Chronicle: To Ease Professors Into Retirement, A ‘Terminal Sabbatical’

Chronicle of Higher Education, To Ease Professors Into Retirement, a ‘Terminal Sabbatical’:

Widener University administrators ... conceived of an option they’d like to begin offering soon: the terminal sabbatical. The idea is to allow eligible faculty members, on the basis of years of service, to take a one-year sabbatical from which they would then retire, without returning to the faculty. Julie E. Wollman, Widener’s president, says she hopes such a program would encourage more professors to retire by easing their transition out of campus life. ...

Administrators are just beginning to sketch out the specifics of their idea and to pitch it to faculty members, but they envision that a professor who takes a terminal sabbatical would continue to receive a salary and benefits for one year while doing the kind of research and writing one would do on a typical sabbatical. The year might also include some form of service to the university, like performing an analysis of a proposed program or helping to revamp curricula.

[A]dministrators and faculty-retirement experts say the increasing availability of retirement incentives, including buyouts, has led to an unintended consequence: Faculty members now expect them and choose to linger in their jobs, so as to avoid missing one that may be just around the corner. ...

Widener recently offered buyouts to groups of faculty members, most of them in law and business. Administrators say the buyout programs, in which professors were given a year or more of salary in exchange for retiring, show that they do respond to retirement incentives. In all, about 50 professors took the offers during programs this year and in 2013, a significant chunk of the faculty. Widener now has 235 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. ...

At the law school, Widener wanted to cut costs amid shrinking enrollment, a nationwide trend at law schools; Widener’s enrollment dropped 37 percent from the fall of 2012 to the fall of 2015, when the school enrolled about 800 full-time-equivalent students. ...

Not all retirement incentives are created equal. And it remains to be seen whether terminal sabbaticals — which, unlike buyouts, wouldn’t come with a year’s salary for no work, but rather with a year’s salary in exchange for working on a project — would have the same appeal to professors.

Three years ago, when he was 64, Michael J. Goldberg, a law professor at Widener, could have taken a buyout but didn’t, because he felt he had a few good years of faculty service ahead of him. Besides, he wasn’t old enough to qualify for university health insurance for retirees. This year, for two full years of his salary, he took the offer. “I wasn’t dying to leave the work, and I’m still good at it, I’d like to think,” he says. “I don’t know whether one year would have been enough of an incentive.” Mr. Goldberg says he also would have considered taking a terminal sabbatical for one year of his salary. “It certainly would have been attractive,” he says. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

‘WHY WOULD I QUIT?’
But administrators recognize that there are many others, like David Ward, a 67-year-old professor of philosophy, who won’t be swayed by a terminal sabbatical or any other incentive. Mr. Ward says he enjoys his work too much to quit. “I get paid for reading interesting books and talking about interesting topics,” he says. “Why would I quit that?

Even so, he’s a supporter of terminal sabbaticals. He knows faculty members who no longer share his passion for the work, who might be better off doing something else but who hang on for the security of a paycheck. “There are professors who burn out, get frustrated at the quality of students, or just lose interest,” Mr. Ward says. “The students aren’t getting the best, the discipline isn’t getting the best, and the faculty member isn’t having any fun. In those cases, retirement incentives are a win for everyone.”