This extended working paper reports on an investigation into how the career endings of UK academics and their transition to retirement are managed by the individuals concerned and their employing institutions. The project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It was conducted over 18 months from October 2019, the majority of which time coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated revision of the original research design.

The principal data were collected through virtual interviews and two surveys, one of academics further on in their careers but still working (defined as receiving at least the majority of their income from paid work) and another of retired academics (defined as receiving the majority of their income from pensions). 81 survey participants were still working and 161 were retired. 54 interviews were conducted, 20 with participants who were still working and 34 retired. Overall the participants split into two halves, those under 70 and those aged 70 or over. Although the retired participants inevitably were concentrated in the older age groups, there was considerable variation in actual or planned age of retirement. Men made up between 55% and 69% of the different groups of participants, and there were further biases towards participants being white and working for (or having worked for) pre-1992 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Survey participants had better representation from STEM subjects, while the interviews had better representation from humanities and social sciences. Over 80% of survey participants lived in households with a partner (a minority of these with other family members as well). Interviewees included good representation from Scotland as well as England. Further data were collected relating to HEI policies on later careers and retirement, and relating to academic obituaries.

The survey data were collected between May and September 2020 and the interview data between May and October 2020. While the surveys and interviews were being set up, analysis of obituaries featuring in The Times Higher over the 5 years to December 2019 was conducted. The HEI policy documents were collected in January 2021.

The analysis of the data was framed around answering four questions:

• What does ‘retirement’ mean, and what does it look like?
• Is there a right time to retire?
• How do academic identities evolve? and,
• What support do universities provide?

The discussion of the data in relation to these questions in section 3 makes up the bulk of this extended working paper, where the challenges of defining ‘retirement’ and ‘careers’ for academics are discussed. Four main themes emerged from the analysis, relating to the uncertainties surrounding later academic careers and retirement, the strong sense of academic work as a vocation, the complex nature of turning points and trajectories, and the importance of paying attention to contextual influences. The analysis of policy documents revealed wide variation in what is available by way of university support and also in its tone, and some indication of what might be considered good practice is given. Other material available to later career academics is also discussed, including consideration of the idea of ‘role models’. It is concluded that although opportunities do exist for people to shape their path to academic retirement so that it fits their circumstances and preferences, nevertheless difficulties remain. Participation in three ongoing conversations is recommended.

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As a researcher needing to press ahead with collecting data, I found unalloyed positivity in my project funders’ rapid approval of the request to switch to online interviewing. Not only was there relief that the project could continue, there was also pleasure at the thought of being freed from travel and all the frustrations that come with it.

Suddenly, research did not have to be done at the expense of home comforts, and the need to kill time when arriving early for an appointment became a thing of the past. Indeed, liberated from the so-called tyranny of distance, I could interview more people in a given time, not only because interviews could be scheduled closer together but also because the working day could be extended to fit participants’ availability and preferences.

This euphoria did not survive first contact with the realities of online interviewing. Although initially spared the technical challenges of poor-quality and lost connections (which became all too familiar as time went on), I immediately discovered that a lot of contextual information about interviewees is lost when people are not interviewed face to face in their homes or offices.

For a start, obviously, a Zoom or Skype call screens out all the things beyond the immediate frame. I was interviewing academics and retired academics, who were most often positioned against a backdrop of bookshelves (as indeed was I). However, I’m used to interviewees in their homes apologising for the mess (quite often only in their imagination), engaging in casual conversation about photographs of family members on a mantelpiece or offering to show me their garden when I mention a particular plant.

Other rituals of the face-to-face interview that do not figure in the virtual encounter are offers of refreshments and enquiries about the journey. The “feel” for a person simply has less depth to it when the encounter is conducted online than when you meet them in their home setting. This relative shallowness works both ways, of course. The interviewer’s presentation of self is also more superficial when all that is seen by the interviewee is an image on a screen, and opportunities to convey things about oneself are more limited. The scope to employ body language is reduced when only head and shoulders are on view, and the props that reinforce the researcher’s identity, such as the recording device and notebook, are less obtrusive.

