Law Reform: A Proposed Remedy for “Deeply Toxic” Damage to Higher Ed Caused by Abolition of Mandatory Retirement

Bentley University Professors  Beverley Earle and Marianne Delbo Kulow have a nicely provocative article in the Spring 2015 issue of the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, titled The “Deeply Toxic” Damage Caused by the Abolition of Mandatory Retirement and its Collision with Tenure in Higher Education: A Proposal for Statutory Repair.  From the introduction:

There are very few positions that offer the level of protection that tenure does. One such position is a federal judgeship, which is distinguishable because of the very public nature of the work. If a judge performs inadequately, community backlash may quickly develop that could usher in a publicly coerced retirement. For example, a state judge, who recently gave a lenient sentence to a convicted rapist of a minor who committed suicide, has announced his retirement following pubic outrage.Tenured faculty members, unlike judges, labor in the relative isolation of the classroom, where feedback comes at the end of the semester and then only via student evaluations. This creates the first of two problems for higher education in the United States stemming from the abolition of mandatory retirement: the difficulty of removing a tenured professor for poor performance.

 

In most universities, only egregiously poor performance by a tenured professor is flagged for termination; outdated, boring, or barely adequate, teaching may not sufficiently stand out to warrant a more intense review.  There is also a slow feedback loopdue to minimal, if any, post-tenure peer classroom evaluations and skepticism about student evaluations of teaching. Therefore, often many semesters pass before there is sufficient evidence to persuade a professor or her superiors that the tenured professor’s employment status should be reevaluated. Inadequacies in scholarship can be even more difficult to discern, given the common time lag between research and publication, as well as the variations between disciplines in frequency, length, and format of publications.

 

The second distinct challenge faced by higher education caused by the coupling of the abolition of mandatory retirement with the institution of tenure is the prospect of stagnant departments: no new faculty may be hired because there are no vacancies….

The authors’ proposed reforms include “expiration” of tenure for professors reaching age 70, while permitting continued employment opportunities on the same evaluative standards as non-tenured faculty.