U of T will end mandatory retirement for its faculty and librarians effective July 1, 2005, the university announced on Monday. Professors and librarians will no longer be forced to retire at age 65, ending a rule that the University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA) has been fighting for years. The new agreement was hammered out in mediation between U of T administration and UTFA throughout February.
“We’ve been talking with the faculty association about this issue for a very long time,” said U of T VP of Human Resources and Equity Angela Hildyard on Wednesday. “We wanted to look at this in a very comprehensive way to develop options that we thought from both our perspectives met the needs of individual faculty members and librarians to have choice, and the needs of the university to be able to plan, to be able to attract and retain senior scholars.”
“We worked very hard over very many years, as did the administration, to make this come about,” said George Luste, UTFA president. “We’re certainly pleased that this is before us right now for final approval.”
The agreement between UTFA and U of T, which must still pass at Governing Council, does not just end the retire-at-65 rule; it presents several retirement options for senior faculty: early retirement; “postponed” retirement, allowing faculty to work past age 65, in theory for as long as they like; and “phased retirement,” which is a three-year program for faculty who wish to cut back to part-time teaching and research in their last few years before retirement.
“It made sense for this university to look at that entire relationship for individuals approaching, at, and post- retirement, and we wanted to look at it in a holistic way,” said Hildyard.
“It’s fairly comprehensive,” said Luste. “It makes it easier for people to retire sooner, it gives people the option of phasing out their retirement, it allows people to retire later. It says that after you retire, even if you don’t really get a salary anymore, you can still have an affiliation, a connection, and be a participant in the values and opportunities of the university.”
Legislation from Queen’s Park is widely expected to end mandatory retirement province-wide in the next few years, so U of T’s move is at least partly in anticipation of this. But Hildyard said that the move simply made sense for everyone.
“For us, it was more a matter of saying: ‘What’s in our best interest?’, never mind the legislation-which in our opinion will be pretty bare-bones legislation. How can we structure this so that it meets the individual faculty members’ needs and the university’s needs, and let’s do it in a way where all the issues are available for us to address and to negotiate.
Reaction to the decision among U of T faculty was mixed.
“I have to say it’s excellent,” said Prof. Thomas McIntire, who teaches religion at Victoria College. “I’m glad U of T has done that, and high grades to the U of T Faculty Association for getting it that far.” But McIntire, who turned 65 last October 4 (see The Varsity, Oct. 18), is still waiting to hear what his fate will be when the current school year ends. The agreement between U of T and UTFA covers faculty and librarians who turn 65 after July 1, 2005; McIntire and the estimated 50-60 faculty members who are scheduled to retire this spring will still have to take some kind of retirement. And McIntire isn’t happy about it.
“I have to say that in three and a half months I walk out the door against my will,” said McIntire on Tuesday. “I know the rules at my university are changed, and it feels extraordinarily unfair to push us out the door now, if they don’t make these transitional arrangements genuine for the 2005 [retirees].”
The agreement, posted on UTFA’s website on Wednesday night, does include one clause on the status of faculty who turned 65 during this academic year: they are to be given the special three-year “phased retirement.” McIntire, who wants to keep teaching full time, described this measure as “half good.”
“That would be the positive way of saying it, I suppose,” he said on Wednesday, adding that he still would prefer to remain a full-time professor.
Other faculty members were not so happy with the new agreement.
“The main issue, the important one, is that it’s much harder for us to find jobs,” said Prof. Matt Price, a visiting assistant professor of history. Price said that young faculty members like him have enough difficulties at work-their lower pay, less job security, scarce opportunities for advancement-without having older faculty remaining in their jobs years past retirement.
“Every job that someone doesn’t retire from is a job that isn’t available to us,” he said. “If people really take up this offer, and really don’t retire at 65, then there’s a genuine possibility that new jobs are not going to materialize, which is a disaster for those of us who are younger and don’t have tenure-track jobs already.”
“That’s an argument we hear on occasion,” said Michael Doucet, president of the Ontario Coalition of University Faculty Associations. “It clearly is not the case. The sky has not fallen in other jurisdictions that have done this; there’s no evidence whatsoever that there’s been any impediments to hiring young faculty.” In Quebec, Doucet said, where mandatory retirement was abolished in the mid 1980s, less than two per cent of university faculty are over the age of 65. Furthermore, Ontario is expected to need to hire 11,000 new faculty members in the next five to six years, and Doucet said that those professors who would keep working past 65 are a drop in the bucket from that perspective.
McIntire agreed that the problem isn’t old professors-it’s lack of government funding.
“Younger people haven’t gotten jobs in the last ten years, and it has nothing to do with retirements or ending it or anything else,” he said. “It has everything to do with government underfunding of universities, and universities not pushing to get positions that they really need. What I’d advise [Price] to do is to push the university to go into a blitz of hiring, and that means of course pushing the government.
“There’s room for everybody in this boat, that’s what the message is.”
