Sorry, You Can’t Teach for Free : Unintended consequence of university retirement deal stands in way of volunteerism

Early retirement, always an option for companies or institutions looking for ways to reduce the payroll, has become increasingly popular during the current recession. But the workload does not necessarily shrink when the work force does, and another fairly frequent managerial option has been the immediate rehiring of some “retired” workers on a free-lance or part-time basis.

The latter practice, however, has been seen by some labor leaders as ominous. Retirement pay plus retirement-level benefits plus free-lance work in the same capacity may mean both a savings for the employer and a fair deal for the employee, but the effect is to deprive an aspiring full-time, full-benefit worker of the job that he or she might otherwise have had.

To meet this objection, an early retirement plan recently approved for the California State University stipulated that professors could not be rehired to teach their old courses past the first year, and even then only if no replacements could be found. The rule was well-intentioned, but it has had one unforeseen and unwelcome consequence: Professors, some legal advisers say, may jeopardize their retirement benefits even when they are “hired” to teach without pay, as some have volunteered to do.

True, a permanent, post-retirement volunteer might take a paying job away from another professor; but this year, even after the Cal State system has recalled every laid-off junior professor it has money to hire, it will still face a huge overflow of students turned away for lack of faculty to teach them. Professors like Benjamin Saltman of Cal State Northridge have volunteered to rescue those students in this hour of systemwide crisis.

All parties to this discussion, Republicans and Democrats, administrators and professors (including their union), clearly want to find a way to remove the threat of penalty from an act of professorial noblesse oblige. The legislative knot looks like one easily enough untied. We urge only that it be untied quickly.