About 20 to 30 professors will retire under the faculty retirement incentive, Provost Peter Lange estimated last week.
The deadline for professors to decide to retire was Jan. 30. Professors, however, have a 45-day period to change their minds so the exact number retiring will not be available until mid-March.
“We’ve never had a program like this where we could make the resources available so that the deans could help alleviate the concerns of some of the faculty members,” Lange said. “The success of this incentive is going to vary across schools, but I think [it will be successful] overall.”
The retirement incentive could be offered to professors who meet the Rule of 75 in every school except Medicine and Nursing. Professors who accept the incentive will retire by June 30, 2011.
The handling of the retirement packages and negotiations is unclear, and it is unknown what schools the 20 to 30 professors are retiring from.
“The process was fundamentally managed by the deans of each school and as a result there was variation throughout schools,” Lange said.
Tom Katsouleas, dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, said no one in Pratt had accepted a package yet, but noted that he and a chair contacted eligible faculty by phone or in person to inform them of the incentive.
“The spirit of this [is] that there may be faculty that are ready and would like to retire and for whom the financial downturn in particular may prevent them from fulfilling that wish,” Katsouleaus said.
George McLendon, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, said he did not want to comment until Feb. 22 when he would have “more information.”
Blair Sheppard, dean of the Fuqua School of Business was in India and unavailable to comment. Administrators at the Nicholas School of the Environment were compiling the numbers but did not make them available Thursday evening.
The incentive aims to sustain a level of faculty renewal, Lange said. He added that administrators have seen signs that retirements, faculty leaving to take positions at other universities and hiring would all slow down.
“The renewal of faculty on a regular basis is very important to keeping a very lively intellectual environment,” Lange said. “Furthermore, it also allows you to maintain the demographic balance within your faculty because we have no one new coming in at the young end and the senior people [are] staying longer. You’re going to get an aging of your faculty that is not in itself bad, but you don’t want to have gaps because eventually something is awry.”
Lange said the money the schools borrow from the University’s central fund to pay for the retirees’ offers would not be subject to interest.
“As we said from the beginning it is not fundamentally a budgetary measure,” Lange said. “There may be some savings in the short run... It is a faculty renewal measure [for] faculty who may have been thinking about retiring before the financial crisis and found themselves more uncertain whether or not they could do it and what the conditions would be.”
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