Creative approaches to academic retirement can yield benefits for retirees, their institutions, and society at large.

Academic retirement is evolving in a larger context where coalescing demographic, economic, social, and policy trends are calling standard practice into question.

This concluding chapter reviews salient points raised in the volume. It considers what stakeholders should play a role in reinventing academic retirement. The chapter also identifies a number of issues each individual retiree must address in order to achieve a successful transition from work life to retirement.

Academic retirement no longer follows a consistent, predictable pattern. This trend demonstrates a need to rethink the nature of retirement in colleges and universities to better serve both individual professionals and their institutions.

The emeritus college, a recent higher education innovation, provides retired professors with a means to stay intellectually engaged and continue to contribute professionally in retirement. The emeritus college can also help institutions maintain a steady flow of professional talent by making retirement more attractive for senior academics. This…

What is an emeritus professor? The emeritus role means different things at different colleges and universities, but generally it has an elusive, ambiguous quality. It may simply mean that a professor has retired with an honorific title acknowledging many years of service to an institution. Or it may mean that a senior professor has transitioned to…