Emeritus, honorary, and visiting professors are an untapped resource

Walk into almost any British university and you will find them.

They may no longer have offices on the main corridor, appear on departmental workload models or attend every committee meeting, but they are still there.

Emeritus and emerita professors continue to edit academic journals, publish papers, supervise doctoral students, review manuscripts, mentor junior colleagues, sit on grant panels, and represent their institutions around the world. Honorary and visiting professors perform many of the same functions, often bringing expertise from industry, the professions, or overseas universities. Yet remarkably little is known about them.

The invisible academic workforce

Universities are increasingly making use of more flexible forms of academic labour.

At the same time, the academic workforce is ageing, retirement patterns are changing while financial pressures often limit opportunities to replace experienced academics with equivalent expertise. One might therefore expect considerable research into how universities make use of emeritus, honorary and visiting professors.

However, the evidence is surprisingly sparse.

Most of what we know comes from a handful of studies conducted in North America, usually within single institutions. These studies consistently paint the same picture. Retired academics remain highly productive, continue to identify strongly with their universities and are keen to contribute, but often do so despite inconsistent institutional support rather than because of it.

A recent mixed-methods study at the University of Manitoba found emeritus and emerita professors continuing to undertake research, scholarly writing, postgraduate supervision, and mentoring while describing widely differing experiences of institutional support.

Some felt valued and included, others spoke of feeling overlooked or disconnected. Access to office space, parking, information technology, and administrative support varied considerably. The researchers identified six themes: commitment, connections, variability, overlooked, clarity, and opportunity, which together capture both the enthusiasm of retired academics and the organisational inconsistencies that shape their continuing contribution.

These findings are hardly surprising. Universities have generally developed emeritus arrangements incrementally rather than strategically. Policies differ not only between institutions but often between faculties within the same institution. In some universities emeritus status is largely honorary and in others it carries practical privileges such as office accommodation, library access, research support, and continuing supervision rights. Honorary and visiting professorships are even more heterogeneous, with titles sometimes recognising distinguished achievement and sometimes serving primarily to strengthen external partnerships.

An old unresolved argument

What is striking is not the variability itself but the absence of evidence on which institutions can base their decisions.

This is not a new observation. More than 30 years ago James Mauch and colleagues argued that universities needed to rethink the meaning of emeritus status. They suggested that the traditional model of awarding an honorary title at retirement no longer reflected the reality of academic life. Instead, emeritus appointments could become flexible mechanisms through which universities retained experienced scholars, facilitated phased retirement and preserved institutional memory. Many of the issues they identified in 1990 remain unresolved today.

More recent commentators have gone further. Michael Miller and Kenda Grover have argued that retired academics should be regarded as strategic human resources rather than former employees. They suggest that universities should actively organise the continuing contribution of emeritus and emerita professors through structured arrangements such as emeritus colleges. Raymond Saner has similarly described emeritus and emerita professors as an underused intellectual resource capable of contributing not only to universities but also to wider society through consultancy, entrepreneurship and international collaboration.

Filling in the picture

Taken together, these studies suggest that universities may possess a substantial reservoir of expertise that is neither fully understood nor systematically used. This matters for several reasons.

Universities increasingly emphasise mentoring, interdisciplinary collaboration and research culture. Experienced academics often excel in precisely these areas. They possess decades of disciplinary knowledge, extensive international networks and practical understanding of how universities function.

Universities invest heavily in developing academic staff throughout their careers. When retirement results in a sudden loss of expertise, institutions lose not merely an employee but also accumulated organisational knowledge.

Later-life academic activity challenges outdated assumptions about retirement itself. For many academics, scholarship is not simply employment but part of their professional identity. Research, writing and supervision frequently continue long after formal contracts end. Universities should recognise that academic careers no longer end neatly on a retirement date.

Despite these considerations, there appears to have been no national study examining emeritus and emerita, honorary and visiting professors across the UK higher education sector. That gap is important.

Universities spend enormous effort planning recruitment, succession and talent management. It is curious that they know so little about one of the most experienced groups of academics already working in their institutions.

Before deciding how to make better use of emeritus, honorary and visiting professors, universities first need to understand who they are, what they do and what helps them contribute most effectively.