Although I was aware of these variations between modes of interviewing as my data collection progressed, my consciousness of them has been heightened now that the phase of data analysis has arrived. Immersion in the data always brings with it the thought that elements of interview conversations could have been pursued further or taken in other directions, but the medium of the virtual interview does seem to have left me with an intensified sense of these paths not taken.

Might it have been possible to elicit fuller accounts of interviewees’ perceptions had the photographs of representations of retirement (my research topic) been handed to them as laminated objects rather than presented as images on a screen? Might memories of a career have been conveyed more fully if I had been able to hold and read the inscription on the celebratory tankard awarded for four decades of loyal service by appreciative colleagues?

If there is a balance sheet to be drawn up of the pros and cons of virtual interviewing, the loss of the immediacy of face-to-face interviews will inevitably feature in that assessment, but not everything will be placed on the debit side.

As already noted, it does allow more people to be interviewed for a project than is possible if travel has to be factored in, with savings of money as well as time. It may also be the case that research participants prefer the greater control over the extent of intrusion into their lives that virtual interviewing affords. Once telephone and email interviewing are added into the mix, it may well be that Skype and Zoom emerge as a new happy medium that endures long after the pandemic has eased.

Graham Crow is professor of sociology and methodology at the University of Edinburgh.

This research note appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement on 5 February 2021.

This idea has been advanced through the sociological writings of Erving Goffman (who himself spent time working as a card dealer in Las Vegas, where he had the message reinforced that play is a serious business) and Pierre Bourdieu (who drew attention to people’s “feel for the game”). Game theorists’ models of successful strategising offer another source of such thinking with a longer pedigree.

The game analogy also helps in understanding what happens after careers are formally over. In a survey of recently retired academics conducted two decades ago, more than one in eight participants agreed that they felt “out of the game, no longer of consequence”. The study’s authors, Barbara Tizard and Charlie Owen, rightly saw such end-of-career marginalisation as undesirable for those individuals who wished to maintain links with academic teams of which they had been a part, and for institutions that were missing opportunities to benefit from post-retirement contributions.

This might be expected to have changed in the interim because fixed retirement ages have been replaced by more flexible arrangements in most UK universities. As a result, those who wish to “stay in the game” as paid staff may do so. Higher Education Statistics Agency data show numbers of academic staff aged 66 and over increasing by almost 30 per cent in the four-year period to 2018-19. By contrast, overall numbers for all age groups increased by less than 10 per cent, and numbers of those aged 35 and under increased fractionally less than that average.

While absolute numbers of older scholars staying in post may be relatively small, the perception of early career scholars being kept waiting for their chance to “get on to the field” is real. One of the retired participants in my current study of later academic careers and retirement put it thus: “Being out of the game is a necessary stage to allow others into it.” Nearly a quarter of retired academics in my survey identified “wanting to ‘make way’ for the next generation of academics” as one of their motivations for retiring.

Of course, retirement is not solely an individual decision. Almost a fifth of Tizard and Owen’s participants identified pressure from their institutions to retire as part of their considerations, and things do not appear to be so very different now. The language of being “forced out”, “kicked out” or “got rid of” features in several people’s accounts of “hanging up their boots”.

In many cases, this relates to changes being made to the “rules of the game”, with much criticism levelled at the perceived proliferation of irksome rules and regulation. This is not unique to the current generation of retirees, as bureaucratisation and the extension of audit culture figured in the “dissatisfaction with the work situation” that was the most prominent reason given for early retirement by Tizard and Owen’s participants. Further back still, in 1992, the erosion of academic autonomy was part of A. H. Halsey’s narrative concerning the Decline of Donnish Dominion.

Just as in sport, academics who do not feel ready to retire when their contracts come to an end may seek new teams to join − and in the process challenging ageist assumptions about declining productivity. Just as a footballer is thought to hit their peak at about 27 or 28 years of age, certain academic disciplines are known for judging people’s best work to occur early in their careers, though these are contested notions and some individuals strive to prove the value of experience over youth.

