Archive for Retirement

Thoughts of Retirement

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical, Maynooth, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 19, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve been reviewing my situation while here in Barcelona. One of the themes that keeps popping into my head is well expressed by part of a little speech by Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai:

But there are times… when suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything – or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men’s careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy, but I must admit I’ve had some thoughts on those lines from time to time.

Healthy or not I’ve also had thoughts along those lines, and sometimes feel I should step aside and create a job opportunity for someone younger. I know my employer wouldn’t mind if I did that either. They’d much prefer replacing me with someone cheaper and more compliant than me. I think if I asked for early retirement they would probably jump at the chance. I’d miss the teaching and the students, of course,

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.

When I moved to the Emerald Isle in 2017 I supposed that I would carry on living in Ireland after retiring. Now I’m having some doubts about that. I have been advised by medical experts that my arthritis would be more tolerable in a warmer climate. And there’s the cost of living in Ireland, which is much higher than Spain. I can imagine living here, actually, though I think Barcelona itself might be a bit expensive for a pensioner. Somewhere in the surrounding countryside, or along the coast, might be nice. I’ve got a few years to think about that.

Another thing in my mind is what will happen to the Open Journal of Astrophysics when I retire? I would like some larger organization or community to take it over in the long term. It’s not expensive to run, actually, but someone would have to take over as Managing Editor. Moreover, I don’t think it’s really fair to expect one small University in Ireland to bear the full cost of a global astrophysics journal indefinitely.

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Strategic Plans

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on September 18, 2022 by telescoper

Maynooth University is in the middle a consultation exercise involving the construction a new Strategic Plan Envisioning Our Future for the period 2023-28. This is something higher education institutions do from time to time, and it usually involves dreaming up ways of spending money they haven’t got on things they don’t need. I’ve seen a few Strategic Plans in my time, but yet to see one that was worth the glossy paper it was expensively printed on. I can’t envision this one being any different,

You could dismiss the current Strategic Plan as merely an irrelevance but it is having a real effect, in that it has completed distracted the University management away from crucial operational matters, such as new appointments and fixing various failing systems. Moreover, it seems very likely, there being little chance of a substantial increase in government funding, that any new “initiatives” arising from the Strategic Plan will be paid for by further plundering already hard-pressed departmental budgets.

The other day I looked up “Strategy” in a dictionary and found

Noun: a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.

The biggest issue is not the plan of action bit, it’s the articulation of the aim and the interpretation of long-term as being “the next five years”. I know I am excessively old-fashioned but I think a university – especially a publicly funded one – should be aiming to be as good as possible at teaching and research. If we have to have a plan for the next five years, at a bare minimum it should involve increasing the investment in its existing departments and providing better teaching facilities. I don’t see either of those happening at all. We’ve got a new teaching building, but nothing has been done to improve any of the other teaching rooms on campus. It’s very dispiriting for front-line academic staff to appearance such neglect of what should be the core functions of the institution.

Anyway, now that I am no longer Head of Department and free of the requirement to attend pointless meeting after pointless meeting I am going to focus what remains of my energy on teaching and research, even if The Management does not deem these important.

Tomorrow (19th September) is the first week of teaching term for the 2022-23. Though new students don’t officially start until 26th September, some are already here and I have even spoken to them. Although we have had a very rough couple of years, our first-year numbers look healthy, which is a good point to be handing over the reins. I have two new PhD student and one Research Masters student arriving this academic year which should help me with my research plans.

Undergraduate science degrees and PhD degrees in Maynooth are typically of four years’ duration. I’ll be sixty during this academic year and over the last few weeks I have been doing a bit of strategic planning of my own. Although I can’t be made to retire until I’m 70, I think it will be a good time to go when the incoming UG & PG cohort finishes, i.e. four years from now. I love teaching and enjoy my research but there is a point at which one should step aside and make way for someone younger.

Assuming, that is, that: (a) I live that long; (b) I can sell my old house and pay off my mortgage; (c) my USS pension is not worthless by then; (d) I’m not sacked in the meantime for insubordination.

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