The Cornell faculty is getting older.
Like the American population as a whole, the number of faculty in higher age groups is increasing. With no mandatory retirement age, professors are staying in their positions longer than they expected to when they began their careers.
Those factors, combined with the budgetary cutbacks that have occurred at all levels in recent years, have seriously restricted the flow of new faculty into the university. And the lack of "new blood" can lead to a kind of academic anemia, manifested in decreased intellectual energy, fewer new ideas and new perspectives and restricted ability to diversify the faculty along gender, racial and ethnic lines.
These concerns led to the formation last fall of
the Provost's Committee on the Transition of Faculty to
Emeritus Status, chaired by Ronald G. Ehrenberg, vice
president for academic programs, planning and budgeting. The
committee has prepared a draft report that proposes
recommendations in the areas of career-long financial planning,
phased retirement, transitioning to emeritus faculty status and
faculty compensation policies.
The draft report will be widely discussed on campus before final recommendations are made, Ehrenberg said. Discussions will be held in the Academic Leadership Series on May 1 and in the Faculty Senate. Other groups from whom input will be sought include the academic deans, the Association of Cornell University Professors Emeritus and the Campus Life Committee of the Cornell Board of Trustees.
While noting that the vast majority of faculty nearing retirement age at Cornell are highly productive, Ehrenberg said that the fiscal impact of increasing numbers of later retirements is significant. Thirty-five percent of current faculty were hired before 1978, when the mandatory retirement age was raised from 65 to 70. Twenty-seven percent of the faculty were hired between 1978 and 1987, when the mandatory retirement age was eliminated (although this change did not become effective until 1994).
"Because of these changes in the law, the majority of faculty currently at Cornell have received the opportunity to remain employed for longer than they or the university expected at their times of hire," Ehrenberg noted.
He said the committee, made up of faculty and administrators, based its numerous recommendations on several principles:
·Faculty benefits packages should be designed to ensure that retirement will be financially feasible at historical retirement ages and should not provide disincentives for retirement.
·Departments and colleges must continually review faculty workloads to be sure that they are equitably distributed across faculty.
·Tenure must be considered a "two-way street" in which the faculty member "must accept the obligation to think in terms of the well-being of his or her department, college and the institution as a whole."
·Phased retirement options for both endowed and statutory faculty should be adopted to facilitate the transition to emeritus professor status.
·The status of emeritus professors should be enhanced and they should be treated as the valuable human resources that they are.
"The committee hopes to have substantial and productive discussions of its draft report in the coming months, and we urge faculty to review this report and provide comments by Oct. 1," Ehrenberg said. The final report will be submitted to the provost in November.
The full text of the draft report will be available within two weeks on the World Wide Web at http://www.ipr.cornell.edu . Hard copies will be distributed to all faculty members as well, Ehrenberg said.