[Just a brief note to say that I have been missing in action for three weeks totally snowed under an avalanche of exercises and papers. I could have written once more about the pains of marking, but I find it gives me no relief from the frustration of realizing that the students who fail are the students who don’t follow instructions, that’s all I need to say.]
In Spain the official retirement age is now 65 but it will be 67 in 2027, gradually increasing year by year. Life expectancy for 2023 is 81.8 years for men and 87 for women, the second highest in the world after Japan (though we might beat them by 2040). For university teachers the official retirement age is the same, though we may retire at 70 (an age rumoured to be extended to 72 in 2027) and stay on for 2 years as an honorary professor or 4 as an emeritus if you have a sufficiently impressive CV (and your Department agrees). Allow me to clarify that an honorary teachers is paid nothing and an emeritus just a symbolic stipend. My good friend and colleague Felicity Hand hit 70 last February and will be officially retiring at the end of August. She will stay on for 2 more years as honorary professor. The diverse events around her retirement are giving me much to consider beyond her specific case, so this post today is partly an homage to her and a reflection on what retirement means for university teachers.
My Department is relatively young and not too big, so it has gone through a rather small number of retirements. As far as I recall 10 colleagues have retired in varied circumstances: one in her mid-fifties crippled by depression, one in her early sixties when numbers added up sufficiently for her pension, the others between 65 and 70, one of them staying on for 4 years as emeritus. Of the ones who retired at 65, one unfortunately passed away not too long after his retirement. We have lost two other colleagues, one to cancer near the age of retirement, the other to a stroke when she was only in her mid-40s, which was certainly an awful tragedy.
This brief summary shows that there is no specific lesson to learn from the experience of the colleagues who retire. A possible lesson is ‘retire as soon as you can for life is short’, whereas the other contradictory lesson is ‘retire as late as you can if you still enjoy what you’re doing’. I started thinking about retirement around the age of 55, not because I want to retire but because whether I retire at 67 (10 more years), 70 (13 more years) or 72 (15 more years), my career has now a limit, and that supposing everything goes well healthwise, knock on wood. I was indeed thinking of retiring at 67 but seeing how full of energy my friend Felicity looks these days (nothing to do with any of our other retirees!), I’m wondering whether I could wait a little bit more. What worries me is that whereas she has been a teacher for 35 years, I will have been a teacher for 42 years by the time I’m 67. Having been now a teacher for almost 32 I feel awfully tired, and I wonder what it will be like to carry on for longer than another decade. We’ll see.
The first homage Felicity received was on our annual Departament pedagogy workshop, TELLC (Teaching English Language, Literature and Culture) which I myself organized. I wanted TELLC to have a fixed section, consisting of an interview, whenever a colleague retired but to my surprise two of my colleagues rejected my invitation. The section has now started with Felicity Hand’s interview by our friend Esther Pujolràs, a teacher at the Universitat de Lleida and her main disciple. Esther started her interview by declaring that ‘Prof. Hand is not retiring, she’s being retired’, and this sentence has certainly stuck in my mind. Recently, our school, the Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, asked Felicity to choose an interviewer for a short commemorative piece. She did me the honour of choosing me (you can see the whole video here) and I made a point of asking Felicity whether she felt she was being retired. She replied very politely that one needs to know when to leave, as we need to make room for the younger generations. Still, this is the first time I have wondered whether mandatory retirement is totally fair. So far, I have seen colleagues eager to retire, or who should have retired long before, but this is the first time I believe we’re squandering energies that could be still employed.
Apart from the two interviews for TELLC and the Facultat’s YouTube channel, Felicity turned her final lecture into a public event and participated in the homage paid by the school to this year’s retirees, which was a very beautiful event. To my surprise, out of 8 retirees, 4 declined the honour of participating in this act; the Dean hinted that some were unhappy with how the school has treated them and I understood that one had retired in a huff, as if their area of expertise should retire with them. I should think that if you bear a grudge against the Facultat the retirement celebration is a good moment to vent it, but of course I might be totally wrong.
