With age and reputation come a host of other responsibilities--committee work, mentoring--that can take time away from teaching and research. In addition, the grant process has become more competitive, making it harder and more time-consuming for faculty to find outside support.
Older professors face greater challenges than ever in obtaining the necessary funding to run their lab.
While competition for funding and space affects all faculty, these factors combined can place older faculty especially in an untenable position: unable to obtain funding for their interests or divided between other responsibilities, their labs may sit empty, creating pressure on an administration to give lab space to tenure-hungry assistant professors.
"The administration has degrees of freedom in pushing people out. It's partly the carrot, partly the club," Levins says, with the retirement bonus being the carrot and changes in space being the club.
Respecting Our Elders?
Zelen is 70, but he says he has no plans to leave anytime soon.
"I guess I'll wait until I fall off the lecturing podium or they carry me out," he jokes. "I don't think about [retirement]," he adds.
Part of the reason faculty may be reluctant to retire, he says, is the sudden change in status that faculty members undergo when assuming emeritus status.
He remembers several years ago he contacted all the emeriti at the SPH.
"Most of them had little contact with the University," he says. "They were paid no attention to, that was the sense that I got. I think that's just the way Harvard is, and probably most universities are like that."
With no parking space, no University phone book, no help with changes in information technology and no classes, faculty felt cut off from the institution where they had done their life's work.
"Most people whom I contacted would have preferred to have access to faculty and students and an office.... The University hadn't done very much to use this resource, to make the retired faculty feel they are still part of the University community," Zelen says.
The SPH is currently constructing offices for emeriti on a separate floor of one of its buildings. This is similar to a plan by the Business School, which constructed a separate office building for retired faculty.
"I don't know if I'd like that. It's like being in a retirement home," Zelen jokes.
"The whole point of being in a University is to mingle with all walks of life," he says.
An Uncertain Course
Though emeriti professors are still a part of the University, many older professors fear that their connection to the community and their ability to continue their work would be greatly diminished by a change to emeritus status.
In the days when retirement was mandatory at 70, older professors who kept actively pursuing their work did not have the opportunity to continue in the same fashion that they do now. But at the same time, universities could plan with certainty for the future of their departments, and professors could rely on a clear system.
Now, in a time of transition, schools are scrambling for a way to resolve the problems of an aging faculty and the opportunities of continued leadership from their most experienced professors. The Business School has taken a clear-cut approach: making incentives available only up to a certain point.
Though the size of Salhanick's bonus turned heads across the University, it is important less as a specific case or an indicator of future policy than as an indication of the many tensions confronting an administration eager to be on the cutting edge and older professors hoping to continue their lives' work.