Retirement

The silver tide of faculty retirement continues to ebb and flow. While much of today’s scholarship on faculty retirement focuses on the financial implications for colleges and universities, arguing that older faculty members clog up the faculty pipeline, cost more in salary and benefits, and are ineffective teachers who fear technology, little research addresses the retired faculty member’s experience.

The twenty-two thousand faculty members in the twenty-three-campus California State University, like most faculty at other public universities and colleges across the United States, are underpaid relative to their years of higher education. An October 2010 report from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, prepared by Sylvia A.