Retirement planning: do compulsory retirement ages benefit the academy?

One thing that has to be borne in mind in the UK is that the official retirement age is sneaking up... soon asking someone to retire from academia at 65 will leave them with several years to wait before they are eligible for their Old Age Pension!

I had to retire from my teaching post when I reached 65 even though I did not want to. My request to continue was denied. Since then I have written three books and currently working on my next one. The students of course, have been denied the opportunity of witnessing, through teaching methods, the composing of these books, although they are selling well to institutions throughout the world.

It is extremely regressive to "solve" the problem of inequality by forcing older faculty out, solely on the grounds of age. For one thing, it doesn't fix the problem – if you want more equity, you have to improve hiring and career planning – and one can argue that it makes it worse, because once you accept one form of arbitrary discrimination, you pave the way for others. And it packs in a world of untenable assumptions. In practice-led subjects, older faculty may well be "young" in in academic career terms, still producing returns from that recent investment. It is a STUPID STUPID STUPID debate, amid so much other STUPIDITY in this world right now.

In teaching, in particular, there is no substitute for the best teachers getting the jobs whatever their age. Sometimes that will be 25, expressing contemporary ideas and culture, and sometimes it will be 69, my age, expressing experience and accumulated knowledge. In research, the state wants compliant and re-electable product, in the social sciences, so it is best not to fund people like me and they haven't. So oldies tend to be siloed into Headships/admin/management where they can keep everyone in check and be kept away from writing the kind of books that challenge existing knowledge with authority.

Please reconsider the ageist stock photos used in this piece. Velocipedes and kerchiefed babushkas do not represent institutional knowledge and continuity.

Retired at age 57 and never regretted it. So much else to do and the younger generation are no doubt more pedagogically literate. As for deferral of the state pension, I was perfectly capable of living on my modest USS pension (and my final salary was extremely modest by academic standards and I had previously worked for 18 years in lower-remunerated occupation in local government). My regret is that the next generation have to contend with the neoliberal, marketized UKHE system which is going broke and will affect their careers. So, so sad.

It is amazing reading about the views on age, tenure, academic performance and the debate on whether older academics should give way to the younger ones in the economically advanced societies-usually against the background of opportunities and public financial constraints. In a developing country like Nigeria where the demographics is youth-oriented, where the pool of academics is modest and often eroded by brain drain; older academics, often beyond their 70s, are strongly welcome in the higher education market. This phenomenon provides a fusion of experience of the old and the vibrancy of the youth, which will feature for a long while.

There is little doubt that enforced retirement in academia is one of the most difficult things to accept, particularly when the ideas are still flowing freely and deserve publication. However, as departmental head in human genetics in the medical schools of Leiden and Utrecht, but now retired in Brazil, one of the most difficult problems was re-allocating sufficient laboratory space to in-coming post-docs, who sometimes arrive with their own ideas and research budget but require sufficient space to set up shop. Obligatory retirement can be an important way to achieve that. Arguably, adequate physical space is a department's most important resource, since the money needed for research and personnel will probably arrive through well-planned applications, but made impossible without space.