The federal uncapping of the retirement age, which went into practice at Hopkins in 1988, can make long-term hiring and budgetary decisions tricky for deans and department heads. The financial reality today makes it next to impossible to add a new tenure track position to your department. So, with a limited number of spots available, and with highly paid senior faculty staying on indefinitely, how do you make room for new junior faculty?

The issue is less of a problem in the short term for divisions like the School of Medicine, where just 13 percent of faculty were 55 or older in a 1993 survey. But at the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, that figure was 33 percent. When the C-21 subcommittee on faculty issues examined the retirement issue, it concluded in 1994 that over the next 15 years, uncapping retirement, coupled with slow growth, will lead to a substantial increase in the percentage of Hopkins faculty 65 or older "with concomitant loss of flexibility in Hopkins's academic programs." Medicine's Dan Nathans, who chaired the C-21 subcommittee, says the long-term concern is that Hopkins "will not be able to hire the number of young people that a vibrant institution must hire to stay at the forefront."

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