Time to reconsider retirement age of academics

 

What does or should retirement mean to many who have had a career in a Malaysian university? In this piece, I also discuss two terms, “academic” and “scholar”, linking it with their roles in the university and society.

Retirement for an academic usually means you stop chasing publication deadlines and the peer review drama set by the global ISI, Scopus, and WOS journal network. You are finally spared the months of stress, waiting for feedback from “blind” peer reviewers.

Peer reviewers are academics themselves, who voluntarily offer their services to review your draft manuscripts. Thousands who have gone through this process claim that peer reviewers can be extremely insulting and condescending.

Their feedback demoralises and is often unhelpful. However, as a struggling academic trying to advance in one’s career, one tolerates the abuse.

Also, they are not literally “blind”, but they might as well be. Many of these reviewers are often self-hating and insecure, mid- to senior-level lecturers themselves. After their own experiences through the publishing process, they have become vindictive and bitter. They project all this anger on the next unsuspecting generation of writers.

An end to drudgery

Retirement also means you are no longer required to satisfy your faculty’s demands to apply for research. You are no longer required to officially contribute to the “at least you have applied” folder.

You are no longer expected to write a useless research proposal, just so that there is a record that applications from the faculty were sent in, and that the faculty’s “application quota” has been met.

Finally, you no longer have to attend meetings that subtly insult your intelligence. You no longer have to waste time listening to your administrative superiors. You can finally ignore these “academic bureaucrats” who operationalise the ministry’s directives. They do a good, robotic job though. It is as if they truly believe the university is part of the ministry of higher education.

Now that you are retired, you can finally accept that your colleagues with whom you spent decades have no analytical or critical thinking skills. Yet they lecture to students about the ideals of possessing such skills.

You finally realise that your colleagues will remain “academics”. They will probably never amount to scholars who will continue in the struggle of identifying and solving societal problems.

Slipshod work, plagiarism and bullying

The world of academia is unique. Compared to many other careers, there is a high concentration of privileged and egotistical individuals who work in the universities.

Furthermore, among the many academics in Malaysian public universities, many are less rigorous in their research, or class preparation. I write specifically about social scientists because I am most familiar with them. They can be extremely slipshod in their writings, not to mention there are regular cases of plagiarism and bullying.

A scholar is a person who may publish and participate in public discussions, and who is also a researcher. This person has the expertise in an academic discipline but functions equally well outside the university. A scholar who works at a university is also an academic.

An academic does not always develop into a scholar. An academic is the job. Professors, teachers, or researchers at a university are paid to do the job of teaching, supervision, and researching.

We need more scholars

In the Malaysian context, when most of these academics retire, you never hear about them again. Ideally, though, a small country like ours with too many problems linked to nation building, should have more “scholars” whose mission in life is to think about society.

There are two universalisms of higher education, and what the bigger purpose of our universities should be.

First, there is the traditional purpose of the university, which is to employ academics. These are people who have spent many more years after secondary school, perfecting a specialised discipline.

Ideally, these academics do research, produce new “epistemologies” (knowledge), publish, and are subsequently paid to pass this on to their students. This is why classes and tutorials are part of academia and university life.

Second, among these academics, they must make the effort to link their work as an academic, to society, while constantly keeping in mind a long-term vision on how all this intellectual activity on campus benefits different communities and the nation as a whole.

Dying breed of scholars

This is their added responsibility, beyond their traditional role as academics, their narrow discipline, the classroom, their tutorials, and a monthly paycheck. Academics who evolve into scholars impart their knowledge to students as well as to society simultaneously, in simple language.

While they are still employed at the university, they must continue in their specialised theoretical teaching and publishing, for the academic discipline.

However, they should also write and speak for society, addressing on-going problems and proposing solutions. They keep track of the bigger picture of the nation, and offer their analysis on how society can be more harmonious.

It is most likely that a scholar would know how to navigate smoothly between these two platforms. An academic would not, and this is the tragedy of Malaysia’s public universities.

We have a growing number of retired academics (we are an ageing society, after all), and a dying breed of scholars. On top of this, we have 20 public universities, with a mandatory retirement age of 60 years.

My last point is this. Many academics have an intellectual awakening in mid-career. Some begin to transition to the “scholar” realm in their late 40s to mid-50s. Many find their calling as they approach the age of 60, the age of retirement.

Maybe it is time to reconsider the retirement age of university academics. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.