This panel, which took place at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in May 2016, examines the experiences of five scholars who have retired from university life and the responses to the panel by two scholars anticipating that transition. Panelists discuss how and when they decided to retire; the role of the university, department, and profession in their post-university lives; and the kinds of activities and connections that sustain their identities and give their lives meaning. Their experiences suggest admiration for and a subtle critique of university life. Their words of wisdom offer support to those anticipating retirement in planning their transition from university life and considering what that life could and might be like.

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Rapid transformation in the ecosystems of academic publication can be attributed not only to changing demands of the neoliberal university but also to factors in the broader economic, cultural, and technological world. The centralization of information flow has led to consolidation of academic publishing into fewer multinational media corporations who provide information to scholars in aggregated and disaggregated forms. Resistance by academics has focused on the availability of open access scholarship, but they have not solved how to make this system financially sustainable. This article reports on trends in this ever-more-unequal ecosystem, the challenges they raise, and options for scholars to solve them.

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Mitche ll Alle n World-systems scholars have examined the expansion of the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) core for two decades now, since it represents the earliest documented case of strong core and peripheral differentiation. But many have pointed out that those differences were fragile, and ANE empires had limits as far as size and longevity. This situation changes drastically in the first millennium B.C., when the Assyrian empire expanded to a size unheard of in previous times and survived intact for almost two centuries. Even when it fell Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Macedonian empires of equal size replaced it.What caused this exponential leap in the strength of cores over peripheral areas? Using the example of the western semiperiphery of the Assyrian Empire-Phoenicia, Philistia, and Israel-I demonstrate that the Assyrians used new innovations in administrative technology to solidify the growth of their empire-standardized weight systems, a lingua franca, currency rationalization, and taxation mechanisms. Curiously, though, these advances were originally developed by the semiperipheral states that were independent of the Assyrian Empire were only later turned into tools of imperial stabilization. I discuss the Assyrians, specifically the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the tenth-seventh century B.C., the first large empire of the central world-system core. It was an empire that stretched from the mountains of Iran to the Nile River of Egypt-basically the boundaries of the contemporary Middle East, about three thousand kilometers as the crow flies-and significantly dwarfed in size any Near Eastern empire that had come before it. As I've shown in my previous work (Allen 1997), their world-system was much larger than the imperial borders, extending from beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to Afghanistan. It was a stable empire too.The Assyrian hegemony in the Ancient Near East lasted nearly two centuries, and it was succeeded by equally large empires-Babylonian, Achaemenid Persian, Macedonian, C. Chase-Dunn et al. (eds.