Too Many or Too Few Professors in the '90s?

If everything goes as scheduled, 1994 could be a bad year for Harvard's junior professors.

A federal law prohibiting a mandatory retirement age is slated to take effect at universities around the country then, and many higher education experts say they fear that one result will be a logjam in hiring at schools such as Harvard.

Although higher education officials like Ernst Benjamin, the general secretary of the American Association of University Presidents, say that "national studies are showing that there won't be a problem," Benjamin concedes that the new law may have an effect at certain schools.

"The universities that are going to have a problem are ones where the compensations in faculty life are so attractive that people don't really want to retire," Benjamin said.

And Harvard, according to Benjamin and other national experts, is exactly the kind of research university with excellent facilities and a large endowment that may suffer the effects of the new law, as faculty members decide to hold on to their lifetime posts as long as possible.

In 1986, when Congress passed the federal law forbidding employers to set a mandatory retirement age, it gave universities a seven-year exemption so that they could readjust their benefit plans and insure that they could maintain a high quality staff.

Although universities around the country are planning to lobby Congress to extend their exemption from the law, national experts and Harvard administrators say they expect the new law will go into effect as originally planned.

If that happens, administrators and faculty members say the University will change its pension and benefit plans for professors. But they are less certain about the law's effects on faculty hiring--some say they are afraid a hiring stoppage could occur, though most are concerned that there may end up being too few, rather than too many, faculty members.

Harvard administrators cite recent surveys showing that most professors will not take advantage of the ban on mandatory retirement, and say that nearly 50 percent of the senior faculty will have left Harvard by the year 2000.

According to a national study conducted by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA), 80 percent of professors surveyed said they plan to retire before age 70. At Harvard, about 45.6 percent of the faculty will be 70 at the end of the next decade.

And that would leave the University in a major bind, professors and administrators say. Essentially, Harvard would then be forced to launch major recruiting drives for professors at a time when it has become increasingly difficult for the University to attract the top-notch scholars it has always sought.

"I don't really think this [federal ban on retirement] is going to be a major problem. I really think the big problem is going to be lack of people rather than too many people," says Aage B. Sorenson, head of the Sociology Department. "I think this actually is a good thing because there is going to be a lack of academic personnel."

Still, the retirement issue has generated much concern in both faculty and administrative circles. Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence created a faculty-administrator committee last year to investigate potential policy changes.

"If we do not have regular retirements, bringing newcomers to our faculty will be extremely difficult. I do not think such a situation is likely," Spence wrote in a report released last spring. "But what does happen depends in large part upon our policies as a Faculty and a University."

The committee has not yet completed a report, but its members say they will discuss everything from the practical issue of redesigning the pension plan to the vaguer concern that older professors holding tenure positions indefinitely may prevent the promotion of younger faculty members.

Faculty members and administrators say that the structure of the tenure system itself presents a major obstacle in formulating responses to the federal law. They say there will be no way to assure that professors who remain in their posts after age 70 will stay productive, since tenured professors are never reviewed for their teaching and scholarship.

"The obvious question is how to operate a University where people have tenure where their scholarship and teaching aren't reviewed regularly," says Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences Paul C. Martin '52, who sits on Spence's retirement committee. "We are studying what are the implications of various policy options and how they are available to the University."

Many administrators and faculty say they are uncertain whether lifting the mandatory retirement age will bring the policy of lifetime tenure without review into question. But most say they doubt Harvard will change its policy, citing fears about the University's commitment to academic freedom.

"When the rule hits, people who don't have the hearts, or fear the litigation, won't be able to say to someone 'You really should go,'" says Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus David Riesman '31. "I don't think it is going to be a huge problem, but in the places where it is a problem, it will be an extremely difficult one. It's not going to be universal, but it's going to be serious in a few places which you can't predict."

If professors do choose to remain at the University in full-time tenured slots, faculty members say their greatest concern is that senior posts which could be open to new faculty members will remain unavailable for extended periods.

"If people don't retire and we go on paying their salaries and providing facilities, what will we do about recruitment? If we go on recruiting at the same rate, Harvard will have more and more professors, which would be financially burdensome," says Houghton Professor of Chemistry Jeremy R. Knowles.

But Knowles says that the alternative to intensive recruitment is equally impracticable. "The opposite extreme is unthinkable: we'll just stop recruiting for four or five years. That would be outrageous. A whole generation of scholars would have no opportunity for academic advancement. It's bad for that generation, but it's also appalling for an academic institution not to receive a continuing infusion of new blood," he adds.

Knowles and other faculty members say they think the solution is clear: Harvard must make retirement more attractive by providing excellent benefits and insuring that giving up one's lifetime post does not mean complete removal from the academic community.

