PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : On Widgets and Aristotle: Retiring From Loyalty and University Life
Well, it’s really happening. Come Jan. 1, 1993, my husband will be retiring from the University of California. After 30 years as a professor and 10 years as a student--all at the same institution--he is entering the real world. No wonder it feels like a belated expulsion from the womb.
My husband’s prolonged loyalty to this institution of higher learning may have been acquired along with his mother’s milk. Right after World War II, she moved the family from Arizona to California, to ensure her children a superior education. Her son became a professor at the same place that had trained him, and he saw his own history reflected in every poor, bright student who found the University of California a way out of the underclass. So, he stayed on even when Harvard made him an offer--because he couldn’t identify with the world of private, elite universities. And he stayed throughout the difficult, violent late ‘60s and early ‘70s--because he thought he owed the university his loyalty in return for all it had done for him.
Loyalty to social institutions is not so different from loyalty to family or friends. You stick with them through thick and thin; you see their faults, may even try to change them, but accept the rest. And of course, institutions, like family members or friends, can disappoint you. “After all I did for them, how can they do this to me?” You see it all the time on the television news. A tearful, surprised face: “I worked for this auto plant for 20 years, and my father did before me. And now they’re going to close the place down.” The free market at work.
Of course, the University of California is not closing down; it is merely scaling back in light of severe state budget cuts. The booklet sent to my husband explains that the early retirement program being offered is “purely voluntary.” But the cover is more honest. It reads: Permanent Workforce Reduction. And in the meeting we attended, someone explained that the university hoped many people would volunteer to retire to avoid forced lay-offs--including tenured professors--in the future. So you might say we saw the handwriting on the wall: Get out while the going is good.
I studied gerontology as a graduate student and wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on working-class retired people. Often, they were happy to retire. Their work had been physically hard and not all that interesting. Professional men and women--lawyers, doctors, professors, politicians--usually hate to retire and often postpone it as long as possible. Their work may be more interesting, but it isn’t always that interesting. But the leap from being a high-status somebody to being just an ordinary retired person is much greater. No more nurses to order around in the hospital, no more law clerks at your beck and call, no more students hanging onto your every word.
I cautioned my husband about all this back when he was 40 or so and king-of-the-mountain; and I urged him to think about and plan for retirement--even early retirement, if health or other problems should demand it. And he agreed. But, of course, it always feels different when it’s actually happening to you. What rankles the most is that the university is saying to some of its highest paid, most experienced, often best professors: “We’re in a financial bind and we’d like to replace you with someone younger who will cost us only a third as much.”
“I’ve really been working for a widget factory,” my husband complains. “They’re not interested in the fact that I’m very good at what I do; they think we’re all interchangeable.”
“Well,” I say soothingly, “no one in this world is indispensable. I’m sure Lee Iacocca feels just as hurt as you do at being shoved aside.”
“Yes, but he chose that career,” my husband persists. “I realized long ago that being a professor was not just me and Aristotle wandering through the groves of Academe. But I still thought that somehow a university differed from a for-profit business.”
And to this, I have no answer.
