Compulsory retirement age at Cambridge
May 8, 2012 Leave a comment
Academics at Cambridge University have voted to support a compulsory retirement age of 67 for themselves in order to promote “intergenerational fairness” and enable career progression.
In an organization in which more than 60 per cent of the academic opportunities at the university in recent years have become available because somebody had retired, there are obvious arguments for doing so. However the need for innovation seems a tenuous claim being more related to length of tenure than age.
Fortunately the ruling will not apply to non-academic staff and was supported by older academics themselves. As the final section of a report in People Management speculates, it will be interesting to see how many other universities go down this route. It will be even more interesting to see how many non-academic organizations try for an Employer Justified Retirement Age (EJRA) following this example.
