Now that I’m back home from campus after work, and have access to this blog once again, I thought I’d share a little ethical question with you.
Less than a year ago, while I was in Barcelona, I posted an item about looking forward to retirement. Here are two paragraphs from that piece:
The fact of the matter is, though, that I can’t afford to retire yet. I have a mortgage to pay and I’ve only had five full years of pensionable service in the Irish system, so won’t get much of a pension. I have the frozen residue of my UK pension, of course, but that is subject to an actuarial reduction if I take the benefit before I’m 65, which is also the standard retirement age for academic staff in Ireland. I can’t be made to retire here until I’m 70, in fact, but I think I’ll be well beyond my best-before date by then and am not keen to overstay my welcome.
So it looks like I’ll have to stay until I’m 65 at the earliest. In fact I won’t be able to collect the State Pension (SPC) until I’m 66, so I’ll probably have to stay another year. That means that when I get back from sabbatical I will have four or five years left until I can retire. I don’t know what I’ll be teaching when I return but I hope I get a chance to teach a few new modules before the end. In particular some cosmology or astrophysics would be particularly nice. All this is predicated on: (a) me living long enough; and (b) Physics at Maynooth not being closed down; neither of these is certain.
Since I posted this I have made a firm decision that I will retire as soon as I’m able, which should be in June 2028. This is partly because I recently had a health scare which, though it is now seemingly resolved, has persuaded me not to take (a) for granted. There are things I’d like to do before I pop my clogs and I won’t be able to do them while still in full-time employment. I’ve done some calculations and should be able to pay off my mortgage early, perhaps even by the end of this year.
Anyway, this led me to the following ethical question, to which different colleagues have had different responses.
A PhD in Ireland typically takes a minimum of 4 years. That means that if I were to take on a new PhD student next academic year (starting in September 2025) then less than three years would pass before I would retire. If a member of staff is less than 4 years from retirement should they decline all PhD supervision requests?
Opinions through the Comments Box please!
PS. My two current students will both have completed well before 2028.
PPS. Another question is who would take over the Open Journal of Astrophysics…
In the Dark 