Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but academics are among the oldest professionals, on average. And just like everybody else, they're getting older.
But since mandatory retirement became illegal in 1994, many professors are deciding to work later into their old age, for a variety of reasons ranging from good health to fear of a worsening economy.
Professors hanging on for longer will mean serious problems for schools, at least according to some observers of higher education. Others aren't so sure.
Schools thought they'd be stuck with "old fogeys" when mandatory retirement ended, said Ernst Benjamin, interim general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. "That really has not happened," he said.
Reasons for delayed retirement include not just inadequate retirement income and rising health care costs, but also high job satisfaction and flexible workloads, according to a 2004 survey of senior faculty at the University of North Carolina. And with the economy entering what most observers are calling a recession, economic reasons for staying on are likely to become stronger.
But some faculty are retiring earlier as well, Benjamin said. A "burned-out" feeling, dissatisfying work environment and good financial security were all top reasons for faculty to retire earlier in the UNC study. And earlier retirement poses its own problems in terms of replacement. Schools looking to save money sometimes choose to hire locally for non-tenure track positions, Benjamin said. Most retirees at Brown are replaced with junior faculty, Dean of the Faculty Rajiv Vohra P'07 wrote in an e-mail.
Retiring professors can also doom small programs: Swedish classes at Brown will end next month when the only instructor, Ann Weinstein, retires at the end of the academic year. She will be joining other big-name professors, including Professor of Classics Michael Putnam and Professor of History Gordon Wood, in retiring at the end of this semester.
Many institutions encourage their employees to retire before age 70 with a variety of incentives like buyouts or post-retirement health care, Benjamin said. Brown professors who have been here for 15 years receive a bonus equal to an academic year's salary if they retire at 68, with that bonus increasing to 1.375 times a year's salary at 67, and 1.75 times at 66, Vohra wrote. That plan will last for two more years.
Many professors opt to go part-time before fully retiring, either using a phase-out program or retiring and returning part-time, depending on the institution, Benjamin said. While Brown has no phased retirement plan, Vohra wrote, many faculty choose to work half-time or two-thirds-time for a few years before retirement.
But one often undiscussed issue that affects an older faculty is its declining health. As professors' mobility or eyesight deteriorates with age, they may file disability claims under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Though it's hard to say which requests are age-related, "there's clearly a higher level of need as we all age," said Catherine Axe, director of Disability Support Services. DSS does not keep statistics on age, she said.
Disability-related faculty requests can include handicapped parking permits, the use of a DSS shuttle and providing assistive technology. Brown provides programs like ZoomText, for example, which magnifies computer screens, and Job Access With Speech, or JAWS, which reads text aloud or even works with braille output.
Cases are usually clear-cut, Axe said, with proper documentation and a reasonable request. Faculty must still be able to perform the "essential functions" of their job, and the University can refuse accommodations that place an undue burden on the institution - for example, unduly expensive ones, Associate Counsel Janice Wright said. She said an age-related claim had not gone to court, to her knowledge, in her 17 years at Brown.
That's not the case for all disability claims, however, as Henry Kingsbury can attest. The ethnomusicologist and former professor of music sued Brown after administrators refused to renew his contract when he returned from leave after brain surgery. He alleged that a list of "essential functions" had been crafted specifically to prevent his return, according to a Nov. 30 Chronicle of Higher Education article. Though not age-related, his case illustrates the tightrope institutions must walk between granting requests to increasingly old professors and saving resources.
Kingsbury started at Brown as an assistant professor in 1991, suffering a brain injury shortly thereafter, Wright said. After returning from medical leave in 1994, he filed a claim that his disability was not being accommodated, and lost his case in 2002, she said. He filed a second suit, in which he argued that he was not disabled but perceived as disabled - a condition also protected by ADA - but his second suit also failed, in 2004, she said. Kingsbury did not return requests for comment.
