Marvin Bressler is among the last casualties of mandatory retirement in academe.
A sociologist at Princeton University since 1963, Mr. Bressler turned 70 in April and was forced to retire July 1. If only his parents had had better timing, he says, he would still be a tenured professor.
The timing is important because on January 1, 1994, federal law will no longer allow colleges and universities to require tenured professors to retire at 70.
Higher education has for years enjoyed a special exemption under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which bars most employers from enforcing mandatory retirement. After the exemption expires on December 31, tenured professors will be free to choose whether to continue working at 70.
Almost every campus has at least one professor with the bad luck to turn 70 this year. “Life is full of arbitrary injustices,” Mr. Bressler says wryly. He supports mandatory retirement -- in principle -- as a way of opening up jobs for young scholars. He’s just not enthusiastic about it for himself.
“I feel in my full vigor,” says Mr. Bressler, who has been allowed to keep his office at Princeton. He will teach a freshman seminar next spring. “I would have preferred to stay forever. And that impulse ought to be discouraged by any administration.”
As the end of mandatory retirement nears, colleges are studying how they will be affected and looking at ways to motivate professors to retire before 70. A variety of measures are being considered, such as offering bonuses for early retirement, allowing retirees to teach courses and keep a campus office, and toughening the post-tenure evaluations of all professors.
Campus officials are treading carefully, however. They are concerned about maintaining the vitality of their institutions, but they want to avoid any suggestion that scholars over 70 are unproductive -- although some may be.
“Professors don’t become incompetent when they turn 70,” says Ann H. Franke, counsel for the American Association of University Professors. “Some can turn incompetent at 41.”
When universities talk about vitality, they don’t just mean the well-being of individual faculty members, says Robert S. Hamada, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago. He headed a committee at Chicago that helped devise a set of proposals for dealing with the end of mandatory retirement.
“It’s the ability of a department to renew and refresh itself with the appointment of new hires,” he says. “If there becomes a preclusion of new hires because the older people refuse to turn over, there is a loss of fresh ideas.”
Interviews with benefits experts and college administrators suggest that major research universities are the most concerned about a future without mandatory retirement.
Congress made mandatory retirement illegal for most employees in 1986. But it exempted tenured professors until 1994 and asked the National Academy of Sciences to study the matter.
A 1991 study by the National Research Council, an arm of the academy, found that most tenured professors chose to retire before age 70, and, on many campuses, before 65.
The study predicted that those patterns would continue in the absence of mandatory retirement. It also predicted that the nation’s leading research universities were the only institutions likely to face a serious problem of low turnover because of professors’ staying on past 70.
Some public and private institutions have already eliminated mandatory retirement because of state laws. The American Association of University Professors says at least 13 states have banned the practice on their public campuses, and an additional 8 states have applied the prohibition to both public and private ones. The research council’s study said those states had encountered no major problems with professors’ staying on too long.
Some skeptics in academe say the demise of mandatory retirement will affect every campus to some degree. And they believe many institutions are underestimating the fallout.
“No matter how you figure it, the end of mandatory retirement cannot be a plus for any institution,” says Robert M. Wilson, an adviser to A. Foster Higgins & Company, a benefits consulting firm, and vice-president emeritus of the Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s an immediate threat in ’94, ’95, and ’96 to certain institutions. But I believe it’s a long-term threat to many institutions that are feeling pretty good about it now and don’t think they have a problem.”
Mr. Wilson and other observers say the University of Chicago is far ahead of the pack in examining how the end of mandatory retirement will affect its campus. A campus report found that if Chicago made no changes in its retirement policies, it stood to lose nearly 90 appointments between 1994 and 2010 because of professors’ remaining past 70. Not only would the hiring of new scholars be limited, but the university also would face higher costs because senior professors are at the top of the pay scale.
At colleges where the teaching loads are heavy, people burn out and the lure to retire is strong, says Mr. Hamada, the finance professor at Chicago. Teaching loads are often lighter at research universities, and people stay on, he says, “because they’re doing what they love to do -- research.”
Something about academic life makes it difficult for some people to leave it behind, Mr. Wilson says. Scholars spend their lives devoted to a particular discipline. They may work on a single project for decades. “This becomes their life, and people don’t want to give it up,” he says. “Retire? Retire to what?”
Chicago adopted a package of reforms this year that is widely considered a model. Among its features are early-retirement incentives, improved medical benefits for retirees, tougher evaluations of all professors, changes in the pension plan, and creation of a committee on retirement.
Rather than set up a new process for evaluating professors, Chicago has decided to make better use of its current salary-review system and to deny a pay raise to professors who don’t merit one. “We would hope that the salary decision becomes much more serious,” Mr. Hamada says.
