Greater work-life balance in academia will help reduce fear of retirement

Note to editors:

I’m not quite sure why you felt the need to publish the self-indulgent Teaching Is a Sacred Life by Joe P. Dunn (November 19, 2025).

It’s great that Joe is inspired and passionate about his teaching. Of course, most teachers who choose to teach are (or have been) inspired by this. So what are the advantages of this article? I guess Joe is still teaching at 80 years old.

Yes, some people see retirement as a goal because they don’t like their jobs. But many teachers see their profession as a vocation, so why do they want to retire? One reason is reduced efficiency. Rigid attitudes and cognitive decline are unfortunate but inevitable consequences of aging. People who experience these declines are often not very good at noticing them because they creep in so slowly that they are most obvious to outsiders or when making accurate comparisons to their selves long ago. (Galileo, who was in his seventies, was completing two new scienceshis seminal work on mechanics published in 1638, found it frustratingly difficult to follow his own notes and ideas from decades earlier. )

Another reason to retire is to give the next generation a chance. Joe talks about the numerous teaching jobs he had as a young man. There are many reasons why pensions are no longer adequate, but one of them is that there is no longer a mandatory retirement age. Mandatory retirement ages for tenured professors were not legal until 1993 (a blanket ban on mandatory retirement came later, in 1986, because legislators believed there were several valid arguments for a mandatory retirement age for tenured professors).

Many academics are so invested in their work that they do not develop a strong sense of identity outside of their work. They end up like Joe, unsure of what they will do in retirement. A wider push for better work-life balance in higher education could go a long way toward helping people develop their whole selves and reduce academics’ fears of retirement. Plus, there are always emeritus positions that allow you to remain involved in the intellectual world of higher education without continuing to collect a salary that you no longer need but someone else does.

When it comes to treating teaching as sacred, clergy are retiring. Heck, we even had a pope retire. The academy can figure it out too.