UWA’s Emeritus Professors College (EPC) celebrate the vital contributions of both new and existing Emeritae Professors while ensuring the recognition of their meritorious and longstanding service to the University.

Recently, EPC members volunteered to join a round table discussion on retirement, with a view to better understanding the issues around the transitionary period for academics.

Emeritus Professor Geoff Riley AM is a member of the Advisory Board of The EPC and led the enthusiastic discussion on the general themes involved in the transition to retirement.

“We identified a need to think about and plan for retirement, (besides financial security), perhaps a decade in advance, and to consider the psychological impact including the critical impact on the family,” Professor Riley said. 

There are many versions of ‘the stages of retirement,’ said Professor Riley but there are three most commonly identified. 

“In the beginning, people experience the ‘holiday stage.’ They look forward to a new control over their own time, less responsibility, travel plans, freedom to explore all the things they have always wanted to try and just to enjoy life more.”

Then, often unheralded, the ‘Loss and Lost’ stage starts. 

“This second stage is generally the most confronting. The losses can be enormous. Role, status, relevance, engagement, and so on. In other words, loss of purpose and meaning, and for academics, who are used to a modicum of status and ‘clout’, the fall can be high.”

Work is a major source of meaning and if a person has defined themselves by what they do rather than who they are, retirement can be particularly difficult.

Emerita Professor Brenda Walker from the School of Humanities says it's impossible to be fully prepared for life's big transitions, but since most academics continue with research and supervision, academics can be lucky enough to be eased into retirement. 

“However some aspects of retirement took me by surprise. My workload decreased quite a bit but I found that I was very tired for a while - it was a deep and residual tiredness,” Professor Walker said.

“The post-retirement period may not be initially energetic.” 

Emerita Professor Vera Morgan AM retired at the end of 2021 and continues to be actively involved in the research activities in the School of Population and Global Health. 

Acknowledging her practical retirement tasks, Professor Morgan found difficulty in the final decisions to sort out long-held work items and files. 

“It was hard to decide what to keep, what to hand on to others and what to toss out. I would have liked to have known how other academics chose what to do with their hard files upon retirement,” Professor Morgan said. 

As Professor Riley discovered, this practical issue throws into sharp light the psychological reality of throwing away your life’s work and it is not helped when asked that it be done with urgency because “We need your office!” 

“This was highlighted as a major source of distress by the group and a target for the university to helpfully intervene,” Professor Riley said.

Though it is not all difficult in the earlier stages, the plan to retire can be made easier by proactive succession planning. 

“The transition to retirement was made much easier by the person who replaced me as Head of Unit, Anna Waterreus,” Professor Morgan said. 

“You might say that, in the year before I retired and in the year after, our regular meetings created a mutually smooth transition so Anna could comfortably move into the new role and I could comfortably relinquish my old one.”

In difficult cases of retirement transition, grief can stand as a model for the event. 

“Grief is not depression, and both can heal, but only by ‘reconfiguration’. Neither can be restored to the former state,” Professor Riley said. 

By the third stage of retirement, people are beginning to find new ways to ‘be’ and ‘do’, finding renewed purpose and meaning again. 

“This reconfiguration is often best done by trial and error, by trying new things, and perhaps taking some risks. Which is not to say that one dispenses with activities that previously provided pleasure, but there is room for more now, new opportunities and room for extension,” Professor Riley said. 

Professor Walker says she will now have time to develop the book she has always wanted to write, embracing her own valuable insights passed on to mid-career researchers. 

“We all keep a tight focus on the immediate and obviously necessary demands of our research, but the best work is not always linear and insights come from unexpected places, casual reading, passing conversations and our own relaxed minds.”

If you are an Eremiti and Emeritae Professor and would like to join our next retirement round table, please email Jenn Parsons. 

Find out more about the Emeritus Professors College here.