On the Occasion of My Retirement

Abstract

Last winter I decided to take early retirement. For some time I had considered going down to halftime until I turned 65, which is the average retirement age in Sweden. This would have meant continuing with at least some of my duties as a lecturer for three more years. But one morning I woke up and said to myself: No! I can't! It's simply impossible. Not fulltime, not halftime, not at all. I sent off an email informing my superior and started to plan for a life with less income than I have had ever since I was a PhD student, yet with greater peace of mind than I have had for years.What led me to make this decision, which seemed unexpected and totally illogical to most of my friends and acquaintances? I mean, as a PhD student I had struggled for years to achieve my goal of an academic job. Ever since my first position, I have shared workplaces with intelligent and exciting colleagues, and I have traveled around the world to meet other intelligent and exciting people at international conferences. My salary is good. I enjoy a high degree of independence when it comes to how I plan and carry out my lectures and seminars, and I have nice and ambitious students. I have even been offered more opportunities to do research than I have asked for. Nevertheless, I gladly leave all this behind because it will mean the end of a suffocating feeling that I believe can be traced to the occurrence of a specific phenomenon: New Public Management.New Public Management was introduced to Swedish universities in the early 1990s in order to implement principles of the business world in the public sphere. Most notable among these were documentation, measurement, outcomes and efficiency. These keywords were, of course, established in the academic world long before New Public Management was even heard of. Academics of all times have been practicing them whenever they build research networks or decide which grade a student assignment deserves. What New Public Management brought to the table was not so much the practice of documentation, measurement, etc., but rather the visible existence of documentation, measurement, outcomes and efficiency. Clear instructions and templates of all kinds became mandatory. Days and hours were spent-and still areon writing various documents intended to ensure the quality of institutions and academic work. Independent, collegial groups function as gatekeepers who guarantee that not a single wrongly spelled word or misplaced comma