About Felicity’s public lecture, I must note for those of you who don’t know about it, that there is a tradition of opening up the last class to whoever wants to attend. There were not many of us (colleagues, students) in the classroom, but those who were not there missed what I can only describe as the perfect literature class. Felicity’s lesson (on Anglophone Indian crime fiction) was full of relevant information and insights, and she managed to have most of her fourth-year students present participate. I’ve never heard so many intelligent remarks in one class, believe me. Felicity had resisted the idea of making this final lecture public, but it was a moving, very beautiful last lecture. Since she is going to stay on for two more years, it might well be that was not her very last class, but I need to clarify that unlike emeritus teachers, honorary professors cannot teach regular subjects. She can be a guest in a colleague’s subject, and tutor dissertations (BA and MA, I think), or continue research, but not offer regular teaching.
There is, as you can see, a difference between the university teachers who think of retirement day as the end of the professional road and those who decide to stay on for a while to walk further down that road. The main motivation tends to be research rather than teaching, as, let’s be frank, teaching is not right now a source of professional satisfaction. Much less for Literature teachers. Another retiree, Prof. Rossend Arqués spoke on behalf of the 4 teachers receiving the Facultat’s homage and he devoted most of his speech to bemoaning that students don’t read. I know this opinion has been voiced since print exists but this is our reality, as I have been chronicling here since 2010. In fact, I have come across an interesting phenomenon. ChatGPT detector Zerogpt.com has been giving false positives highlighting just some sentences in a number of essays in my second-year class. I realized the essays corresponded to students who clearly had not read the novels they were writing about but pretended they had. Their shallow comments sounded indeed as if written by ChatGPT, hence the confusion. I found glaring errors about basic plots in other essays because, you see?, students don’t even read CliffNotes, GradeSaver or similar online student aids. Good time to retire.
Teachers stay on, I was saying, for research. I asked my university whether retired teachers have access to all our library resources and, oddly, they cannot use the digital resources from home. I was told this is expensive and, so, they need to travel to our campus to use those resources. I’m mystified. I would think that if a retired teacher goes on publishing research using our university affiliation, this benefits UAB. Research, particularly of the kind done in Literature, is cheap and does not impinge on younger researchers’ work (I have no idea what happens in the sciences, but I can imagine). I fail to understand then why any restrictions are applied at all. I have heard, in any case, of other universities depriving teachers of their library card and email addresses the day they retire. That is cruel.
I’ll finish the post with a comment on something else I have seen Felicity Hand do: dismantle her office library. Teachers who retire need to empty their offices, and this is never easy for literature teachers who, logically, accumulate many books. We have a small corner in the corridor for book-crossing and Felicity has been leaving there a few books every week. We’ve been commenting on the difficulties of dismantling a personal library. You cannot give away the books that are underlined or scruffy in any other way. Our library is not accepting donations because they have run out of room. I took some of her books to my class, but students tired of picking them up after three tries. Felicity has decided, in fact, to transform part of her collection (on Postcolonial Studies) into a small library housed in our Department, for our MA and PhD students, which seems to me a very good idea, provided we can get a succession of volunteer librarians among our post-grads.
This is not, then, a professional goodbye (friends remain friends after retirement!) but a ‘see you later’, for 2 more years. Actually, in the next 3 years we’ll have 3 more retirements, and, a little bit later, it’ll be the turn of the only two other colleagues who are older than me. Or in plain English, I’m sixth in line, a sobering thought. I’ll make certainly a good note about all these persons’ experiences. If anything bothers me, however, is not that so many of us are approaching the age of retirement but that so few young people are being hired. Felicity Hand’s tenured position will be soon replaced with a full-time, four-year contract position (a Lector or Ayudante Doctor) but the doctors now applying for that type of position are closer to 40 than to 30. That anyone could be hired at 25, as I was, or even earlier, seems incredible.
Happy retirement, Felicity!! See you around!