First-year classes are often massive.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The University of Toronto is giving its older professors a gentle nudge, offering a retirement incentive largely designed to bring about some turnover in the faculty ranks.
The package released Wednesday offers a year's salary to about 500 faculty members and librarians age 60 or older and with 10 years service - a fifth of the faculty association's total membership - if they choose to retire in 2011.
Such initiatives are often aimed at saving money; older professors earn higher salaries while any new hires who replace them - often two or three years later - tend to be younger and lower on the salary scale.
But Angela Hildyard, a vice-president at U of T, said the goal was neither to cut costs nor reduce faculty numbers, but rather to "renew" the university's faculty by shifting teachers and researchers to areas that need them.
"Several of our faculties … may want to move into new or emerging areas of scholarship, or to strengthen particular areas," she said.
There is no mandatory retirement age for tenured professors, and while they are often esteemed academics carrying treasure troves of knowledge, their unpredictable longevity can throw off estimated retirement patterns and block new hires. According to recent Statistics Canada data, nearly 30 per cent of Canada's faculty members are aged 55 or over.
"I think there has been some concern that not enough people are retiring after age 65," said George Luste, president of the University of Toronto Faculty Association, adding that he thinks costs were still a consideration.
Crucially, the retirement offer contains a promise that the university will start searches to replace those who accept the incentive within five years.
The U of T package follows similar efforts at other large universities in recent years. McGill University and the University of Western Ontario made buyouts available in early 2009, and the University of Alberta followed suit last year. South of the border, Stanford University will spend up to $10-million a year on retirement incentives to make room for new professors.
Jan Jorgensen, an associate provost at McGill, said 81 people accepted the first phase of McGill's offer, a welcome and greater-than-expected response. But he also noted institutions offering retirement incentives are taking risks.
"We lost a couple of stars," he said.