However, at all career stages, there are numerous ways in which the “playing fields” are not “level”, and for those who wish to continue playing it takes determination, stamina and strategy when the odds are stacked against you. Many such veterans’ accounts of staying in the game also mention that most unpredictable element of games: the luck of the draw.

Academics for whom retirement may be on the horizon and who regard the prospect with anxiety should take comfort from the finding that many of their predecessors have made the transition to life beyond work and found it much fuller and more rewarding than feared.

Plenty of participants in my study present narratives in which they look back and wish they had taken the plunge sooner. Counterbalancing this are the accounts of those numerous academics who are working well beyond state retirement age and who do not feel ready to retire. They have found ways not only to stay “in the game” but to stay “on top of their game” − and remaining well integrated with other team members appears key to that.

Graham Crow is professor of sociology and methodology at the University of Edinburgh.

This research note appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement 29 January 2021.

The American sociologist Arlie Hochschild has noted the benefits to females starting out on academic careers of having female role models who have been successful in the male-dominated academy, but she also recalls as a teenager rejecting the role models her mother encouraged her to emulate.

The self-help literature that advises on managing an academic career is likewise ambiguous on role models. A good role model can supply confidence and reassurance about the desirability, and indeed the possibility, of building a career in contemporary universities, particularly to people vulnerable to “imposter syndrome”. But one person’s successful trajectory cannot be replicated by someone who comes later; contexts change, and serendipitous connections make every career to some extent unique.

This ambiguity helps to explain why interviewees in a project I am conducting on later academic careers and retirement have responded as they did when I asked them about role models. I had (naively, it transpires) expected the question to elicit numerous names of forerunners and peers who were judged to have navigated their later careers in ways that brought an identifiable sense of achievement and fulfilment, but surprisingly few candidates have emerged.

In addition, a proportion of those who have been identified have had their case for consideration as a role model qualified by caveats: their achievements would be harder to match in today’s faster-paced and more demanding environment and, anyway, the things that bring satisfaction to one individual may be disappointing to another.

Furthermore, the very idea of a role model may be objected to on principle because of the way it lionises the individuals who are identified as role models. There is something disagreeable when a person is turned into a heroic figure against whom the majority of people are made to look mediocre in comparison.

A related complaint is that attributing success to an individual risks overlooking the part played by that individual’s colleagues and subordinates, along the lines of Bertolt Brecht’s Questions from a Worker Who Reads. There are echoes here of the way in which obituaries are found to be one-sided, presenting rather selective accounts of their subjects’ lives that focus on the more favourable aspects (however understandable it may be to do so at the time of someone’s death).

People held up as role models may, on closer inspection, turn out to have feet of clay, or at least to have been less consistently saintly than their admirers have portrayed them. We should rightly be wary of hagiography and are correctly reminded that some of the most influential figures in the history of various disciplines had careers that were, by conventional standards, failures (in sociology, Thorstein Veblen, for example).

My interviewees have also stressed that it is difficult to relate to individuals whose reported career trajectories follow a neat and tidy linear pattern of repeated success, which can come across as too good to be true. There is, as Raymond Williams showed in Keywords, an older, less positive meaning of the word “career” relating to being uncontrolled, and it is important not to airbrush out this aspect of work lives that is beyond the power of individuals to influence.

Despite these reservations we may, nevertheless, retain a place for the notion of the role model. A person could be held up as an inspiration to others less because of their achievements than because of their personal qualities. Indeed, in the academic obituaries that I have been studying as part of my project, these personal qualities are often to the fore. An analysis of the 256 obituaries in Times Higher Education, mostly written by Matthew Reisz, in the five years from January 2015 revealed these qualities to be many and varied. They range from attention to detail to versatility, and from integrity to open-mindedness. This focus on qualities rather than on achievements makes a role model more human and opens up a wider pool of people from whom role models may be selected, going beyond decorated members of the establishment.

Furthermore, we may be led to acknowledge that what have been celebrated as people’s good points in certain circumstances may in other circumstances be less desirable characteristics. Even when focusing on their qualities, role models still need to be chosen with care.

