Faculty now have the task of using retirement optionscreatively, and institutions, of finding common purposewith faculty.

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New Ways to Retire

David W. Leslie

Colleges and universities can no longer tell faculty when they must retire.Instead, faculty can now tell their institutions when they will retire. For yearsprior to 1994, the impending federal abolition of mandatory retirement causedcolleges and universities to worry that faculty might choose never to retire.The specter of an infinitely aging and increasingly costly gerontocracy rulingthe classrooms, labs, and committee structures of universities led to variedexperiments with incentives and inducements to make retirement attractiveto faculty members. In this issue of New Directions for Higher Education, weexplore how one of those newer options, phased retirement, works.

The fears that faculty would take advantage of their privileges and stayon at their jobs indefinitely appear to have faded. On the whole, experiencein the first decade following uncapping of mandatory retirement shows thatfaculty plan to retire in their mid-sixties and that only small numbers arelikely to remain beyond age seventy. Faculty members vary in their careers,finances, and personal situations, though, and now must actively decidehow to retire. Their employing institutions, once enforcers of a universalretirement age, increasingly recognize these factors and play the role of sup-porter, counselor, and adviser, offering options and negotiating terms andconditions under which faculty can choose the course they find best fitstheir circumstances.

The institution’s role as a facilitator of retirement decisions is one thatfew have ever prepared to manage. Retirement is a once-in-a-lifetime tran-sition for individuals. They may or may not have done more than the mostrudimentary planning and may not have thought through the options

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, no. 132, Winter 2005 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI: 10.1002/he.193

6 NEW WAYS TO PHASE INTO RETIREMENT

available to them. In addition, department chairs and deans, the frontlinesupervisors of faculty, are typically focused on building programs for thefuture, seeking funding, recruiting new faculty, and developing newcourses of research and study. Although the orderly and inevitable depar-ture of those who may have built the department in the past is a criticalelement in reshaping a department or college, chairs and deans have nottypically been trained to deal with the concerns and issues facing prospec-tive retirees.

In fact, very little in general is known about how to manage phasedretirement issues in colleges and universities. The literature on faculty retire-ment is thin at best, so this volume will be one of the very few publicationsdealing with phased retirement. But as a large generation of faculty reachestheir sixties, the need to understand who retires, why, when, and how is pressing.

Proportionally, the major concern of colleges and universities in thethree or four decades after World War II was finding enough qualified fac-ulty to fill positions in a rapidly expanding higher education system. Nowa maturing industry, higher education is faced with a dramatically increas-ing number of faculty members in their late fifties and early sixties—thosewho were hired during the boom years of the 1960s and 1970s. And just asthe tenured ranks have aged so quickly, so have institutions turned increas-ingly to temporary and part-time faculty as ways to put off making long-term financial commitments. Scarce state and federal funding and increasingtuition rates have limited institutions’ ability to attract and hold newerPh.D.s. Rapidly changing (and increasingly expensive) technology has alsocrimped institutions’ ability to invest where new Ph.D.s feel it is profes-sionally and scientifically important. So younger faculty appear to come andgo in a far less permanent relationship to their institutions, while thetenured ranks age further without replacements. We have found that phasedretirement helps both institutions and faculty in these circumstances.

For institutions, planning is made easier when they know who may bestepping down through a few years of partial employment and ultimatelyinto retirement. Phased retirement can also provide an incentive to keep tal-ented people from leaving too soon. (This is quite the opposite of what insti-tutions may have thought they would need to do after the uncapping ofmandatory retirement.) Also, faculty who phase into retirement acceptreduced pay. The recovered funds can be redeployed to areas in which theinstitution needs to invest.

The individual faculty member benefits by easing through the transi-tion to retirement and in several other obvious ways. Where institutionshave provided for phased retirees to start receiving payouts from their retire-ment plans, those who do phase are often at least as well off financially asthey were when working full time (see Chapter Four). They may continuetheir affiliation with their professional colleagues and continue to enjoy the

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION • DOI 10.1002/he

NEW WAYS TO RETIRE 7

life of the mind that has become for most a totally consuming way of life.Since many faculty lives are so fully engaged socially and psychologically intheir institutions and professional activities, “cold turkey” retirement is bothfeared and difficult to manage. Phasing provides a transition both from thisconsuming involvement and to whatever may come next in a major shift inone’s life course.

DAVID W. LESLIE is Chancellor Professor of Education at the College of Williamand Mary.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION • DOI 10.1002/he