To the editor:
I’m not fairly certain why you felt the necessity to publish the self-indulgent “Instructing as a Sacred Life” by Joe P. Dunn (Nov. 19, 2025).
It’s nice that Joe is impressed by his educating and is so enthusiastic about it. After all, most college who selected educating are (or have been) so impressed. So what deserves the article? I assume that Joe continues to be educating at age 80.
Sure, some individuals view retirement as a objective as a result of they don’t like their jobs. However many school view their career as a vocation, so why would they retire? One purpose is due to diminished effectiveness. Ossified approaches, diminished cognitive capability and so forth are the sad, however inevitable, outcomes of ageing. The particular person experiencing these declines is usually not the very best at noticing them, as they creep in so slowly that they’re most seen to outsiders or when precisely evaluating to your self from way back. (A septuagenarian Galileo, when finishing Two New Sciences, his seminal 1638 work in mechanics, was disheartened to seek out that it was exhausting for him to comply with his personal notes and ideas from a number of many years earlier.)
One more reason to retire is to provide the subsequent technology an opportunity. Joe talks in regards to the plentiful school jobs when he was younger. There are numerous explanation why they’re now not plentiful, however certainly one of them is that there isn’t a longer a compulsory retirement age. It was authorized till 1993 for there to be a compulsory retirement age for tenured school (later than the overall 1986 ban on necessary retirement as a result of lawmakers felt there have been a number of legitimate arguments for a compulsory retirement age for tenured professors).
Many teachers pour a lot into their work that they don’t develop a robust identification outdoors of their job. They find yourself like Joe, unsure what they might even do in retirement. A broader push for a greater work-life steadiness in increased training may go a great distance towards serving to individuals develop their full selves, and would scale back the concern of retirement amongst teachers. Plus, there are at all times positions emeriti that help you preserve your hand within the mental world of upper ed with out persevering with to attract a paycheck that you just now not want and another person does.
Talking of viewing educating as sacred, clergy retire. Heck, we’ve even had a pope retire. School can determine it out too.