Perhaps the biggest change is in the university’s pension plan. Like most private institutions and some public ones, Chicago has a defined-contribution program. Under such a plan, the employer contributes a set amount to an employee’s retirement fund. The longer the employee stays on, the bigger his or her pension becomes.
Chicago is trying to remove this disincentive to retirement with a new approach, says Henry S. Webber, its associate vice-president. The university will stop contributing to its employees’ retirement funds once they have reached an amount where employees could receive annual retirement income equal to 75 per cent of their salary, not including social security. But the decision will be based on the assumption that the employees took a balanced approach, investing half of their money in a fixed-income fund and half in a stock fund. The change applies to new hires; current employees are grandfathered in until they pass 70.
What Chicago has adopted, Mr. Webber says, is a “portfolio” of changes. “Some of them represent major improvements in benefits,” he says. “Some of them represent limitations.”
Harvard University is still considering such changes. Its arts and sciences faculty, however, has approved a set of guidelines aimed at making the campus more friendly to retirees. In the past, retired professors were not allowed to teach or attend faculty meetings. Under the new rules they can do both. A retired professor can now teach one semester-long course a year.
“We wanted to make the retirement decision not seem like such a cliff off which people must jump,” says Robert H. Scott, vice-president for finance at Harvard.
After the mandatory retirement age was raised from 65 to 70 in 1978, a large number of Harvard’s professors stayed on until 70, Mr. Scott says. He expects a number of professors will now stay on past 70.
“There’s a lot of things the university will have to deal with now,” he says. “Issues such as, How are we going to end academic careers? How are we going to work within departments to plan for an orderly replacement of faculty members?”
At smaller colleges, where research is less of a priority, such concerns are muted. At Kalamazoo College, for example, a state law banned mandatory retirement a few years ago. “It hasn’t been a problem at all for us,” says Provost Richard J. Cook. “Right now we have no faculty who are over 65. In fact, the majority of our faculty have been retiring between the ages of 61 and 64.”
To help people adjust to retirement, the college allows professors to take a year-long sabbatical during the last year of their employment. They receive two-thirds of their salary and can use the time to do whatever they choose. Mr. Cook says that in the four years he has been provost, every eligible retiree has taken the sabbatical year.
Kalamazoo has just created a commons area in the campus library for retired professors. It includes a lounge, a small kitchen, book shelves, and telephones. “It’s particularly important for retired faculty who don’t have space in their old departments to use as an office,” Mr. Cook says.
Being allowed to teach a course or keep an office is little solace, though, to professors who turned 70 this year and retired reluctantly. One professor who decided to fight back is Adamantia Pollis, a political scientist. She sued to keep her job at the New School for Social Research. Ms. Pollis turned 70 in June and was forced to retire at the end of that month. Her suit accused the college of age and sex discrimination. A federal judge last week dismissed her claim of age discrimination, but agreed to hear the sex-bias charge.
“I love teaching,” she says. “I’m also academically very productive. I’m not talking about in the past. I’m more productive now than I was earlier in my career.”
Administrators at the college decline to comment on her case. But in a statement last spring, Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the college, defended its treatment of Ms. Pollis and denied her allegations. He said he saw no reason to treat her differently from other professors who retired at 70.
Some institutions, like the New School, the University of Minnesota, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, are following the letter of the law and requiring all professors who turn 70 by December 31 to retire.
Others have taken a different tack. At Harvard and Princeton, because faculty members typically retire at the end of an academic year, mandatory retirement will not apply to anyone who turned 70 after July 1 -- the beginning of the 1993-94 fiscal year.
The end of mandatory retirement has led to some awkward situations in the short term. At Princeton, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Val L. Fitch, had to retire this summer because he turned 70 in March. But Philip W. Anderson, also a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, escaped mandatory retirement because he won’t reach 70 until December.
“I hate the R word,” says Mr. Fitch, adding that Mr. Anderson has been teasing him about the situation. But the two scientists have ended up in similar circumstances. Princeton has allowed Mr. Fitch to keep his laboratory and his office. He will hold a part-time research position that will be renewed on an annual basis. Mr. Anderson has a tenured appointment, but began working part-time last year.
Aside from short-term glitches, some observers speculate that the end of mandatory retirement may lead colleges to change the way they do business. Some may become more careful about granting tenure and more stringent in evaluating tenured professors.
Edward O. Laumann, provost at Chicago, says the mandatory-retirement rule helped institutions avoid having to make some sticky decisions about people.
“There are egregious cases where someone has clearly lost it but no one is prepared to do anything because they respect the person’s former contributions,” he says. “It’s not easy to say this person is not the man he was 20 years ago.”
What makes evaluation more difficult is that people make different contributions at different stages of their lives. “A young hustler doing lots of lab work then becomes a grantsman setting up programs, then becomes a mentor for new people,” Mr. Laumann says.
“In a sense, this flat rule helped us finesse having to think through all those hard issues.”
