Universities to offer retirement incentives

In light of the global financial crisis, many universities are beginning to offer incentives to employees who are willing to retire, but so far, Hopkins has not extended - and has no plans to extend - such offers to its faculty.

Meanwhile, peer institutions such as Dartmouth and Harvard have been offering voluntary retirement incentives in order to prevent having to layoff faculty.

According to the Yale Daily News, Yale University has also been considering providing incentives to professors, but nothing has been finalized.

Senior Associate Dean for Finance and Administration for the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Frederick Puddester said that Hopkins has no plans to offer retirement incentives to professors.

"At the Krieger School, which is the only school I am working with, we have no plans at this time to do incentives," he said.

Unlike some of its peer schools, Hopkins is taking a different approach to managing the financial shortages caused by the ailing economy.

Puddester noted that the upcoming hiring and salary freeze, effective July 1, was engineered to prevent having to layoff faculty.

"We believe, based on our current conservative estimates on revenue, that those actions will be, with some other stuff we're doing, sufficient to balance our budget for 2010, so that we won't need to do across the board layoffs," he said.

Dartmouth launched a plan that offered six months of pay to employees following their retirement. Staff over age 55 with at least 10 years of continuous service, some 600 employees, were eligible, according to The Dartmouth.

Harvard offered a similar plan to its staff this past week. The eligibility requirements were the same as Dartmouth's, though Harvard's reward is projected to be a lump-sum payment, according to the Harvard Crimson.

The Crimson stated that administration viewed the incentive program as a preventative effort to avoid having to fire employees.

Even though Hopkins did not adopt the incentive strategy of some of its peer institutions, most students supported the University's decision not to offer retirement incentives at this time.

Freshman Camille Kramer expressed her preference for Hopkins policy over the alternative of retirement incentives.

"New professors who make less will have less initiative to probably go above and beyond in the classroom," Kramer said. "Education should be the biggest priority, so I agree with [freezing salaries]. I think it is the best policy."

Junior David Sigmon echoed Kramer's remarks.

"A lot of the best professors have been around a long time, so they learn how to best teach college kids. They don't treat us like we're five years old," he said.

"The three best professors I've had have been three old guys."

Sigmon also agreed that freezing salaries was a good compromise between firing and offering incentives.

"I think [freezing salaries] is something we have to do. Money is tight everywhere," he said. "I think it's better than cutting stuff."

Other students were more skeptical about whether or not a salary freeze would be sufficient to cover the University's losses.

"I don't know how much [professors] make, but I'm sure that freezing their salaries won't make much of a difference," senior Dave Larose said.

Although the University has no current plans to offer retirement incentives, Puddester did not exclude it as a possibility if the necessity arose.

"We are looking at all our options right now," he said.

"We're working with the chairs of the departments and the heads of administration almost on a daily basis to come up with ideas to save money, so we're looking at everything."