A Moral Obligation to Retire?

Retirement?

Isn’t this a little besides the point? When somebody retires nowadays, the full-time slot tends to disappear only to be filled by contingent labor.

Louis Proyect, at 9:00 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Moral obligation to retire

1. “New perspectives” and “change” are to be viewed as “good” in and of themselves? Most change is non-adaptive. I my experience, prior to getting tenure, many newbies on the faculty keep their heads down and don’t venture anything new. 2.Wisdom developed over to decades of varied experiences isn’t even worth mentioning? Well, if you don’t have any of that wisdom I guess it’s hard to see it.

Barb, Assoc. Prof., at 9:40 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Retirement as an Institutional Necessity

The following is Section XIV of my “A Sixty-Year Ride through the World of Education,” Hamilton Books, 2007.

XIVRETIREMENT AS AN INSTITUTIONAL NECESSITY

There certainly is such a thing as age discrimination, and it was pervasive until, in 1986, thanks to the passion and political skills of the congressman from Florida, Claude Pepper, mandatory retirement was eliminated for almost all workers. An exception was made for postsecondary institutions; they were permitted to enforce mandatory retirement at the age of seventy until the end of 1993. After that, all retirement would be voluntary. The first of these changes was one of degree, since prior to this congressional action many institutions had required stepping down at sixty-five and oth-ers at sixty-eight. The change that began in 1994, however, is one of kind, since, together with the practice of granting indefinite tenure, the profes-soriate was from then on guaranteed lifetime employment. The effects of the new policy have been much studied, but the revela-tions have not been startling. Many faculty members retire later than they did pre-1994; the average age of the faculties at most institutions has risen, especially at research universities. That fact, together with the finding that professors with higher salaries are more inclined to postpone their retire-ment, has increased the total cost of the professoriate, a condition that has undoubtedly fueled the tendency to hire cheap part-timers to do an in-creasing proportion of undergraduate teaching. Further, there seems to have been little if any modification of the institutional disinclination in the academy to evaluate the performance of tenured faculty members, not to mention instigate proceedings that would deprive them of tenure for rea-sons of substandard performance. On the assumption that those people who retain all of their sharpness, vigor, creativity, and enthusiasm into the mid-seventies and beyond are the exception rather than the norm, the overall quality of faculty activity must have declined. It can be argued that these not-so-drastic institutional deficiencies are not too high a price to pay for freedom accorded to faculty members to determine when to quit rather than being put out to pasture when they would much prefer to continue in harness. Moreover, there are at least two components to a retirement decision, an economic one and one that might be referred to as a matter of lifestyle. Retirement should not bring with it a drop in living standard, especially considering that most retirees will have made significant payments into retirement plans, as well as FICA, throughout their careers. I myself decided on the date to quit when the economic tea leaves suggested that I could afford to. While the needed cal-culations are complex and contain a number of uneliminable uncertainties, it is not hard to come by competent help. I seem to have succeeded, since in more than a decade of retirement, my living standard did not undergo any shocks. The matter of lifestyle is more complex. Some faculty members past sev-enty are still fruitfully involved in research and in need of university re-sources, ranging from the use of its libraries to maintaining a laboratory. Others are reluctant to give up teaching, feeling that they continue to be effective instructors of undergraduates or in giving guidance to doctoral students—and enjoy doing so. Finally, there are some who do not want to give up the camaraderie and stimulation of departmental life and interac-tion with colleagues. These considerations, too, are good reasons to post-pone retirement. But it is time now to focus on an additional consequence of the elimina-tion of mandatory retirement. The other side of the aging faculty coin is that fewer young and freshly minted doctorates are recruited into the acad-emy. And that is a serious matter, because ultimately colleges and universi-ties depend on newly trained brains for the infusion of new ideas. That you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is a genuine handicap when it is impera-tive that new tricks be performed. Take two of the scholarly revolutions that took place during my years in the academy. The first was the mathe-matization of economics. Until developments in the 1950s one neither needed to know much mathematics nor statistics to be a competent economist. That rapidly stopped being the case, with the economics jour-nals coming to be chock full of equations, graphs, and tables. Few if any of the older economists turned around to learn the needed math: the field was transformed from below, so to speak, by young newcomers. And so it was with the other revolution I want to point to: the move in biology from the level of the organism and the cell to the molecule and its components. Again, only a rare old-style biologist acquired the techniques that were needed in the new versions of the field; it was the youngsters that made the transition. It is vital, therefore—and “vital” is the right word—for the academy to be steadily renewed by the entry of men and women who are recently trained and who bring into their departments new ideas and new techniques. The graying of the faculties has slowed down that infusion and courts the dan-ger of stagnation. That, in the language of 1066 and All That, is a Bad Thing. So, to borrow Lenin’s title, What Is to Be Done? On the wholesale level, institutions have devised attractive early retirement options and will surely continue to do so from time to time. These inducements are no doubt effective in lowering the average age of the faculty, but it also turns out that the more able faculty find these buyouts particularly attractive, since, after having received the goodies from the institution they have been serving, they can turn around and cop additional earnings elsewhere. While wholesale early retirement programs nevertheless achieve their central goal, there is a need to work at the retail level in an ongoing way. When it has been established that a professor’s net income after retirement will not differ very much from what it was before that step is taken, there are ways in which feared lifestyle changes can be mitigated and even elimi-nated. This just-stated economic hypothesis is plausible even if perhaps counterintuitive. Before retirement, a faculty member makes a substantial contribution to a retirement plan, and pays not a little to the federal gov-ernment for Social Security. That balance sheet goes from a hefty minus to a heftier plus. An astute administrator must exhibit these and other eco-nomic facts to a potential retiree to allay fears of a contracted future. Then there is a need to deal with the equally important issue of lifestyle. Part of the answer involves the difficult matter of real estate. Few institu-tions, if any, have the space to allot offices to their emeriti, while having a home on campus is sine qua non for the preservation of the faculty lifestyle. But there are solutions: offices for groups of retired faculty members, since no one of them is likely to spend all that much time on campus, or cubicles in the library for research-minded emeriti. These are among the possibili-ties; what matters above all is that enabling a presence on campus is seen as a problem that must be solved. Beyond a home, there is the need for in-volvement. Given the large number of part-timers colleges and universities hire to get the needed teaching done, offering the opportunity to teach a limited number of courses to retired professors must be regarded as a win-win proposition. The institution gains an experienced instructor at a rea-sonable cost, while the professor-returning-as-lecturer stays involved while earning modest fees on top of retirement income and Social Security. In short, arrangements are often possible that satisfy both institutional and individual needs.A final moralistic conclusion. Persons who have chosen to make their life’s work the teaching and research that is possible only as members of academic institutions have an obligation to the colleges and universities that enabled them to lead the very special lives that are afforded to the pro-fessoriate. An important component of that obligation is to realize that there is a moment when stepping down and making way for younger schol-ars and fresher ideas is more valuable to the academic establishment than continuing with one’s own contributions.

