A recent New York Times article discussed how the job market for PhD economists is unusually tight this year. This sentence drew my attention: “In some cases, the tenured ranks have become clogged by baby boomers putting off retirement.”
This is an interesting issue. It may seem as if the old and befuddled professor, unsteadily making his way across campus in a tweed jacket, papers occasionally falling from a briefcase unnoticed into a snowbank, is nothing new. The brilliant-yet-scatterbrained trope of the academic dates back to a time before academics even existed. An ancient story says the Greek philosopher and polymath Thales of Miletus was so intensely looking up at the stars he fell down a well. A servant girl was conveniently on hand to make fun of him. By the 20th century, disheveled professors with Einsteinian hair were a well-known trope. The reality, however, is that the absent-minded professor of the 20th century was not old, certainly not in his 70s. Even Fred MacMurray, the star of a Disney movie literally called “The Absent-Minded Professor,” was in his 50s when the movie was released. Same with Professor Hubert Alyea, the real-life inspiration for the film.
In reality, there used to be very few old professors on campus. Why? Most universities had a mandatory retirement age. As one recent article describes it, “Until 1982, colleges and universities could mandate the retirement of faculty at age sixty-five, and, until 1994, they could mandate retirement at age seventy.” And these were truly mandatory. It didn’t matter who you were or how much you had done. Milton Friedman, winner of the Nobel prize for economics and arguably the greatest economist of the 21st century, retired from the University of Chicago at 65. Albert Einstein, the ultimate academic, stepped down from his institute at Princeton at the same age. Neither quit academia entirely. Friedman would continue to work for decades out of Stanford’s Hoover Institute. Einstein continued to do research. They were, however, no longer tenured professors.
This was how universities operated. Scholars began their careers as tenure-track professors, where they would do research and teach for around six years. Then, they would go up for tenure. If denied, they had to move to a different university. If granted, they had a job until they turned 65. Then they would retire and make way for the next generation of scholars. In the 1980s, as the civil rights movement expanded to issues beyond race, this blatant example of age discrimination drew attention. Amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, passed in 1986, made it illegal for most professions to have mandatory retirement ages. Higher education was given an initial exception, but this ended in 1994. Since then, tenure has conveyed a job for life.
This is an interesting issue because there are two ways to look at it. From a discrimination issue, it’s clear: there’s no reason to have a mandatory retirement age for a teaching job. If the pilots or firefighters have a mandatory retirement age, fine, lives are at stake. But not for teachers.
From a labor market issue, however, this has created a much bigger problem than originally anticipated. During the exemption period, when universities were still allowed to have a mandatory retirement age of 70, the federal government convened a committee to examine the issue. The committee’s report ultimately recommended that “…there is no strong basis for continuing the exemption for tenured faculty. The committee recommends that the ADEA exemption permitting the mandatory retirement of tenured faculty be allowed to expire at the end of 1993.” [Note: in this and all other quotes from the report, the bold font is in the original.]
This conclusion was reached because, at the time, professors retired. Even at colleges that didn’t have mandatory retirement ages, most stepped down in their 60s. The report found that at “uncapped” schools, where faculty could work as long as they wanted, a minuscule 1.6% of professors stayed employed past the age of 70.
The report concludes:
Despite the growing number of older faculty members in U.S. institutions of higher education, evidence from uncapped colleges and universities suggests that few tenured faculty now continue to work past 70. Current faculty retirement patterns suggest most faculty choose to retire before the mandatory retirement age. The committee concludes: Higher education as a whole is likely to experience few changes in faculty behavior or demographics as a result of the elimination of mandatory retirement, and a significant number and proportion of faculty will choose to work past age 70 at a few research universities.
Of course, reality proved otherwise. We live in a far different era than one where 98.6 percent of professors retire by age 70. In fact, the odds have flipped. According to one study, 60% of faculty are expected to work past 70, and 15% are expected to work past 80. This is a massive shift. Far more professors work into their 80s today than professors used to work into their 70s. What happened?
This is a great example of cultural norms can play a big role in decision making. Because most schools had an iron-clad retirement age, even professors at schools that didn’t followed the culture. Professors were forced to retire at 65 or 70, and they did. Professors who could stay on longer generally were in the minority and generally didn’t. Any that stayed later but didn’t pull their weight would quickly be subject to the anger of the rest of the department. Once no professor was bound by the mandatory retirement age, the culture shifted. More and more professors stayed longer and longer. Far from being exceptional, a 70-year-old professor today sounds normal. Faculty quickly realized they could essentially semi-retire and still be paid in full. As one department chair at an R1 university once told me, “A full professor can work ten hours a week and get paid over $100,000. Why would anyone give that up?”
The ripple effects of this shift have been large. One concern about removing the mandatory retirement age was that it would endanger tenure. The thinking was that universities would now be more hesitant to grant faculty jobs-for-life rather than jobs-until-65. The federal committee, however, said this would not happen:
Tenure does not protect faculty against dismissal for inadequate performance. Colleges and universities can dismiss tenured faculty for adequate cause provided they afford due process in a clearly defined and understood dismissal procedure. Therefore, the committee concludes: Eliminating mandatory retirement would not pose a threat to tenure.”
Unfortunately, eliminating mandatory retirement did pose a threat to tenure. The ratio of tenured-to-untenured faculty has flipped over the last half-century. In 1975, there were roughly three tenured or tenure-track professors for every non-tenure-track instructor. Today, it’s the exact opposite: roughly 75% of college instructors are either full-time non-tenure-track employees or part-time adjuncts.
I’ve seen that evolution first-hand. Many senior professors at my university retired during Covid. Most of them were replaced with non-tenure-track hires. My home department had one tenured professor retire several years ago. He was replaced with a non-tenure-track instructor. When my current senior colleagues retire, I expect much of the same. The day could come when I am the only tenured professor left.
To be fair, the demise of tenure has more than one cause. It isn’t solely because mandatory retirement ages were scrapped. But the shift definitely played a role. Universities have budget constraints. Knowing exactly how long you were going to pay full professors was a huge edge. Universities knew that a 60-year-old tenured professor would continue to draw a high salary for five more years. Then, that retired professor could be replaced with a tenure-track professor who cost less than half as much. Universities could plan out tenure lines years in advance. Today, a 60-year-old tenured professor could easily teach for another 15 years. Maybe another 25.
So what’s the answer? Herman Berliner of Hofstra University has an interesting solution: make tenure term-limited. Most professor begin their career in their early to mid-30s. They are granted tenure in their upper 30s to early 40s. If tenure was capped at, say, 30 years, that could solve a lot of the problems. If after 30 years of tenure, professors were automatically converted to non-tenure-track employees on renewable contracts, that would serve two functions. First, many would retire. Second, those who didn’t would be subject to the same expectations as other non-tenure-track instructors and could be fired for poor performance. This system would also largely preserve the benefits of the tenure system, namely academic freedom. I’m sure it would have drawbacks, but it sounds like a reasonable middle ground.