Fat City |Thank you, Illinois taxpayers, for my cushy life.

Fat City- Thank you, Illinois taxpayers, for my cushy life.

"After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life."

This calculation was based on a salary spiked by summer teaching, and since I no longer pay into the retirement fund, I now receive significantly more than when I “worked.”

But that’s not all:
There’s a generous health insurance plan, a guaranteed 3 percent annual cost of living increase, and a few other perquisites.
Having overinvested in my retirement annuity, I received a fat refund and—when it rains, it pours—another for unused sick leave.

I was also offered the opportunity to teach as an emeritus for three years, receiving $8,000 per course, double the pay for adjuncts, which works out to over $200 an hour.

Another going-away present was summer pay, one ninth of my salary, with no teaching obligation.

I haven’t done the math but I suspect that, given a normal life span, these benefits nearly doubled my salary. And in Illinois these benefits are constitutionally guaranteed, up there with freedom of religion and speech.

Why do I put “worked” in quotation marks? Because my main task as a university professor was self-cultivation: reading and writing about topics that interested me. Maybe this counts as work. But here I am today—like many of my retired colleagues—doing pretty much what I have done since the day I began graduate school, albeit with less intensity.

Before retiring, I carried a teaching load of two courses per semester: six hours of lecture a week.
 I usually scheduled classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays:
The rest of the week was mine.

Colleagues who pursued grants taught less, some rarely seeing a classroom.
 The gaps this left in the department’s course offerings were filled by adjuncts, hired with little scrutiny and subject to little supervision, and paid little.

Sadly, there is more.
Click the link above to read it all.