Last Wednesday (June 18, 2025) I finished clearing out my filing cabinets in my old office in Goodwin Hall, which means I have fulfilled my last obligation to Queen’s University. The School of Computing staff has graciously offered to move the few things I want to keep over to a retirement office in Sutherland Hall.
I am not sure how long I will keep active, technically, in retirement; many retirees drift (or run screaming) away after a short while. But I still have several projects that might be fun to work on, and access to the University library system can serve to support some things that I rarely worked on while subject to Publish or Perish pressure.
I had quite a few regrets when I retired at the end of 2023, but those have mostly faded. The remaining one is that, though I have been academically inclined for my entire life (since before even Kindergarten), I was never so narrowly focused that the “inquire into interesting ideas” part of my mindset matched what is needed to thrive on the research side of the job.
Apparently, according to some people, I turned into a fantastic undergraduate chair and curriculum coordinator, which was a lot more helpful to a lot more people than any research I would ever have done.
I have long thought that it could be useful to young academics if I were to capture my experiences in a short book, called something like Academic Life: A Survival Guide, about what being an academic is really like. The value, in my opinion, is that I would write from the perspective of someone who survived, but didn’t feel like he thrived. It could be helpful if that made it more realistic than some of what I have read about university life over the years.
I do wonder how long it would be useful, since I have heard some people (including a board member of a different university) opine that classic universities can’t survive much longer in their current form. But in retirement, all that really matters is whether I would enjoy writing it.
I would just hope that at least one person gets something out of reading it.