Dive Brief:
- With no mandatory retirement age, more than half of faculty say they plan to work past their 70th birthdays, and 15% say they plan to stick it out until they’re 80.
- Hofstra University’s business school dean and former provost, Herman Berliner, has proposed a 30- to 35-year limit on tenure, according to the Hechinger Report — a proposal that is unlikely to go anywhere without an industry shift.
- One-third of university faculty are 55 and older, while only 20% of the rest of the workforce is that age, and offers of buyouts at universities across the country are not convincing these faculty to leave their posts.
Dive Insight:
While older faculty can certainly still be productive, departments are less flexible to create new majors or shrink low-demand areas, and they have less money to hire new faculty. U.S. higher ed is producing new Ph.D.s all the time, sending them into a field where tenure-track positions can only become more scarce. The federal government banned mandatory retirement in 1986 and universities had an exemption until 1993, when they, too, had to comply. Many administrators have been thinking about ways to change tenure since then, surely, but to be a lone institution that implements any such measure would create a severe competitive disadvantage until the rest of the industry caught up.