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

This chapter offers guidance for making retirement an open topic for discussion, poses important questions prospective retirees should consider, and suggests a range of actions institutions can take to help academics make a successful transition into a fulfilling retirement.

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.

Implementing retirement innovations requires careful attention to the organizational change process.

This chapter reviews discourses about "senior" and retired faculty. These discourses suggest a deficit or burden-based view that shapes the values and practices of faculty and department chairs. Yet retired faculty can be valuable resources and help with teaching, service, and research. A process for changing departmental views to create…

This chapter describes the types of organizations that have been established in recent years to enhance the experience and engagement of retirees from higher education institutions. Using the University of Southern California as an example, it also introduces a range of strategies institutions can employ to ease the transition into retirement.

Recent legislative and regulatory actions have made retirement policies more complicated. Six major elements appropriate for retirement policy review are addressed: normal-age benefits and goals, mandatory retirement, early retirement, phased retirement, auxiliary retirement savings programs, and retirement counseling. (MLW)

The 1986 amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and tax reforms from that year will require changes in retirement policies in higher education, especially pension plans, because of the extension of nondiscrimination rules to all tax-deferred annuities. (Author/MSE)

Uncapping the mandatory retirement age is unlikely to alter retirement age by much, but it will lead to substantially higher pensions for faculty members who continue to work. Institutions must monitor retirement-age behavior in order to restructure pension and other benefits appropriately to meet income and retirement objectives. (Author/MSE)

The major findings of three studies conducted in 1979-80 for the Consortium on the Financing of Higher Education (COFHE), a group of 30 private colleges and universities, on the potential impact of extending the minimum age of mandatory retirement from 65 to 70 are presented. (MSE)

To advocate replacement of traditional tenure arrangements by fixed-term contracts is a misreading of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act amendments, and may threaten academic freedom. (Author/MSE)

Those who address questions about phased retirement policies should see them in a larger context of needs for flexibility in the terms of faculty employment. (Contains 2 figures.)

Political, social, and legislative forces outside higher education orchestrated and directed congressional action to uncap the mandatory retirement age, paying little attention to the special nature of higher education. Lobbyists for higher education did not greatly affect the ultimate resolution. (Author/MSE)