Retirements on the rise

Academe, May/Jun 2000 by Johnson, Hans P

THE LONG-ANTICIPATED WAVE of faculty retirements, predicted since the late 1980s, is finally beginning to crest. Many departments on campuses coast to coast are starting to see a rise in vacancies associated with professors' concluding their careers. According to a survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, one-third of the tenured professoriate is now over the age of fifty-five.

Ernst Benjamin, the AAUP's director of research, notes that some administrators and faculty had worried that the end of mandatory retirement for tenured faculty, which became effective in 1994, would lead to a surplus of elderly professors unwilling to leave their positions. "That hasn't been the case," says Benjamin. "Data indicate that only 1 percent of the professoriate is over the age of seventy." Most of those who are now retiring come from the cohort of professors in their fifties and sixties, he reports.

According to Benjamin, the graying of the tenured faculty detected in the UCLA survey has occurred mainly because many of the positions created by retirement are not being filled by fulltime faculty. Instead, substantial numbers of retirees are being replaced by part-time professors. These professors are "overworked and underpaid," says Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, who has studied the rise over the past decade in part-time and adjunct appointments. "They lack not only the means to build satisfying professional lives, but also basic job security and academic freedom," he argues. "For many administrators, the increasing number of retirements is merely an opportunity to expand this exploited workforce."