One of the University's most pressing concerns about lifting the mandatory retirement age is that the current pension plan is designed for a set retirement age, Scott says.
Under Harvard's current faculty pension plan, each year the University and a faculty member make a contribution to an interest-earning fund. When a professor retires, the fund--converted to an annuity and combined with Social Security--should provide about 70 to 80 percent of the faculty member's final income. The yearly amount is determined by the size of the fund, and the life expectancy of the faculty member.
"When the law takes effect, our current plan will overachieve the objective," says Scott. "You'll have faculty leaving with a pension higher than their salary. No company is interested in having that kind of a situation."
Retirement after 70 would change the pension in two ways, Scott says. First, the University and the professor would each be contributing to the fund for several more years, so the fund would be larger in real dollars.
In addition, the later professors retire, the shorter their life expectancy after retirement will be. So the portion of the fund used each year will increase not only because the fund itself is larger, but also because it is expected to last fewer years.
"The problem with respect to lifting mandatory retirement is that the longer the annuity is there, the greater the sum will be, so at some point not too soon after age 70, the pension will be greater than income," says Joan Bruce, the University benefits director.
There are several different pension plans the University could choose to adopt, but administrators say choosing a new one is difficult because they must accomodate not only professors with lifetime posts at the University, but also junior faculty members who plan to leave Harvard and teach elsewhere.
A pension plan in a field like academia, where there is a high turnover, must be designed so that professors who stay at Harvard for only a few years can take a certain amount with them.
And junior faculty concerns are in many ways present behind-the-scenes in the administrative deliberations about retirement.
If Harvard cannot find ways to replace the nearly 50 percent of the senior faculty who will likely leave in the next two decades, then the entire question of faculty retirement is moot, administrators say.
"I don't think there are going to be a lot of people saying they want to teach past 70. Most people I know really want to leave at age 65," says Lowell Professor of the Humanties William Alfred '49. "It doesn't look like a tough profession but it really is. They'd have to bring them in on ironing boards."
And if faculty members continue to leave at or around age 70, the University will have to fill a huge number of posts in the next decade, a task which many fear Harvard cannot perform.
"In an atmosphere of steady or declining numbers of earned doctorates and of increasing demand for the best people, we must take steps to insure that our recruitment policies and practices are effective," Spence wrote in last spring's report. "More appointments will be required each year to maintain our strength."
But the University's ability to recruit junior faculty has been under attack for the past several years, as younger academics say that the near-impossibility of being promoted from within Harvard's faculty makes the University a less attractive workplace than many of the other prestigious schools, such as Columbia or the University of California at Berkeley.
In addition, the high cost of housing in Boston and the difficulty of luring two-career academic families are intensifying the competition to recruit the best junior faculty. Those concerns are particularly pressing, experts say, because the pool of high-quality young scholars has decreased, and will only get smaller in the 1990s.
"We must ask where the replacements will be coming from. Here at Harvard and other research universities, a very large part of the faculty comes from smaller research colleges [which are suffering themselves from a smaller pool of faculty]," says Riesman.
But the need for those smaller colleges to keep providing an influx of fresh blood for Harvard is contingent upon one thing: Will the University's already-tenured professors decide to hold on to their jobs or move aside for the next generation?