My first article in this line of thought was ‘Why Publish or Perish; Why Not Publish and Perish?’ that was published in the East African Watch of 26 June 2024. In the article I was speaking to the universities and the academics therein.

I knew I was wasting my time and energy because in universities the focus is to use publishing as a measure of an academic productivity of their staff while the staff use it as a vehicle for career development. Even if they know they publish for very small audience (their students and colleagues in their disciplines), they have no choice but to toe the line.

 I now want to speak to retired academics or those academics about to retire. Sixteen years of retirement from academic life and writing outside the Ivory Tower make me suitable to advice on how to convert academic expertise into public education and expand your influence beyond the confines of your discipline or profession

It is true, for decades, our professional lives were governed by an unspoken, yet all-powerful, commandment: Publish or Perish. Our worth was measured by impact factors, citation counts and the prestige of journal titles. We wrote for tenure committees, grant review boards and a small circle of specialised peers. This system, for all its flaws, shaped disciplines, advanced knowledge and built careers.

But now, you have retired. The pressure valve has been released. The race for promotion is run. So, what happens to that hard-earned expertise, that deep well of knowledge and that finely-honed ability to write and argue? Does it simply retire with you?

We propose a different, profoundly rewarding path: a shift from publishing for career development to publishing for public education. This is not a step down from academic rigor, but a step out – into a broader, more accessible and potentially more impactful arena.

Liberating shift, redefining “impact”

The “perish” part of the old equation is gone. What remains is the pure, unsullied act of publishing. But now, the “why” and the “for whom” can be entirely transformed. Here we go:

• Audience: From a few dozen specialists to thousands of curious citizens, professionals in other fields, policymakers, and students of all ages.
• Purpose: From demonstrating novelty for tenure to explaining significance for understanding.
•  Measure of success: From citation index to reader engagement, a spark of curiosity ignited or a public debate informed.
• Voice: From the cautious, qualified, discipline-specific jargon to clear, confident, and compelling narrative.

Your expertise is not a relic; it’s a public resource. In an age of misinformation and rapid change, the ability to distil complex ideas into wisdom is a rare and vital commodity. You possess it.

Practical palette: Formats for public scholarship

Retirement offers the freedom to choose your medium. The monograph is no longer the only option.

• The long-form essay and non-fiction book: Dive deep into a topic you love for a trade press or university press with a public outreach mission. Think Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass – academic rigour made accessible.
• Opinion editorials and analysis pieces: newspapers, magazines, and digital platforms like The Conversation, Aeon, or Literary Hub hunger for expert voices to contextualise current events, scientific breakthroughs or cultural trends.
• Digital publishing and blogging: Start a Substack newsletter or a professional blog. Serialise your thoughts, build a dedicated readership and engage in direct dialogue with your audience on your own terms.
• Public lectures and multimedia: Turn your written work into scripts for public lectures, podcast interviews, or YouTube series. Collaborate with museums, libraries, or community organisations.
• Revise and reimagine: Return to your life’s work. Which journal article, buried in a specialist archive, contains a kernel of an idea that could blossom into a beautiful explainer for a general audience?
• Overcoming the inertia: From academic to author
• The transition requires a mind-set shift. It’s not always easy.
• Letting go of the jargon: It was a shorthand for peers. Now, it’s a barrier. Challenge yourself to use metaphor, analogy and story. Explain the “so what?” clearly and early.
• Finding your public voice: This is an act of translation and rediscovery. Read excellent public-facing scholars. Practice writing as if for a bright, interested friend
• Embrace a new peer review: Your readers – their questions, comments and engagement –become your new feedback loop. It can be more immediate and gratifying than the traditional blind review.
• Start small: A 700-word op-ed is a very different challenge from an 80,000-word monograph. It’s an excellent place to begin honing your public voice.

The rewards: Legacy, engagement and joy

The benefits of this pivot extend far beyond the page.

• Intellectual vitality: It keeps you researching, synthesising, and thinking in new ways. It’s a powerful antidote to stagnation.
• Tangible Legacy: Your influence extends beyond your discipline into the public sphere. You become part of the essential bridge between the academy and the world it serves.
• Community and connection: You will connect with retirees from other fields, with journalists, activists, and lifelong learners. You build a new, diverse intellectual community.
• Pure enjoyment: To write for the joy of sharing an idea, free from the shadow of assessment, is to rediscover the original love of learning that likely drew you to academia in the first place.

Unfinished conversation

Retirement is not an end to your scholarly life. It is a commencement into its most liberated and potentially influential phase. You have traded the narrow track of “publish or perish” for the open landscape of “publish and flourish”—flourish in your sense of purpose, your connection to society, and the continued growth of your own mind.

The public needs your knowledge, your historical perspective, your scientific literacy, and your capacity for critical thought. They don’t need another paywalled journal article. They need you.

So, take down that seminal work from your shelf, look at the world’s unanswered questions, and begin again. This time, write for everyone.

