Mandatory retirement: the case in favour

This article is part of our Prof v. Prof summer debate series, where academics take opposing viewpoints on hot topics in higher education. Read all the articles from the series here. 

It is time for universities to make mandatory retirement a serious point of negotiations with faculty, because we are losing the balance of early-, mid-, and late-career scholars within our universities. The university system has limited funding and thus limited tenure track (TT) positions. When older academics refuse to retire, it prevents early career scholars, who tend to be more diverse, from entering the professorate. Scholars like me, who should be mid-career, find ourselves fighting for entry level positions as assistant professors well into our 40s. The system is unsustainable, and it is leading to the exploitation of underemployed academics who are entirely qualified to take on TT positions.  

To put this in perspective, Statistics Canada reports that, as of 2021-22, only 0.4 percent of full-time academic positions were held by people below 30 years of age. As of 2024-25, StatCan data no longer break out the vanishingly small under-30 cohort, and only 14.5 per cent of full-time faculty members were under the age of 40 — compared to 25 per cent over the age of 60. Nearly half of that older cohort were over 65. 

Even more starkly, in 2024-25, only 16 per cent of full professors were under the age of 50, while 23 per cent were over 65 and another 21 per cent were aged 60 to 64. As of 2024-25, the median age of a full-time faculty member was 51 years old. 

In contrast, in 1971-72, when most universities had mandatory retirement programs, about 14 per cent of all full-time faculty in Canada were under 30 years of age, accounting for about 14 per cent of all hires, and the average age of a full-time faculty member was 38 years old.  

Some of this demographic flip is good news. It reflects the fact that life expectancies are getting longer, that people are maintaining cognitive and physical health for longer, and that our system values academic elders. In practice, however, this means that early career scholars are pushed to take on postdoctoral research positions, sessional work, and/or non-TT teaching jobs, which are all jobs that exist as auxiliary support for those in TT research positions. Interestingly, the number of teaching jobs outside the tenure track continues to increase, resulting in a situation where, quite often, untenured early- and mid-career scholars are relegated to teaching larger first-year classes that make departments money, while established academics mostly teach smaller upper-year and graduate classes. Many young scholars leave academia entirely because they burn out doing sessional and frontline teaching work, and/or they realize there is simply no path to a TT job.  

The ageing professorate has created an arms race in the hiring process. When I was leaving graduate school in 2015, many of my professors told me that you could get a good job in the humanities with one good article in a well-placed journal and solid letters of recommendation. After all, they told me, departments hire early-career scholars based on their projected potential as researchers. Scholars in my cohort now speak of needing four or five articles and/or a scholarly book to even get an interview, and some scholars are not getting their first TT position until they are well into their second book. If you are an adjunct or in a teaching-focused position, this level of productivity is unrealistic. There is nothing, moreover, to suggest that being a sessional teacher, even with wonderful teaching evaluations, leads to eventual TT employment.  

Mandatory retirement within the university system is legal in Canada. The key case on this topic is McKinney v. University of Guelph, where, in 1990, the Supreme Court found that universities have a compelling interest in maintaining mandatory retirement because a university is a “closed system with limited resources.” Mandatory retirement is “intimately tied to the tenure system” because it “ensures continuing faculty renewal,” in a context of otherwise iron-clad job security, while allowing “long-term planning both by the university and the individual.” Mandatory retirement, moreover, “ensures [the] infusion of new people and ideas, a better mix of young and old that is a desirable feature of a teaching staff, and better access to the universities outstanding research facilities which are essential to push forward the frontiers of knowledge.”  

I want to be clear that I deeply value my senior colleagues and that I think having departments members over 60 is a good thing. I just want a better mix of scholars over 60 and scholars in their 30s and 40s. 

Furthermore, as the Supreme Court found in Dickason v. University of Alberta in 1992, “the objectives of mandatory retirement were stated to be the preservation of tenure, the promotion of academic renewal, the facilitation of planning and resource management and the protection of ‘retirement with dignity’ for faculty members.” I want here to underline the value of retirement with dignity. People should not be rushed out the door at 65, but I am not in favour of a system of lifetime appointments, as it allows people to stay on until they can no longer do the job.Sometimes this leads to unfortunate instances in classrooms, disputes with colleagues, or department chairs having to tell someone that they can no longer be trusted to do a job they love. These situations can be traumatic for professors and deeply uncomfortable for students, who are often the ones who witness and are forced to report these senior moments. After all,  

In a world where it is possible to get hundreds of qualified applicants for a TT position in the humanities, we should be aware that the difference between those who land tenured positions and can go on to make almost $200,000 per year, and those teaching as adjuncts and living in poverty can come down to luck and happenstance. We are preserving a system of privilege by removing mandatory retirement, and the people who benefit from this system are not being completely transparent about the role of luck and privilege in their success.