Composing and de-composing identities of an emeritus professor: academic, post-academic or pre-compost?

Abstract

This article addresses the narrative desert that exists around the role of emeritus academics by considering how such colleagues fit within the narrative ecology of the university. By drawing on my personal experience of becoming emeritus, I illustrate how the dynamic tension of composing and de-composing processes of identity construction can be traced within an adaptive cycle of development. In this case, the anomic deconstruction of the academic is balanced by the salutogenic reconstruction of the post-academic professional identity. This offers a methodological exemplar that could be used to generate a patchwork of professional autoethnographies to inform the description of a neglected element of institutional natural history. The approach sees emeritus status as an active part of the process of professional identity development rather than as a passive endpoint and presents a departure from the perception of the frail elderly academic who lurks in the shadows of the zombie university.