Resonance imperative: Why your voice matters beyond retirement

 We have all seen it: brilliant colleagues who, upon retiring, seem to unplug from the current of intellectual life and, far too soon, fade from vibrancy into silence. The transition from a structured, purpose-driven career to an unstructured retirement can be lethally disorienting. The “perish” in “publish or perish” tragically takes on a new, literal dimension when purpose is lost.

This is why the shift to publishing for public education is not merely an interesting option – it is a vital strategy for sustained resonance. Resonance is the antithesis of that silent fade. It is the continued vibration of your life’s work, reaching new ears and creating new harmonies in the public sphere. It is about moving from being a citation in a closed system to being a voice in an open conversation.

Resonance as life-force: The personal payoff

For the retired academic, resonance is first and foremost a source of cognitive and existential vitality.

• Neuroplasticity & Purpose: The brain thrives on challenge and novel tasks. Translating complex expertise for a public audience is a profoundly demanding cognitive workout –synthesising, simplifying, story-telling. It forges new neural pathways, fighting the mental stagnation that can accelerate decline. It answers the haunting post-retirement question: What is my day for?
• Identity continuity: You spent decades becoming an expert. That identity doesn’t – and shouldn’t – vanish on your last day of work. Public scholarship allows you to shed the administrative burdens of academia while retaining the core identity of a scholar. You are not just a “former” professor; you are a historian, a biologist, a philosopher – now with the freedom to speak directly to the world.
• Combating isolation: The lecture hall, the lab, the department coffee room – these are gone. Writing for the public creates new connections. An op-ed sparks emails from across the country. A blog comment leads to a conversation with a high school teacher. It replaces the lost collegial network with a vibrant, interested community that values your knowledge.

Resonance as ripple effect: Social impact

The fear of seeing expertise “die on the vine” speaks to a deep understanding of waste.

Resonance ensures your life’s work compounds.

• Amplifying Neglected Work: Think of the seminal paper you wrote that only five people ever cited. Within it lies an idea that could change how people understand climate policy, mental health, or civic engagement. Public writing is the amplifier your specialized work never had.
• Countering the Erosion of Fact: We live in a moment where foundational knowledge is often contested. Retired academics are a bulwark of epistemic authority. You are not chasing trends or grants; you speak with the hard-won credibility of a career built on evidence. Your public voice brings weight and nuance to public discourse, directly combatting misinformation.
• Mentoring at scale: You are no longer advising a handful of graduate students. Through public writing, you mentor thousands. You guide citizens in critical thinking, help journalists understand complex issues, and inspire the next generation of scholars who might discover your work outside the academy’s walls.

Silence to resonance: A practical antidote

The path from that observed silence to sustained resonance is deliberate. It requires reframing retirement not as an end, but as a migration of platforms.

• Start with Your “Unfinished Business”: Look at your CV. Which project always felt too “public-facing” for tenure review? Which topic did you yearn to explore outside disciplinary constraints? That is your starting point.
• Build a simple ritual: Replace the department meeting with a writing ritual. Two hours each morning at the library or local cafe. The structure is no longer provided by the university; it is provided by your commitment to the public.
• Find your first resonant frequency: Don’t aim for a book first. Aim for connection. Write a 500-word letter to the editor of your local paper about a city council issue touching your expertise. Submit a short piece to The Conversation. The immediate feedback – seeing your words in a public forum, however small – is a powerful jolt of recognition and purpose.
• Embrace the role of Translator: See this not as “dumbing down,” but as the highest form of scholarly service – making knowledge accessible. You are the essential interface between the depth of your field and the breadth of human curiosity.

Choice before you

The colleagues you witnessed fading had, in effect, allowed their intellectual pulse to flatline. The switch was turned off. The tragedy was not just the loss to them, but the loss to us all – the books unwritten, the perspectives unshared, the clarifications never made in the public square.

You have a different choice. You can choose to be a resonant object.

Strike the chord of your expertise. Let it vibrate through op-eds, essays, blogs, and books. Feel it resonate in your own renewed sense of purpose. Watch it resonate in the engaged comments of readers, the invitations to speak, the slow, steady shaping of public understanding.

Your career was built on the foundation of knowledge. Your retirement can be built on the architecture of legacy. Do not let your life’s work end with a final footnote in an academic journal. Let it begin a new, louder, and more democratic conversation today.

Yes!  Turn your expertise into echo. Make resonance your retirement plan.

You may not believe it, but I have written over 450 articles published in various media as part of my contribution to public education. I have been spurred on by my conviction that public education is. Public good that should not be eliminated by Project 2025 (see ‘Public Education is Public Good that Should not be Eliminated by Project 2025’, Muwado, 13 February 2025), and by the urge to resonate beyond the Ivory Tower.

Project 2025 is a plot against the poor because it seems to eliminate public schools from the face of the Earth. However, it is difficult to eliminate public education to cultivate public ignorance.

For God and my country.

• A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).