Phased retirement

Saint Louis University has a phased retirement program for tenured faculty with sufficient time in service. For up to five years, a qualifying faculty can drop to 70%, 50% or 33% effort, with a commensurate reduction in compensation. They can start at 70% or 50% and drop to a lower level, but they can’t go up to a higher level. Part of the contract is that by the end of the five-year period, the faculty fully retires.

This isn’t institutional magnanimity. It’s a kind of buy-out. Indeed, the university has offered tenured faculty buy-outs now and then: quit now, and you walk away on day one with a full year of compensation. These are ways of off-loading tenured faculty who can’t otherwise be fired except for cause. 

I took the phased retirement, mostly because I wasn’t emotionally ready to quit cold turkey. And I stayed at 70% of my last pre-phase compensation the entire time, which netted far more money than the buy-out. At the end of the five years, I was ready to be unemployed/retired.

As things played out, as soon as I told my chair I was taking phased retirement, he lost interest in me. Yes, he took my lab space away, but I was fine with that. But I was given no teaching assignments to justify my compensation. Indeed, I used that transition to gradually offload my administrative and teaching responsibilities to younger faculty. The best part of all was, when we decided to move to Rhode Island, my chair and my dean allowed me to continue to “work remotely” for the last two years rather than insist that I quit when I moved.

While rare, phased retirement turns out to be a thing in industry, not just academia. 

“For more than two decades, Elizabeth Conway has worked for Abbott, the maker of infant formula, medical devices, and drugs, in Columbus, Ohio.

“Roughly a year and a half ago, she began to ease into retirement through the company’s phased retirement program.

“It was a test to see if I really was ready to retire,” she said. “It allows me to step into it at my pace and on my terms,” the 60-year-old global manager told Yahoo Finance.”

Exactly.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-workers-are-taking-a-phased-approach-to-retirement--and-employers-are-starting-to-help-100007087.html 

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