Majority of Professors are Nearing Retirement
Over half of campus staff over 50
Morgan Modjeski, Staff
As professors across Canada will soon be nearing the average age of retirement, universities will be pressured to fill the spots.
As the average age of retirement in Canada is 61.5, the University of Manitoba has 613 professors above the age of 50 out of 1,172 faculty members, according to the university’s Office of Institutional Analysis.
There currently is no mandatory retirement age in the province of Manitoba but according to the University of Manitoba Faculty Association collective agreement there is mandatory retirement age of 69 for full-time professors. After this point professors have the option to continue teaching part-time.
Robert O’Kell, a senior professor and former dean of the English department at the University of Manitoba, has been teaching for the last 37 years. He said that the effects of a professor shortage could already be seen at the U of M.
“The English department here at the U of M went from 42 full-time tenured or probationary faculty members in 1970 to just 25 in 1995. At the same time, enrolments stayed high and so the gap between resources and needs was filled by sessional and part-time teachers, some who were completely qualified but unable to find permanent full-time positions,” said O’Kell.
Currently the number of full-time tenured professors at the department of English is 29.
O’Kell also went on to say that the reason for the lack of experienced professors entering universities is because of cutbacks and budget breaks that occurred in the ’80s and ’90s.
“Most Canadian universities now face the fact that about a third of their faculty members, those that were hired in the early 1970s during a time of rapid expansion, are now about to retire. When universities found themselves facing budget cutbacks in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a period of about 15 years when there was very little hiring done and, as people retired, most departments shrank in size accordingly,” said O’Kell
Richard Sigurdson, dean of the faculty of arts, agreed with O’Kell and said, “Canadian universities went through a very difficult time from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.”
Sigurdson went on to list off the reason why universities suffered through this period of time.
“Our system is a public education system [and] we rely on the province to give us money. We are vulnerable to the changes that occur in the provincial budget.”
With this shortage in professors being something that will affect all universities in Canada, the faculty of arts is doing a number of things to try and bring more young professors to the university.
“Currently, we have new start-up research grants for new professors, we have lowered the [number] of teaching hours for new faculty members,” Sigurdson said.
In addition, Sigurdson continued, the U of M faculty of arts is also providing a mentor program for younger professors so they will be able to get through the “lonely and difficult years” of being a new full-time faculty member.
U of M is not the only Canadian University having to worry about the age of professors becoming a problem currently the average age at Concordia University according to the University of Toronto Faculty Association is 63.5.