Graham Crow is professor of sociology and methodology at the University of Edinburgh. He was director of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science from 2013-16 and deputy director of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods 2006-15.

This research note appeared in The Times Higher Education Supplement 18 September 2020.

Academic careers matter for several reasons, and much has been written about them. Extensive advice is available on establishing successful academic careers, but a recent contributor to this literature lamented that the ideal model of academic careers ‘fails to attend to the concerns of scholars looking to transition successfully out of the university at the end of their career’ (Hay 2017: 200). This issue warrants attention to begin with because it matters to the people whose careers are coming to a close at a time when retirement is associated with new opportunities but also uncertainties (Phillipson et al. 2018). Secondly, the issue matters to universities because they have responsibilities to, and the potential to continue to benefit from, members of their academic staff as they negotiate the completion of their careers. Thirdly, existing arrangements need to be kept under review as times change. The autobiographies, biographies and obituaries of earlier generations of academics that provide accounts of completed careers may be an unreliable guide to what is possible or appropriate now. Each discipline will have its own iconic figures and role models which will bear some resemblance to the sociologists drawn upon here as illustrations, as well as some distinctiveness.

Retirement is not something that workers necessarily approach with equanimity. As Richard Sennett observed in his study of modern, flexible work patterns, ‘It is quite natural that flexibility should arouse anxiety’; when they move away from previously stable points of reference, ‘people do not know… what paths to pursue’ (1998: 9). In the year that Sennett’s book was published, Barbara Tizard and Charlie Owen conducted a survey of academics recently retired from pre-1992 universities in England. They found that two thirds had retired ‘early’ (relative to the fixed retirement ages of the time), although over half of the 1295 academic participants in the study returned to work part-time for universities subsequent to their formal retirement. This raises interesting questions about the very meaning of ‘retirement’, and of the related idea of a ‘career’, about which there is a long history of lively debate (Becker and Strauss 1956; Bourdieu 1988; Pahl 1995; Sennett 1998; Young and Schuller 1991). Tizard and Owen argued that those people who opt to continue to work into ‘retirement’ cast doubt on widely-held concerns that ‘the skills and experience of academics are lost to society once they retire’ (2001: 265) and the associated idea that this is a group characterised by frustration at being compelled to stop. The replacement of compulsory retirement ages by flexible arrangements in almost all UK universities has coincided with a more general movement away from the pattern of early labour market exit that characterised the later stages of the 20th century (Kohli et al. 1991). There have also been changes to pension arrangements, and acknowledgement that career trajectories are gendered further complicates the picture. There is, moreover, a (contested) view that older academics staying in post for longer has the effect of blocking opportunities for colleagues at earlier career stages whose vulnerability to precarious employment already contrasts unfavourably with the early career experiences of the ‘baby boomer’ generation who are now retiring (Grove 2018). It would be interesting to know how much this constitutes a ‘push’ factor for academics considering retirement, and whether it is outweighed by issues of economic need to keep working and the pursuit of self-fulfilment and status among peers. Tizard and Owen’s (2001) findings on these issues are two decades old, based on English pre-1992 universities, and require updating. 

In a linked study of the policies and practices that universities in England and Scotland put in place to support retired academics, Tizard discovered great variation. She found that some institutions regarded on-going relationships with former staff a cost-effective way of contributing to their strategic goals, while others treated them as ‘using up valuable resources long after they have ceased to play a useful role’ (2004: 261). Notwithstanding the humorous old adage that ageing professors never die but merely lose their faculties, ageism is a serious matter in academia. The controversial opinion (attributed to Albert Einstein) that ‘A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so’ is more often associated with ‘hard’ sciences than with other disciplines, but even there it is contested. Instances of ‘late blooming’ (Becher and Trowler 2001: 145) are identifiable in a range of contexts. Arne Kalleberg has pointed out that the use of the terms ‘“early achievers” and “late bloomers” reflect our assumptions about levels of achievement assumed to correspond to (or match) particular life stages’ (2007: 65), but the methodological foundations of what is known about typical academic career trajectories may be shaky. Certainly there are competing views about the best way to approach the study of careers (Abbott 2001: ch.5). But whether the focus is on structural causes of outcomes or on the narratives that people construct, there must be concern that Tizard and Owen found ‘dissatisfaction with the work situation’ (2001: 261) so widespread among their sample’s members who had retired early. Their participants expressed particular concerns relating to the growth of administration, audits, assessments and class sizes. These concerns will have featured in many of them concluding that early ‘exit’ was preferable to continued ‘loyalty’ to their organization or to the option to ‘voice’ disquiet from within, to use the terms made famous by Hirschman’s (1970) classic study. How things stand in relation to the question of job satisfaction among later career and post-retirement university employees two decades on from Tizard and Owen’s study is a matter calling out urgently for repeat investigation. 

