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April 16, 1998

Departments don't know budget repercussions of retirement plan

The numbers are final now. Deans and regional campus presidents know how many professors they will lose to Pitt's early retirement incentive plan for faculty.

Now the question is, as education school Dean Ken Metz put it: "How much will the Provost's office return to the schools in resources to cover classes and student advisement during the payout period?" Provost James Maher stated: "The deans are right to be somewhat concerned, especially about the first year of the plan, and I am too. It will be a month or two, probably sometime in June, before I'll be able to give them a detailed reading of how the plan will affect their budgets for the coming fiscal year," which begins July 1.

Of the 158 tenured faculty members who opted for Pitt's early retirement plan, most came from four units: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (59), the School of Education (23), the School of Engineering (16) and the Johnstown campus (15).

Not surprisingly, those units had the largest numbers of eligible faculty — 158 in FAS, 41 in education, and 29 each in engineering and at the Johnstown campus.

The unit with the next-largest number of early retirees was the University Library System, with seven. No other unit had more than six early retirees, Provost Maher said.

Early retirees agreed to relinquish their tenure rights and retire between July 1, 1998, and May 1, 1999. In return, they will receive payment equal to 1.5 times their annual contract salary, but not exceeding $125,000.

Leaders of units losing the most professors agreed the plan will open slots for younger (and, generally, lower-paid) faculty and ease the flow of resources from lower to higher priority programs.

But in the near future, the plan has left some units scrambling to cover courses.

Education Dean Metz said his school hopes to hire part-time and temporary full-time instructors for next year "until such time as searches for permanent replacement faculty in high priority programs can be approved." Such searches typically take nine months to a year.

"It's that first year that's going to be the real test for us," Metz said.

Tenured faculty were eligible for the early retirement plan if they had completed at least 12 years of service and would be at least 60 years old prior to July 1, 1998, or if the sum of their age and years of service would total at least 85 by that date. University-wide, 381 faculty members qualified.

March 31 was the deadline for signing up for the plan, but faculty had several days after that to reconsider their decisions.

Education has one of the older faculties at Pitt; 41 of the school's 92 full-time, tenured and tenure-stream faculty were eligible for the plan. Even so, Metz said he didn't expect so many of the 41 to opt for early retirement.

"These 23 retirements would take us below the goal we had set under the new strategic plan we're discussing with the provost," he said. Metz said it would be premature to discuss details of the plan publicly, but he said it will make the School of Education "a more focused, less comprehensive school." Education school graduate students completing theses and dissertations shouldn't suffer because of the early retirements, according to Metz. "We have a good history in this school of retiring faculty agreeing to continue serving on [thesis and dissertation] committees until students have finished their master's and doctoral projects," he said.

In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the natural sciences division — one of three FAS divisions — will lose a disproportionately high number of professors, Dean Peter Koehler said.

That includes eight faculty members from physics and astronomy, seven from mathematics, five from biological sciences, and three from chemistry.

"Based on what people have told me," Koehler said, "a major reason for that imbalance is that many of the natural sciences faculty plan to stay here after retirement and continue to do their research. They just won't be distracted by having to teach." Such professors will retain office and lab space, at least until their external funding declines and FAS hires replacement faculty, Koehler said. "If they keep their funding and thereby are able to supervise graduate students, we will give them space. If their funding shrinks or they lose funding, we will have to shrink their space. They understand that." Under a plan agreed to by FAS and the Provost's office, FAS is supposed to trim its number of tenured and tenure-stream faculty to 505 by the fall 2000 term, assuming the school maintains an enrollment of 9,200 students.

But the loss of 59 early retirees, combined with planned hires and expected departures, will leave FAS with only about 475 tenured/tenure-stream faculty by that year, Koehler said.

"This is a fairly abrupt change," noted Koehler, who himself will step down as dean this summer to become a full-time teacher and researcher. "We're losing an awful lot of experienced faculty members, some of whom have been very strongly contributing to teaching and research. In the short term, this will present us with some problems covering classes. In the long run, I think it will be a good thing for FAS because it will allow us to shift resources to higher priority departments." The Johnstown campus will lose 15 of its approximately 120 tenured/tenure-stream faculty through the plan, most of them in the divisions of engineering technology, the natural sciences and the humanities.

"How is it going to affect us?" repeated James Alexander, UPJ interim vice president for Academic Affairs. "Well, if we're able to retain those slots and creatively move them to our areas of greatest need, which in some cases may mean directly replacing the person retiring, then I'd say this will present a pretty good opportunity for us." According to Alexander, the UPJ administration hopes to present a plan to Provost Maher this fall, detailing how the campus wants to redistribute early retirees' positions. "I've already asked our academic divisions to start thinking about these things," Alexander said.

q In approving an early retirement plan with a sign-up period of July 1998-May 1999, Pitt's senior administration and Board of Trustees ruled out a permanent plan to encourage faculty to retire earlier than they otherwise would. Since Jan. 1, 1994, federal law has forbidden mandatory retirement ages for faculty.

Education Dean Metz said he had favored a permanent plan — "one that professors could plan their careers around, and which would promote a continuing regeneration of faculty," he said.

The new plan is less lucrative than the one proposed last summer by the chancellor-appointed Faculty Early Retirement Bonus Plan Committee, a group of professors and administrators who studied early retirement options.

That committee had recommended two plans: One that would have paid retirees up to 2.5 times their salaries, and a "phased-down employment" plan that would have allowed faculty as young as 59, with 10 years of service, to reduce their workloads by half and get two-thirds of their pay for a fixed number of months.

University Senate President Gordon MacLeod told Faculty Assembly last week that the committee's proposed plan would have been "more effective and broad-based" than the current plan, which he said resulted in a "marked skewing" of retirements in just a handful of schools.

On the other hand, psychology professor James Holland — who served on the Early Retirement Bonus Plan Committee and predicted the approved plan would fail — made a point of eating his words at the April 13 Senate Council meeting.

The plan enticed more than 40 percent of the 381 eligible professors to retire early. Holland said last fall the plan wouldn't meet the admini-stration's expectation of 30 percent participation.

"I didn't expect the plan would make 30 percent," Holland admitted. "But I'm real happy with its success."

— Bruce Steele


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