Content area
Full Text
This empirical study employed the inductive qualitative research method with four faculty who retired from a private, religiously-affiliated, Midwestern university. Participants possessed diverging experiences and representative prototypes. The literature suggests that higher education likely will experience significant numbers of retired faculty within the next decade. However, relatively little has been reported about this population, motivating us to utilize qualitative methodology. Analysis of transcribed interviews showed four different portraits emerging. In "A Life of Service, the woman represents faculty who continue professional activities after formal retirement. "Vaguely Dissatisfied," typifies faculty who felt squeezed into retirement and are not generally happy in this life phase. The third we labeled, "Renaissance Man." He has used retirement as a time to peruse new intellectual pursuits and find personal fulfillment. We called our final account, "Family Affair." This person belongs to a generation of women for whom family is particularly meaningful. For her, retirement has centered around connections with children and grandchildren, with professional interests from retirement day.
Published research literature regarding faculty retirement generally falls within three domains. The first, and most prominent, relates to motivators for retirement from academic life. The second addresses the responses of faculty members to retirement, and the third relates to future problems and needs of academic faculty emeriti. Most research relating to retired faculty focuses primarily on the decision of faculty to retire early when offered incentives. Durbin, Gross, and Borgatta (1984) found that demographic characteristics, health, and scholarly productivity had little impact on many faculty members' decision to take the option of leaving academe early. The present study focused on the decision-making process and factors navigating faculty members who were otherwise satisfied with their academic positions. Kim (2003) surveyed several hundred faculty at the University of California, finding that many who accepted early retirement showed a decline in research productivity. However, Kim also found that professors' overall research productivity had no effect on decisions to retire early.
Bradley and Shenk (2003) report that faculty members' decisions to retire from the academic life is based partly on what they term "push-pull interactions" occurring in the retirees' professional and private lives. The "push" factors are aspects in the retirees' professional or personal lives that may influence them to stay employed, such as...