The Senate Executive Committee discusses creating a task force to study how the university can meet the needs of emeritus faculty Tuesday.
The University Senate plans to assign a task force to study age-related issues of emeritus faculty at the university.
The Faculty Affairs Committee proposed the senate and the provost work together to take a closer look at elderly faculty, as the university has a disproportionately large number of retirement-ready professors compared to its peer institutions. The task force would deal with bringing in new faculty to fill the large void left by older professors and also look at how to engage older faculty after retirement.
The executive committee — the senate’s most powerful committee — voted unanimously Tuesday to look into the problem further.
“We recommended that this is an important enough issue that a task force should be formed to study it,” Chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee Eric Kasischke said. “Nobody’s thought about this before. It’s an additional challenge the university faces.”
The Faculty Affairs Committee collected data about the ages of tenure-track faculty and found that of the 1,455 professors, almost 50 percent are above the age of 55. Officials said a combination of both historic trends and recent economic troubles have contributed to the larger population of older professors.
“This is a unique problem,” Kasischke said. “The university’s faculty started growing rapidly after World War II. Most of those professors have stayed and are now at retirement age. But the economy impacted people’s decisions to retire.”
Although the task force doesn’t have a formal plan of action yet, officials said they will examine how the university recruits new tenure-track faculty after elderly professors retire.
“How do we replace these aging faculty when they do retire?” asked senator Lillian Doherty. “That’s something that really needs to be looked at, whether it’s through this task force or another.”
The task force will also determine what kinds of services should be offered to these aging faculty members, such as how to facilitate retirement and how the university will handle so many emeritus faculty.
Some emeritus faculty members said that while retired professors used to complain about a lack of interaction with the university, conditions have improved over the last few years.
“It took some time, but the university has developed some pretty nice relationships with emeritus faculty,” said Marvin Breslow, an emeritus professor and parliamentarian of the senate. “There were a lot of complaints before I retired [in 2000] that we were ignoring emeritus faculty, and they were a resource we should be using better. I feel pretty good about the university reaching out and being available. It’s up to me whether or not I take part in all of those interactions.”
Kasischke and his committee will expand on their report, documenting a formal charge and incorporating the suggestions made by the executive committee and will present it to the senate body as a draft on May 5.
redding@umdbk.com
