retire, barely acknowledging 65th and 70th birthdays. Note, for example, the loud resistance to ongoing mandatory retirement at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in order to create positions for young scholars. This is one manifestation of a multi-level problem of the traditional professions¡¯ emphasis on individualism and individual responsibilities in the context of institutional control over their benefits and working patterns.

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This psychological identification with our jobs explains why most academics do so little to prepare or even discuss the end of full-time paid employment. This silence is untenable, however. I am far from alone in having my retirement encouraged or enforced with little or no warning or preparation time by budget cuts or detrimental changes to working conditions. The decline of tenure-track and tenured position changes only exacerbates varieties of vulnerabilities and heightens the risk of sudden, unwilling retirement.

While individuals must accept some blame for failures of retirement planning, universities and professional organisations must also accept theirs. Retirement guidance, workshops and advice are almost never offered. Skim the programmes of annual meetings of disciplinary and specialist associations, for instance: at most, there are only occasional sessions offering generic comments from retirement savings corporations ¨C amid confusing and often changing optional retirement savings and scheduling opportunities. There is nothing about the intellectual or psychological transition.

Also telling is the absence of the subject from the advice and guidance books offered by university presses such as Johns Hopkins, Princeton and West Virginia, among others. Do publishers and series editors think retirement planning is unimportant, or that such books will not sell? As a now-75-year-old who continues to see retiring colleagues grapple with the transition, I beg to differ.

Perhaps such books or conference sessions would not be necessary if the transition between working and retired status were not so sharp. But while some institutions permit academics to continue to research, publish, supervise students and teach beyond their official retirement, this is rare. Amazingly few universities, anywhere in the world, appear to have humane, phased paths that permit ¨C in fact, stimulate ¨C retirement planning for all parties, from individual professors to their doctoral advisees, their programmes and their colleges.

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From what colleagues there tell me, two US public Californian universities and their systems offer examples that may be adapted more widely. First is San Jose State University, part of the non-elite California State University system and a leader in collegiate labour organising and activism at all levels. There, the Faculty Early Retirement Program (FERP) allows academics to teach half their usual load but, in effect, to retain or even exceed their full salaries by topping up their reduced wages from teaching with income from their pensions. They can do this for up to five years; I am told that about three years is the average.

A second, very different scheme is offered by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). There, tenured faculty may participate in a three-year phrased process in which they teach fewer courses each year while helping their doctoral students to complete dissertations. This allows their programmes, departments and colleges to lobby to keep their faculty budget line for a tenure-track position to replace them in the most useful ways for continuity and planned changes.

By all accounts, both phased paths led to much greater, healthier and more fulfilling transitions for individuals, programmes and institutions. The continuing payment of salaries pays off well for everyone.

I urge a general discussion of the entire issue of retirement planning. The need is urgent and increasing given the political economy of universities around the world and the rising crises of the diminishing professoriate.

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Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history and inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies at Ohio State University. was published in 2024.