U. of North Carolina Lets Professors Ease Their Way Into Retirement

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By AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE

Lawrence L. Kupper, a biostatistics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been a faculty member there since 1970.

But after nearly 40 years of teaching and research in the School of Public Health, Mr. Kupper sees retirement in his future — June 2010, to be exact. Last July he entered "phased retirement": a university program that lets him work half time with benefits, in return for giving up tenure.

"I think being a professor is the best job you can possibly have," says Mr. Kupper, 69. "But I just felt like I was ready to slow down a bit. The advantage of this for me is that I don't have to quit cold turkey, which is a big adjustment."

For the North Carolina system, where 68 percent of its 5,400 tenured faculty members are 50 or older, letting professors formally ease their way into retirement gives the university a much-needed tool to manage the departures of a graying professoriate. With every senior faculty member who enters phased retirement, the planning for faculty renewal becomes a little less formidable. The system expects about 80,000 new students in the next decade, a situation that runs counter to national trends in part because of sharp increases in the state's population of Hispanic high-school graduates.

The challenges of personnel planning in the North Carolina system, made tougher when higher education was stripped of a mandatory retirement age 14 years ago, have lessened because the program has given administrators "a better idea of who was retiring in the future," says Kitty M. McCollum, vice president for human resources and university benefits officer. "Meanwhile, you are able to have your most seasoned faculty stay here on a half-time basis and be mentors to junior faculty coming in."

North Carolina's phased-retirement program was offered in 1998 on a trial basis before becoming a permanent offering in 2001. Since its inception, 765 faculty members have used the program, and 230 professors are now in phased retirement, Ms. McCollum says. The program continues to be highly popular: In 2007, 75 professors entered phased retirement.

Focus on Passions

Nationally the use of phased retirement is increasing. A 2007 report on faculty-retirement policies, conducted by the American Association of University Professors, found that 58 out of the 567 colleges that responded had begun offering phased-retirement plans since 2000.

Almost one-third of those plans were first offered in 2005 and 2006. Still, just 32 percent of institutions in the survey had such plans in place, and some experts think they are tools that should be used more. Phased retirement is "a win for the individual and a win for the institutions," says Robert L. Clark, an economist at North Carolina State University, who studies retirement and faculty demographics. "I think it's sort of the wave of the future in higher education."

Participants in phased-retirement plans talk to their department chairs to negotiate their half-time workloads, which usually revolve around teaching, research, and scholarship with less emphasis on service and administration.

Faculty members can customize their phased retirements around their passions. For Mr. Kupper, that means teaching. He is the winner of several teaching awards at Chapel Hill, with the most recent given to him last year for a "lifetime of contributing to a broad range of teaching and learning, particularly mentoring beyond the classroom," according to the faculty-and-staff newspaper. Part of the reduced schedule's appeal for him is that "you can eliminate some things you are tired of doing or don't like to do."

"One of the reasons I decided to go half time," Mr. Kupper says, "was to drop some of the scrambling for grants that I was doing."

Professors in the School of Public Health are expected to bring in grants to cover about half of their salaries, Mr. Kupper says, a task that has become tiring at this point in his career. For instance, from 1972 to 2006, he served as program director of a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences training grant. He has handed that job off to a younger associate professor.

Although Mr. Kupper will miss the social interaction of teaching after his retirement, he will have one certain link to university life. His wife, Sandra L. Martin, is associate dean for research at the School of Public Health, and the couple will continue to collaborate on research, Mr. Kupper says.

"I still publish several papers a year, and I'm writing a book right now with two of my former students," says Mr. Kupper, who teaches one course a year to graduate students in biostatistics. "I'm probably as active as I was before I went half time."

Although the phased-retirement program has helped sharpen the North Carolina system's personnel planning, it does have an unintended consequence. Sometimes a few professors the system may not want to lose are among the participants, says Harold L. Martin, the system's senior vice president for academic affairs.

"If a very talented associate professor seeks to enter phased retirement, you can't really stop them," Mr. Martin says. "When you make it so enticing, that's what can happen."

Administrative Appeal

But the program still appeals to academic administrators. "From the chair's point of view, it's handy for us," says Michael R. Kosorok, chairman of the biostatistics department at Chapel Hill. "We have a fixed deadline to deal with now." Mr. Kosorok says that he and Mr. Kupper discussed what working half time would mean, and that "in his case it was very simple. We just cut his load in half."

Faculty members, who can't legally be asked when they plan to retire, seem to feel more at ease thinking about the matter "because it's less of a precipitous change now," says Mr. Kosorok. "They're more willing to discuss it because this is out there."

George A. Kiorpes, a piano professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, recently made the "hard decision" to leave behind his 43-year academic career at the School of Music.

Mr. Kiorpes, 76, noticed that although he was still engaged in his music, "it didn't get to me like it used to." In addition, he says, he felt he was reaching the age where he owed himself more free time.

So he began three years of phased retirement in the 2007-8 academic year, in which he worked full time during the first semester and took the rest of the year off to travel. Mr. Kiorpes plans to compress his work schedule into one semester again in the next academic year and then finish his days at the university working half time for both semesters, "for old time's sake," he says.

Mr. Kiorpes, who will teach a course on Chopin this fall, says that he already misses the sense of community he gets from his longtime colleagues in the music school. But "semiretirement," as Mr. Kiorpes calls it, does have a surprising perk: He makes almost as much as he did while working full time, a feat made possible because of his move to a lower tax bracket.

Mr. Kiorpes is paid half his salary and receives retirement money that is equivalent to two-thirds of his full salary, along with income from Social Security. In addition he continues to teach private lessons, serve as the music director at his church, and teach at a summer music camp at his university.

"I'm living surprisingly comfortably," says Mr. Kiorpes, who has rediscovered his love of gardening by taking care of the roses, peonies, tulips, and other flowers in his expansive yard.

Mr. Kupper, for one, is realistic about the opportunities afforded to colleges when senior faculty members retire. The younger professors they leave behind can take on roles once dominated by their senior colleagues, and the university can use the other half of salaries like his to hire new professors.

"I could have continued to work full time as long as I wanted," Mr. Kupper says. "But I really believe that all the fields are changing so fast all that time, and I just think it would be great for universities to have the option and the flexibility to hire young, exciting people to come in with new ideas."