"In principle I'm against the age discrimination act as it affects faculty," Glazer says. "In most businesses people are perfectly happy to give up work...For academic people in elite research universities they're doing very little they don't want to do, and there's very little incentive to retire."
Both Knowles and Thomas Professor of Anthropology Sally F. Moore expect a possible shift in retirement patterns, but not a terribly dramatic one.
"As soon as Harvard shifted from 65 to 70, people stayed on, so one assumes it will shift again," says Moore, who is a member of the FAS retirement committee. "It isn't a very large number each year. It isn't as if the whole faculty will stay forever."
The people who are most concerned about the new retirement law might well not be the administrators, however, but the younger generation of scholars. They could see years of fruitless job searches if aging faculty maintain control of their scarce tenured posts.
"What no one wants to see is a slowing of the movement that's usually been occurring as people move up through the ranks," says Ryan. "You want the whole system to remain quite porous."
As junior faculty members vie for tenure, each professor who stays past the traditional retirement age means a tenure position still not available.
"It's obvious that if there are fewer positions opening up and if the number of positions isn't expanded, then the chances for promotion from within would be adversely affected," says John J. McCole, associate professor of History and Social Studies. "Anything that shrinks the pool is cause for concern."
Even farther in the future, as the law's long term effects begin to manifest, graduate students see cause for concern if professors don't choose to retire.
Graduate Student Council (GSC) Treasurer David M. Porter sees problems for GSAS students in the new retirement policy.
"Originally when a lot of us started these PhD. programs, we thought the job market would be good," says Porter. "As long as professors hold on, that means that the predicted need for new professors will not happen in the mid to late '90s as predicted...That really has a negative effect on the job market."
GSC President Carlos Lopez calls the new law "double edged" because good scholars can remain active but "if faculty fail to make way for the new generation of scholars, that will create problems for the upcoming generation of new scholars."
"The fact that there isn't mandatory retirement could be problematic," he says.
Ryan looks beyond the tenure problem, to how the new law could affect junior faculty even before the review for a permanent post.
"It's not just a matter of tenure," she says. "It's also a matter of who teaches courses in particular areas. Even if a junior faculty member is not personally expecting tenure, they might very well want to teach a course now taught by a senior professor. You don't want to stagnate."