"Administrators in each of the schools are trying to figure out what they should do to create the right environment so that faculty can graciously retire at the appropriate time," says Vice President for Finance Robert H. Scott, who sits on Spence's committee and also heads a University-wide group investigating changes in pension and benefit plans after 1993.

"We must ask, 'What kind of encouragement does the academic discipline provide for the person to leave if that's the right thing, or to stay if that is," says Scott.

One alternative, according to Riesman, is to insure that aging faculty members secure emeritus status, a title he says will help professors remain involved in the academic community without displacing a younger generation of scholars.

"I should think that the governing board will continue to give emeritus status to a person who gives up his teaching status to let another person in," Riesman says. "I see sadly my agemates who have no projects--they whither. When teaching stops, when scholarship stops, when the faculty meetings stop, I think they find an emptiness."

The University will maintain its policy of granting emeritus status to faculty members after retirement, committee members say. The emeritus standing allows a professor to maintain a campus office and remain involved with academic life, but at the same time opens up a tenured spot for a new professor.

Another plan that faculty members say the University will almost definitely implement is a phased retirement system. The University will make agreements with professors to create a gradual retirement process, moving first to half-time employment, then, over the course of three or four years, into full retirement.

In addition to making sure that professors will not lose their place in the University community, administrators say Harvard is considering how to redesign its pension plan so that the retirement ban is not a big issue.

One of the University's most pressing concerns about lifting the mandatory retirement age is that the current pension plan is designed for a set retirement age, Scott says.

Under Harvard's current faculty pension plan, each year the University and a faculty member make a contribution to an interest-earning fund. When a professor retires, the fund--converted to an annuity and combined with Social Security--should provide about 70 to 80 percent of the faculty member's final income. The yearly amount is determined by the size of the fund, and the life expectancy of the faculty member.

"When the law takes effect, our current plan will overachieve the objective," says Scott. "You'll have faculty leaving with a pension higher than their salary. No company is interested in having that kind of a situation."

Retirement after 70 would change the pension in two ways, Scott says. First, the University and the professor would each be contributing to the fund for several more years, so the fund would be larger in real dollars.

In addition, the later professors retire, the shorter their life expectancy after retirement will be. So the portion of the fund used each year will increase not only because the fund itself is larger, but also because it is expected to last fewer years.

"The problem with respect to lifting mandatory retirement is that the longer the annuity is there, the greater the sum will be, so at some point not too soon after age 70, the pension will be greater than income," says Joan Bruce, the University benefits director.

There are several different pension plans the University could choose to adopt, but administrators say choosing a new one is difficult because they must accomodate not only professors with lifetime posts at the University, but also junior faculty members who plan to leave Harvard and teach elsewhere.

A pension plan in a field like academia, where there is a high turnover, must be designed so that professors who stay at Harvard for only a few years can take a certain amount with them.

And junior faculty concerns are in many ways present behind-the-scenes in the administrative deliberations about retirement.

If Harvard cannot find ways to replace the nearly 50 percent of the senior faculty who will likely leave in the next two decades, then the entire question of faculty retirement is moot, administrators say.

"I don't think there are going to be a lot of people saying they want to teach past 70. Most people I know really want to leave at age 65," says Lowell Professor of the Humanties William Alfred '49. "It doesn't look like a tough profession but it really is. They'd have to bring them in on ironing boards."

And if faculty members continue to leave at or around age 70, the University will have to fill a huge number of posts in the next decade, a task which many fear Harvard cannot perform.

"In an atmosphere of steady or declining numbers of earned doctorates and of increasing demand for the best people, we must take steps to insure that our recruitment policies and practices are effective," Spence wrote in last spring's report. "More appointments will be required each year to maintain our strength."

But the University's ability to recruit junior faculty has been under attack for the past several years, as younger academics say that the near-impossibility of being promoted from within Harvard's faculty makes the University a less attractive workplace than many of the other prestigious schools, such as Columbia or the University of California at Berkeley.

In addition, the high cost of housing in Boston and the difficulty of luring two-career academic families are intensifying the competition to recruit the best junior faculty. Those concerns are particularly pressing, experts say, because the pool of high-quality young scholars has decreased, and will only get smaller in the 1990s.

"We must ask where the replacements will be coming from. Here at Harvard and other research universities, a very large part of the faculty comes from smaller research colleges [which are suffering themselves from a smaller pool of faculty]," says Riesman.

But the need for those smaller colleges to keep providing an influx of fresh blood for Harvard is contingent upon one thing: Will the University's already-tenured professors decide to hold on to their jobs or move aside for the next generation?