Retirement Notices: A PSA

In private industry, I’m told, the two-week notice before leaving a job has become almost quaint. Many employers take the moment of notice as the start of a terminal paid leave. Whether the goal is protecting company secrets, preventing a potential loose cannon or just institutionalizing a form of spite—“You can’t quit! You’re fired!”—it’s much less common than it once was to keep people around once they’ve announced their intention to leave.

Higher ed plays by different rules, especially for faculty.

Budgets being what they are, retirements are one of the primary sources of funding for new positions. And searches for new positions take time. From an administrative standpoint, the earlier the notice, the better.

For example, a beloved professor on my own campus submitted his retirement letter in September, to be effective next summer. He’s well respected and will be missed, but the timing of his letter was tremendously appreciated. It gave us notice that the funding from his line will be available for next year in time to actually do something with it. In this case, it gave us the assurance that we could fund a new hire and that we’d have the time to do a search the right way.

Compare that to what happens when someone submits notice in, say, April.

There would be a week or two of determining whether we could afford to try a search, or whether it would go into the “maybe next year” pile. “Maybe next year” searches don’t always happen because the savings from replacing a full-timer with an adjunct for a year become part of that year’s baseline budget; restoring a full position counts as an increase. In a more perfect world with operating subsidies that keep pace with reality, that wouldn’t be a problem. But in a world in which flat funding is the new best-case scenario, anything that looks like an increase is a much harder sell.

But let’s say it’s such a crucial position that we commit to trying to fill it immediately. We have legal requirements for length of public notice, so that takes us into late May if all goes well. A search committee of people willing to do committee work over the summer could start screening applications in early June. Assume first-round interviews in late June, with final interviews in July. (Scheduling those in July is tough, given that you’re playing hopscotch with vacation schedules.) By state law, anyone identified as a new hire has to get multiple legal clearances at their own expense, which can take two to four weeks if all goes well. Our academic year starts in August.

It’s the equivalent of catching a dozen green lights in a row. It’s theoretically possible, but a long shot on a good day. But if the cycle can start in the fall semester, there’s plenty of time to do it right. Post in, say, November, with initial screening before the break. Do first-round interviews in late January, second round in February, get clearances in March, done. We can do the work while people are around, the new hire has time to prepare for classes before August and the department knows months in advance about the new colleague.

Folks in private industry probably spat their coffee reading those timelines, but they’re pretty accurate. They reflect a “measure twice, hire once” approach to faculty hiring, as opposed to the “fast hire, fast fire” philosophy more common in the corporate world. (To be fair, they also reflect some statutory requirements from which private industry is exempt.) In a setting in which hiring takes that kind of time, advance notice has real value. We’re also relatively immune to some of the downsides of advance notice: We don’t really have trade secrets, and loose cannons on faculty are a long-standing fact of academic life.

So, as a public service announcement, I ask my faculty readers who are planning to retire to submit their letters early in the academic year, rather than at the end, if possible. I know sometimes decisions are forced by abrupt circumstances, such as personal or family health conditions that took sudden turns for the worse. Those happen. But if you’re able to call your own shot, doing so early in the year is a real service to your colleagues. Thanks.