Rudolph H. Weingartner, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Pittsburgh, at 10:05 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Moral Obligation to Retirement of Older Scholars

I am an older scholar. Where is is written, “morally", that the older, experienced scholar must fall on his own knife to make way for a freshly minted one? This idea of retirement is merely the old “Ageism” discriminatory vileness put into a new wrapper. If a scholar is healthy, mentally agile and is contributing to his field, and is producing research, then he/she should be given respect and allowed to stay.

Instead of finding ever creative ways to divide up the employment pie, everyone concerned should be bending every effort to increase the size of the academic pie. It is, however, easier to point fingers and fix the blame, instead of fixing the problem.

Thus, if there are not enough available positions in a particular college or university department, then it is the moral obligation of that department and its chair to expand the department, so new professors can be brought on board.

Dr. Douglas M. Cotner

Dr. Douglas M. Cotner, at 1:20 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

“A Moral Obligation to Retire”

I am a 66 year old tenured faculty member at a State university. Counting summer school, I teach eight sections a year at the senior and graduate levels. Two years ago, I won a university-wide teaching award. I currently have one book and one article under review. My university has a hiring freeze, and is laying off part-time faculty. I enjoy my job, and have no plan to retire in the near future. By the way, one of the subjects I teach is ethics. I’m doing well, and my conscience is clear. I realize that one data point does not a sample make, but my situation is one part of the complex reality under discussion.

Joseph Gilbert, at 10:05 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Moral Obligation to Earn a Paycheck?

This discussion is interesting, but it’s kind of, well, academic.

Sure, I have tenure, a Ph.D. and a lot of hard-won experience teaching undergraduates, but I teach full-time for the same basic reason other people my age take a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart — I need the money.

Dr. Scrooge, at 9:45 am EDT on July 22, 2008

Instead of having the old professors quit to make room for mere part-time positions — the most likely outcome — the debate needs to be shifted to the obligation of institutions to hire full Ph.d’s rather than use (and often abuse) temp workers and grad students.

Is this really an issue of oversupply or one of administrative choices creating a false scarcity of jobs?

Oh, and we can’t talk about tuition without dealing with the two elephants in the room, those being costs relating to administration and athletics.

Joseph_C, at 5:05 am EDT on July 23, 2008

Out to pasture?

Avoid the whole moral issue. Abolish tenure.

Tenure rewards those who would sell their souls for a lifetime job with long summer vacations. Tenure no longer protects only those with unpopular ideas, but those who made no waves until they got tenure, at which point they stopped doing much of anything.

And maybe there should be more emphasis on good teaching and less on bad publishing.

Just my $.02 worth as an untenured adjunct, a lawyer, and the child of two tenured professors.

The First Amendment is sufficient to protect anything tenure is supposed to.

Marie, at 3:15 pm EDT on July 25, 2008