By SUSAN JONES
At a June meeting of the University Senate Budget Policies committee, Dwayne Pinkney, executive senior vice chancellor for administration and finance, was asked about the possibility of Pitt offering early retirement packages in light of current financial challenges, and while he didn’t rule it out, he said there are currently no plans.
Pinkney noted that while several universities have begun offering early retirement or separation plans, “It’s early for us. We don’t have any immediate plans.”
He said there’s a lot of work and due diligence that would need to happen “to understand the potential benefit that a program could offer.”
“It’s my understanding that we’ve had something that walks and talks like an early retirement plan before and that perhaps it wasn’t as successful as it was intended to be, and that could be for a number of reasons. I’m not suggesting that because it didn’t work in the past, that it’s something that the University should never explore again, but I do think we should learn from the experience.”
In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pitt offered early early retirement to 840 full-time staff members who were 59 or older with 10 years of continuous service. The package included six months of salary and immediate access to full retirement benefits regardless of age. Of those eligible, 453 took the deal.
In addition, 230 faculty who were 65 and older with 10 years of service were offered a retirement incentive and 55 took the deal.
Pitt also has an opportunity to learn from institutions that are further along with similar plans, Pinkney said. “We will be looking more than casually at the programs that are in place and the extent to which they have been able to successfully design programs that are fair, that are equitable, but that also result in the kind of expense reduction that the institutions are, in fact, trying to achieve.”
Several institutions have instituted voluntary and involuntary separation plans this year, including Duke University, which introduced a voluntary separation incentive program in April and then in June added voluntary retirement incentives for faculty and warned of possible layoffs of staff. Just last week, Boston University said it was laying off 120 employes and eliminating another 120 vacant positions.
Pinkney said that a hastily put together voluntary separation plan has the potential “to have inequitable outcomes. … Diligence is required. We’re prepared to roll up our sleeves to do that diligence, but we’re not there today.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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