The issue of the relationship between what has happened in the past and what is feasible for to-day’s academics needs to combine historical exploration with consideration of emergent possibilities. In the discipline of sociology, for example, the autobiographies of Alan Fox (1990) and Chelly Halsey (1996) that were written during active retirements both report on having been born into working-class families in the 1920s and on careers at the University of Oxford. Both books contain much that members of subsequent generations of academics may relate to, but they also prompt the sense of a lost world, as does Halsey’s (1995) survey-based Decline of Donnish Dominion. A more extreme example is the career trajectory of Norbert Elias, which involved compulsory retirement at the age of 65 from his first lectureship which he had secured at the University of Leicester only eight years previously in 1954. The remarkable flowering in terms of publications and international recognition subsequent to that retirement (Elias 1994) is hard to envisage being repeated, although another exile from continental Europe, Zygmunt Bauman (who also continued publishing into his nineties) may have come close (Davis 2017). Born in the same year as Elias and living only two years fewer than he did, Baroness Barbara Wootton had arguably as many claims to fame but subsequently came to be ‘forgotten’ (Oakley 2011: 2), a state of affairs that Ann Oakley’s biography was written to correct. It has every chance of doing so in an age where researchers are expected to achieve both academic rigour and research ‘impact’, and where the academic sexism that required Wootton at the start of her career to lecture under a man’s name has been successfully challenged. Women are present among the contributors to Alan Sica and Stephen Turner’s (2005) collection of autobiographical accounts of academics who had been students in the 1960’s, and among the contributors to Rosalyn Darling and Peter Stein’s (2017) accounts of sociologists’ journeys into ‘fulfilling retirements’. They constitute the majority of the collection of British sociologists’ accounts of their careers (Twamley et al. 2015). Sociology is only one among 34 disciplinary categories used in the Research Excellence Framework and sociologists would be the first to raise questions about the wider typicality of academic career patterns relating to breaking through gendered glass ceilings and related issues that new research covering the range of academic disciplines has the opportunity to investigate. 

Bringing these three elements together has the potential to shed light on what might constitute a successful academic career and retirement in current circumstances. The very idea that ‘success’ is the appropriate yardstick may be contested, just as it has been for politicians’ careers which have been said to almost always end in failure (Powell 1977). Max Weber’s observation (made in 1917) that ‘In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years’ (1970: 138) is one way of thinking about this. Asking Crane Brinton’s question ‘Who now reads Spencer?’ (Parsons 1968: 3), which draws attention to the fleeting character of academic celebrity, is another. Both provide a useful antidote to the potential for fantasy to enter our imagined futures (Goodwin and O’Connor 2015), although Weber’s discussion of academics’ legacies uses the language of the ‘gratifications’ that are possible despite the work that has been done being superceded. Revisiting the issues raised in Tizard and Owen’s study thus generates some intriguing hypotheses to pursue, including ones about the collective nature of academic life and the importance of cultivating connections to other people, to institutions, and to schools of thought through which individual contributions can continue to be appreciated. Later careers and retirement do involve reconsideration of the meaning of ‘success’ relative to earlier aspirations (Pahl 1995), but this does not have to be couched in terms of disappointment. As Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (2009) research has shown, turning 50 can open the door to a world of ‘passion, risk and adventure’. 

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