One Idea to Ease Faculty Into Retirement: the ‘Terminal Sabbatical’

Faculty members can work as long as they want, a right that began with the end of mandatory retirement in 1994. Many haven’t been shy about exercising that right, and the American professoriate is decidedly grayer than a generation ago.

This creates complications for colleges, including by limiting their flexibility in making decisions about budgets and about academic programming. It also exacerbates job-market pressures for some new Ph.D.s who see a glut of aging scholars contributing to the dearth of job openings. All this was on the minds of Widener University administrators when they conceived of a new option they’d like to begin offering soon: the terminal sabbatical.

The idea is to allow eligible faculty members — based on years of service — to take a one-year sabbatical from which they would then retire, without returning to the faculty. Julie E. Wollman, Widener’s president, says she hopes such a program would encourage more professors to retire by easing their transition out of campus life. That, in turn, would free up money in the budget and allow administrators to more nimbly shift money to emerging priorities.

Administrators are just beginning to sketch out the specifics of their idea, and to pitch it to faculty, but they envision that a professor who takes a terminal sabbatical would continue to receive a salary and benefits for one year while doing the kind of work one would do on a typical sabbatical, like research and writing. The sabbatical might also include some form of service to the university, like performing an analysis of a proposed program or helping to revamp curricula.

Offering a structured sabbatical program at the end of a professor’s academic career is unusual, says Janette C. Brown, executive director of the Association of Retirement Organizations in Higher Education. Many colleges, though, are paying more attention to easing tenured faculty members’ transition into retirement. Phased retirements, in which professors work progressively fewer hours for one or more years, are common.

The University of Southern California, where Ms. Brown is assistant vice provost of the Emeriti Center, hired a faculty retirement “navigator” two years ago to serve as a confidential advocate and resource for faculty members who are retiring or considering retirement. Ms. Brown’s center tries to keep retired faculty members engaged with their university by promoting part-time or volunteer work on the campus and encouraging retirees to be part of a living-history project.

A goal of Widener’s is to reduce the psychological toll of retirement by creating a yearlong transition period.

“Faculty are fearful of losing their identity,” Ms. Brown says. “Institutions need to look at things differently so that retirement is not like stepping off the edge of a cliff. Colleges are not quite getting that yet, but they’re slowly beginning to come around.”

How to Avoid Distrust

At Widener, administrators say they want to bring more openness to the process of retiring. Retirement incentives tend to breed distrust, with professors suspecting that a colleague is getting a better deal. And the lack of clear information can make people wonder whether they should hold out until an incentive like a buyout program comes along.

In fact, Widener administrators and faculty-retirement experts say the increasing availability of retirement incentives, including buyouts, has led to an unintended consequence: Faculty members now expect them and linger on to avoid missing one that may be just around the corner. Ms. Wollman says adopting a defined program, like the terminal-sabbatical idea, that is available to all eligible faculty members would make the process more transparent.

“We want to continue to incentivize retirement,” Ms. Wollman says, “but we don’t want this kind of ad hoc process that begins to seem inequitable because it’s only in certain areas and some people get more than others.”

Widener recently offered buyouts to selected groups of faculty, most in law and business. Administrators say the buyout programs, in which faculty members were given a year or more of salary in exchange for retiring, show that faculty do respond to retirement incentives. In all, about 50 professors took the offers during programs this year and in 2013, a significant chunk of the faculty. Widener now has 235 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.

Sometimes the goal of the buyouts is downsizing, while other times it’s creating flexibility in the budget. At the law school, Widener wanted to cut costs amid shrinking enrollments, a nationwide trend at law schools; Widener’s dropped 37 percent from the fall of 2012 to the fall of 2015, when the school enrolled about 800 full-time-equivalent students. At the business school, the goal of the buyouts was to shift direction by using the money saved on retiring professors to hire new faculty in in-demand areas like finance, which saw an increase in undergraduate majors.

“The evidence from our university and others,” Ms. Wollman says, “is that these things really do work.”

Making Retirement Attractive

Not all retirement incentives are created equal. And it remains to be seen whether terminal sabbaticals — which wouldn’t come with a year of salary for no work like a buyout does but rather a year’s salary in exchange for working on a project — would have the same appeal to professors.

Three years ago, when he was 64, Michael J. Goldberg, a Widener law professor, could have taken a buyout but didn’t, because he felt had a few good years of faculty service ahead of him. He also wasn’t old enough to qualify for university health insurance for retirees. This year, for two full years of his salary, he took the offer. “I wasn’t dying to leave the work and I’m still good at it, I’d like to think,” Mr. Goldberg says. “I don’t know whether one year would have been enough of an incentive.”

Mr. Goldberg says he also would have considered taking a terminal sabbatical for one year of his salary. “It certainly would have been attractive,” he says. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

But administrators recognize that there are many others, like David Ward, a 67-year-old Widener philosophy professor who has no intention of retiring, who won’t be swayed by a terminal sabbatical or any other incentive. Mr. Ward says he enjoys his work too much to quit.

“I get paid for reading interesting books and talking about interesting topics,” he says. “Why would I quit that?”

Even so, he’s a supporter of terminal sabbaticals. He knows faculty members who no longer share his passion for the work, and who might be better off doing something else but hang on for the security of a paycheck.

“There are professors who burn out, get frustrated at the quality of students, or just lose interest,” Mr. Ward says. “The students aren’t getting the best, the discipline isn’t getting the best, and the faculty member isn’t having any fun. In those cases, retirement incentives are a win for everyone.”

At least one faculty member is already intrigued by the idea of a terminal sabbatical. Raymond Jefferis has been a Widener engineering professor for more than half a century. He didn’t waste time thinking up a proposal for his terminal sabbatical: writing a book on mechatronics, which is the intersection of mechanical engineering and electronics.

Mr. Jefferis, 78, loves creating things, whether it’s devising a mechatronics course or inventing a metal detector for archaeological work. He has owned an electronics manufacturing company for 22 years, Mr. Jefferis says, so he doesn’t need to keep working for the money. He would prefer taking a terminal sabbatical to ease him into post-academic life rather than taking two years of his salary as a buyout.

“If it weren’t for a program like this,” Mr. Jefferis says, “I would probably keep going till I dropped dead in class.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.