Compulsory academic retirement should be put out to pasture

The University of Cambridge has a long history of discrimination. It was the last British university to grant degrees to women, for example. This came as late as 1948.

It’s happening again with age discrimination. Almost every other British university accepted the Repeal of Retirement Age Amendment to the Equality Act and abolished compulsory retirement in 2011. Cambridge – along with Oxford and St Andrews – did not.

Instead, Cambridge maintains a mandatory retirement age of 67. This is lawful only if the university can justify it as a proportionate way of achieving legitimate aims.

The chief aim is intergenerational fairness. Young academics are faced with grisly house prices, increased and globalised competition for jobs, and long waits to get settled positions. Refreshment of any university with young scholars, bringing new ideas and skills, is also vital.

The main argument against forced retirement is that it amounts to age discrimination, a great evil. But it is also bad for many early and mid-career academics. Successful research groups are often painstakingly built up over decades and consist of individuals at various stages in their careers, all of whom are negatively impacted if the group is shut down.

Is that impact counterbalanced by a greater availability of permanent positions for those researchers, many of whom are on temporary contracts?  

Cambridge’s retirement policy has operated for more than a decade, so its effects on job creation can now be assessed.

Unhappily, as shown by the below graph (based on data from this paper), Cambridge has consistently had lower levels of vacancies for permanent academic jobs compared with other Russell Group universities, both before and after 2011. Any dividend from the economically justified retirement age (EJRA), as it is known, seems to have been spent on creating fresh managerial and administrative positions.

Source: 

Wyn Evans

Number of number of positions advertised in a year as a proportion of the total number at the university. Note: Russell Group figure does not include Cambridge but does include Oxford.

Oxford has lost in five consecutive employment tribunal cases brought by its own professors against its EJRA of 69. The only case it won was the first one, pursued by John Pitcher in 2019, which was decided before any statistical analyses were available. When Paul Ewart shortly afterwards pursued a lawsuit with ample statistical evidence, he won.

Cambridge is also facing a legal challenge and has responded to the Oxford cases and widespread internal pressure with a proposal to raise its EJRA from 67 to 69. This comes up for a vote on 22 July.

However, a vocal and well-organised opposition has also forced onto the ballot a proposal to drop the compulsory retirement age completely. The university has already conceded that, if approved in the ballot, any effects would be manageable without major disruption.

Although originally in favour of a fixed retirement age, I will now vote for its removal.

One major reason is that I doubt the university’s commitment to providing more permanent positions for junior academics. This is because the university has failed to take advantage of many simpler opportunities to help young scholars. Take UK Research and Innovation’s excellent Future Leaders Fellowship scheme. Launched in 2018, this generously funds untenured staff for up to seven years, with the proviso that they receive a permanent position upon completion of the fellowship. Other UK universities used it to broaden the backgrounds and ages of their staff, creating upwards of 500 new jobs so far. Cambridge, however, only allowed those with existing offers of permanent positions to apply to the scheme, a policy which – because there were a fixed number of fellows in each round – actually prevented new permanent roles being created elsewhere.

Second, discrimination is still discrimination. Moreover, it is unnecessary discrimination. Cambridge can and should be creating fresh academic jobs for younger researchers, as well as facilitating productive careers for its established members of staff, in order to maintain its high international standing in teaching and research – as other top-raking universities are doing. Blaming older academics for job casualisation of the young is the worst kind of scapegoating.

Earlier this week, Thomas Roulet argued in these pages that that “abolishing the retirement age would be a disaster for the university. People would basically be able to hold their job indefinitely”. But it is a clear misunderstanding of human biology to think that the alternative to forced retirement is people living and working for ever. Everyone retires at some point – but the right point will vary according to circumstances, and universities should be sensitive to that.  

Universities should be aiming for higher levels of organisational care for all their employees, whether young, mid-term or old. Cambridge has agreed there would be no major disruption if it offered flexibility on when to retire. A prediction of “disaster” is a wild exaggeration in support of a policy of institutional age discrimination that demeans everyone.

Wyn Evans is professor of astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. He leads the 21 Group, which provides advice and support for those experiencing bullying in UK academia.