A Note to a Friend About Retirement

A Note to a Friend About Retirement

In about 2017, I wrote this letter to a friend who, at 70, was contemplating retiring from his academic position. My advice wandered.

Hi, friend.

I should apologize for burdening you with my moodiness. I think I mentioned it in an attempt to excuse my snippy comment about the Joubert quote. But moody I am these days. It has nothing to do with two cancers (prostate & lymphoma) or a heart attack (three stents and a pacemaker); stuff like that is a piece of cake. It’s about having retired too early. I probably had a couple more good years left in me.

Michael Crow took over ASU ten years ago. One of his first moves was to come over to the ed school and “dis-establish” us. He told all the faculty, “make an appointment with the Provost to discuss your place in the university.” Some of our top faculty did so, and left the college for other colleges on campus. Some left for other universities. The less mobile ones stayed put. I looked around for where I might fit and decided to investigate the public policy college. The first thing I saw was that Crow’s academic appointment was there. Not a week earlier I had published an op-ed labeling as “stupid” a proposal to substitute an exam for the last year of high school in Arizona. The proposal, it turned out, was the work of Crow’s wife. I was 70, I was commuting for August – October from Colorado to teach, and I decided, “screw it.” Went into the Provost and said, “I’m done.”

Several of my colleagues who stayed in the college – which survived Crow’s threats, incidentally – are still holding onto their lines. They are approaching their 80s; their best years are behind them; they occupy a line that should be filled by new young PhDs. My feelings about taking up space and sucking a large salary out of the institution also figured in my decision to hang it up when I did.

I did not, however, anticipate the feelings of worthlessness that come with stepping aside. It’s not as though I had not been warned. Lee Cronbach said, “we sink without a ripple.” Berliner told me that when he left Far West Lab decades ago – which he virtually built himself – a letter that was sent to him two months later at the lab was returned “Addressee Unknown.” David, who is as insecure as am I, fights off his feelings of worthlessness by filling his days with ever more professional activity – much of which involves traveling, which I abhor.

We should have seen this coming. We made our way in an institution that valued originality – the discovery of new knowledge. Individuals navigate the system by ignoring what came before and claiming originality. I often read articles and think, “Jeeez, Lee said all this 50 years ago,” or “Scriven said this, and he said it better.” I know this is how things work, and I accept it. But that does nothing to lessen the sense of superfluity.

I published a chapter in a book this year. It appeared almost to the day 57 years after my first academic paper. I had always wanted to make 60 years. I recall Julian Stanley’s – he was my major prof at Madison – amazement in 1964 when Cyril Burt published a paper 60 years after his first publication. Julian admired that. Somehow I internalized that as a personal marker of success. It probably won’t happen. (P.S. I didn’t admire Burt’s ethics, but I had some sympathy for Clarence Karier’s argument that Burt was not a scientist; he was a rhetorician, in the manner of Isocrates.)

I find that I am no longer drawn to the field. I guess I’m a modernist adrift in a post-modern world. Bob Stake once wrote that I serve the modernist’s appetite. He was right, as he often is. (I started working with Bob when I was 19 years old. We were both modernists then, but he grew.) I was raised, academically, in the age of promises. I was told in grad school that psychology and psychometrics had won the war (WW II). All we needed was some grant money and a couple years to build more valid and reliable tests and match them with the right interventions and we would have the cure for poverty and ignorance and illness. No one believes those promises any more, nor should they.

The whole business of public education has turned out to be political battles for control. Everything we thought was important has been trumped by Koch, or DeVoss, or Eli Broad. The charter school industry is raping the public schools. Re-segregation lies behind every new “reform.” Education doesn’t need more research, it needs more political enlightment. My mood has been tainted by how ugly national politics are at the moment.

I teach a small seminar in an EdD program at San Jose State in the summer. I’ve been splitting the course with David for the past 6 years. The conversation is basically about the politics of education. A younger faculty member could probably do a better job. I’m losing my motivation to update my notes.

I suspect that there is not really any warning for you here. I hung on long enough to sense my own obsolescence. My career spanned two radically different eras in the history of the academy. (Stanly Fish recently did a good job of explaining what has happened to the academy.) I suspect that your situation is different. I recall Julian’s glee at coming out of a faculty meeting where he and his like-minded colleagues had changed the PhD core to exempt us mathematicians from courses taught by Merle Borrowman and Don Arnstein. He thought he had done us a huge favor.

And so, I am retired. I spend my days working on my tennis game – nationally ranked players in their 70s play at my court every Monday; I seldom win. I help my granddaughter with her essays for English Comp. I visit on the phone with my daughter every weekday as she drives to work. I attempt to reach Genius on the New York Times anagram puzzle each morning; it’s called Spelling Bee, ironically a misnomer. I plant flowers, and empty the dishwasher. We own two very nice houses. By most standards, we are “well off,” though not so well off as Ernie House who spends three hours a day working on his investments and has done remarkably well. (He was diagnosed last year with Lewy Body Dementia; 5-year prognosis. We talk about it matter-of-factly. Update in 2025: he was misdiagnosed and is doing fine.) But in spite of our good fortune, financial anxiety is a regular part of retirement. A five-year recession would be tough. Eating one’s seed corn is a choice not faced by the still employed.

You, perhaps, honor the pedagogical function of the university more than some others. And you honor the history of your field and avoid the pretense of originality – unless I have fallen victim to some prejudice. That’s what the university should be more about. Most research is a waste of time, whether to do it or to read it – especially in the social sciences and minor disciplines. (If I had it to do over, I’d go into medicine.) At 70, you have several good years ahead of you, and your perspective on faculty politics is one that is badly needed.