shinysherlock: earlgreytea68: a-forger-and-a-point-man: npr: Protected by tenure that prevents them
shinysherlock:earlgreytea68:a-forger-and-a-point-man:npr:Protected by tenure that prevents them from being dismissed without cause, and with no mandatory retirement age, a significant proportion of university faculty isn’t going anywhere. A third are 55 and older, compared with 20 percent of the rest of the workforce, according to the University of Iowa Center on Aging.And while 36 percent of all workers plan to put off their retirements beyond the age of 65, the proportion of university and college faculty who intend to delay stepping down is more than double that, the financial services company TIAA-CREF reports. Another study found that 60 percent of faculty planned to work past 70, and 15 percent to stay until they’re 80.This dramatic trend foretells more than a future of campuses populated by white-haired professors in sensible shoes and tweed jackets with elbow patches. Universities say it’s making it harder for them to cut costs and improve productivity exactly at a time when students and their families are balking at the high cost of a higher education.And when those students — not to mention politicians and business leaders — are expecting a better return on that investment, the institutions say the buildup of aging faculty leaves them less able to respond to changing demand for new kinds of majors, or to declining enrollments, and that it’s also blocking younger Ph.D.s from entering the workforce.On Campus, Older Faculty Keep On Keepin’ OnIllustration: Paul Blow for NPR@earlgreytea68 and @involuntaryorange: added commentary plzI actually didn’t realize this situation was so much worse in academia than everywhere else. I keep jumping from career to career and in every career I’m told I picked the wrong profession and it’s a sinking ship. I have reached the conclusion it’s just terrible everywhere out there. That said, my field is law, where I haven’t really seen this happening. We’ve had a few retirements just in the few years I’ve been teaching, and we’re not a big faculty, so we feel those retirements. I wonder if there’s something about law professors in particular that make them more amenable to the idea of retiring? (Granted, the professors who retired were mostly much, much older than traditional retiring age, by my guess. Possibly terribly inaccurate guess.) I have very little understanding of what’s going on in other law schools, though. Law schools have been plagued by catastrophic historic lows in quality applications, so it could be that I don’t hear about this aging professor problem because we have a lot of other problems demanding our attention first? Well, unsurprisingly, it’s complicated. I teach English (composition and lit) and I know excellent, innovative teachers at my college in their 70s–and rather horrible teachers in their 30s. All with tenure. And to to say that lack of faculty retiring is the reason younger folks with PhDs are “blocked” from being hired is a vast oversimplification of a system that claims quality education is its main goal and yet treats learning like a product-based, customer satisfaction-focused assembly line. When over 60% of your faculty is part-time (as it is at my school and many others), you are prioritizing the bottom line, and that has very little to do with the relatively few positions taken up by folks not retiring at 70.YES. THIS. the whole claim here is so much bullshit. Why talk about the bloated salaries of upper level admin or sports coaches that go into the millions when you can blame senior professors who are usually working for under 100 grand and actually are out there doing the thing that universities are supposed to be doing, you know, teaching and researching…Yes, there should be earlier retirements but NO that is NOT the reason for the rising tuitions and NO that is NOT the reason that universities can’t “modernize” or whatever bullshit they are spouting here, unless by “modernize” they mean “hire underpaid, exploited labor”. -- source link
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