Back to School

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The story below is from our 2023 edition of Retire-VA. View the rest of the issue for free here!  

Retirees head back to campus and share their wisdom and expertise as adjunct instructors.

Retirement for some doesn’t mean riding off into the sunset, but rather an opportunity to try their hand at something new. Instead of taking up a hobby like pickleball or gardening, some retirees decide to pick up a side hustle, like teaching.

Colleges and universities often supplement their full-time faculty with adjunct instructors, which are contracted on a course-by-course basis. One of the reasons why retirees are so appealing to institutions is that they have plenty of industry experience, which means they can offer students practical insights and perspectives that their more research-driven tenure-track counterparts simply don’t have.

Ray Leven

Ray Leven, 70, is a prime example of someone who has found a way to share his decades of experience with young minds by adjunct teaching.

The western New York native came to Virginia to attend Washington and Lee University for law school. Shortly after graduating, he started his public service career in the Office of the Public Defender in Roanoke. After starting as an assistant public defender, he led the office for roughly 25 years. Later, he became chief magistrate for the area.

A couple of years after meeting Virginia’s retirement requirements for full benefits, he decided to retire at the still vibrant age of 54 in the mid-2000s. “I was working two offices. I had 12 magistrates. We’re open 24 hours, seven days a week. It was a heck of a load,” he recalls. “After 33 years, I said that’s probably enough, so I retired.”

In the early days of his retirement, he continued to dabble in the legal profession by going to court five days a month for a friend who ran a local law practice. He focused on collection cases for various local hospitals. He continued to do the occasional litigation up until two years ago.

He was eventually asked to join the advisory board for Roanoke College’s Department of Business and Economics by a friend who was on the faculty. This eventually led to an opportunity to join the faculty as an adjunct business law instructor in 2013. At first, he wasn’t sold on the idea. He had taught some night classes at Virginia Western Community College for paralegals years earlier, but figured he didn’t have the chops to cut it at Roanoke College. Despite his reservations, he went ahead and took the job.

“As a litigator, neither public speaking nor ego was a problem,” he jokes about getting accustomed to his teaching role. Despite the ego, he admits the process of designing the course from scratch was “scary.”

Although he only teaches one class a semester, Leven is a constant presence on campus. As a divorcee with no kids, he finds a lot of joy in being surrounded by the vibrant campus culture. Living only four miles away, he eats many of his meals in the dining hall, goes to lectures and attends a wide assortment of sporting events.

“The school has been my hobby,” he says. “I make sure I’m there on campus mixing it up with the kids. If I have kids in my class who are on an athletic team, I go to their games. I’ve discovered something—they react to you in class very differently if they’ve seen you with them in their fields. It’s amazing. I have kids in the choir. I never miss the Christmas concert.”

Last year, he was promoted to the rank of adjunct senior lecturer. He has no plans to stop teaching anytime soon.

Leven encourages retirees who qualify to adjunct to seriously give it a try if they want to be active in retirement. “It provides a whole range of stimuli for a retired person—interaction, sports, entertainment, education,” he says. However, he cautions that the compensation for adjuncts is modest, so those looking to supplement their retirement benefits should likely take that into account.

Martha Kuchar

Unlike Leven, Dr. Martha Kuchar, 71, was a full-time academic prior to retirement. Also at Roanoke College, she was a professor in and chairperson of the English and Communication Studies department. When it came time for her to retire nearly three years ago after 29 years of service, she found it difficult to fully step back from the campus.

Without skipping a beat, she returned to the classroom the semester immediately following her retirement. As an adjunct who carried the title of adjunct senior lecturer, she taught one to two classes each semester. “It kept me in the classroom with young people, which I really like,” she says of why she decided to teach part-time.

No longer having to worry about meetings and administrative duties, she found the reduction in commitment to be refreshing. “I could just sail in, teach my classes and then leave again,” she says.

In the fall of 2022, she ended up taking on another role as director of undergraduate scholarships and fellowships.

Kuchar finally decided to call it quits in the summer of 2023 in order to pursue her other interests, including traveling, gardening and the writing of a family narrative. However, she isn’t completely closing the door to adjunct teaching again in the future.

The benefits of having retirees adjunct teach, she says, are significant. “Whether someone is a professional academic or they’ve worked in industry, you acquire a lot of not just technical know-how, but you acquire a lot of wisdom. Wisdom isn’t something you can learn from a book, wisdom is something that comes from age,” she says. “Provided they’re mentally agile and able to tell their stories, I think there’s every reason in the world why such a person would bring benefit to younger people.”

Barbara Wright

Barbara Wright, 72, also decided to return to the classroom after she retired from Virginia Western Community College.

She started her teaching career in public schools in West Virginia. After taking time off to raise her family and relocating to the Roanoke Valley, she started teaching at the college as an adjunct before accepting a full-time position in 2004. She became the program head of the health and physical education and recreation program before retiring in 2016.

Itching to start teaching again, Wright returned to the college as an adjunct as soon as the state-mandated break in her service passed.

She now teaches two sections of Health 100: First Aid & Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation a semester. She designed it to accommodate working professionals, especially teachers who have busy schedules. The class meets on Friday evenings and Saturdays, as well as online.

The importance of having first aid and CPR skills, she says, is why she feels the need to continue teaching the class. “I feel there’s a need for it and I feel I do more than the average Red Cross instructor in terms of throwing in practical stuff,” she says.

As a former administrator, Wright can attest to the benefits of adjuncts who can bring in outside perspectives. She points to Michael Shmerkin, a former Israeli Olympic athlete, who she met by chance at an ice rink and ended up hiring to teach ice skating. “He brought in an experience these kids would never see,” she says. “He did backflips on the ice for us.” 

The story above is from our 2023 edition of Retire-VA. View the rest of the issue for free in our digital guide!