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This article presents information on life after retirement for college teachers. The time will come when one must give up a campus office and decide what to do with the books, papers, files, precious mementos, and other representations of one's professional life. Most of them want to take it home so they could at last satisfy their unfulfilled dreams of reading and writing. Unless one has the luxury of a large home, one should plan to dispose of most of the treasures before one takes the rest home. University librarians receive donations of books from retired professors after the books have been brought home.

The article discusses issues related to the formation of alliances among people involved in higher education in the U.S. Alliances between contingent faculty members and graduate students are not untroubled. Many graduate students fear too close contact with people whom they judge as the failures of academe. In addition, their perches in Ph.D.-granting institutions can give them a narrow perspective on higher education that is at odds with reality and with the perspective of most contingent faculty members, many of whom don't have doctorates. Nevertheless, they have joined with contingent colleagues in the past and can profit from such cooperation in the future. The biennial conferences of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor were born out of collaboration between the two groups in 1995 and will continue, with a seventh conference planned for this August. Those conferences gave birth to the biennial Campus Equity Week and a large collection of papers and other resources. Librarians, counselors, manual-service workers, and dozens of other types of staff members have been buffeted by technological changes, privatization and outsourcing, reorganizations, and plain old attrition and layoffs.