Young scholars crowded out by aging faculty at UNC

For Ted Gellar-Goad, a Ph.D. candidate in the classics department, finding a job has not been easy.

“Any job for which I’ve been qualifying for, I’ve applied for,” he said. “I have applied for around 60 positions now, and these are extensive applications that I have to tailor to each institution.”

“I specialize in Latin poetry so any position that I don’t not qualify for, I have applied for.”

But as university faculty prolong retirement in an uncertain economic environment, some younger, job-seeking Ph.D.s, like Gellar-Goad, might find themselves crowded out of the market.

“In classics, you do tend to jump in for life,” Gellar-Goad said.

“It is hard to leave classics because once you’ve gotten a tenure track job, you tend to stay there because you cannot go into consulting or some other profession like you could if you were in economics.”

John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors, said a lack of employment opportunities is a definite issue for younger scholars.

“The job market has been weak for a number of years,” he said.

There has been an increase in the number of part-time positions at universities, Curtis said, but the proportion of full-time, tenure-track positions per faculty applicant is decreasing.

One reason may be that professors near retirement age are choosing to stay on at their respective universities.

About one in every four professors at UNC is older than the age of 60, according to the UNC Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.

That percentage has increased by 13 percentage points since 1990.

Bruce Carney, executive vice chancellor and provost, said he believes the aging faculty statistic could be due to economic factors.

“If your investment funds are looking pretty shaky, people will tend to stay on if they can,” Carney said.

But Carney pointed out that the age of professors varies according to academic department.

“The sciences, for example, have younger faculty by and large than the humanities,” he said.

“The sciences did an enormous amount of hiring in the 1960s due to the Cold War and Sputnik, and many of those have retired in the last couple years.”

Carney said he foresees the same potential for turnover in the humanities.

“I expect that we are going to start seeing retirements in the humanities among senior faculty, but we have been helped by the Kenan Trust,” Carney said.

The Kenan Trust gave the University funding for 18 new faculty positions, 14 of which went to the College of Arts and Sciences, he said.

Duke University has a similar proportion of aging faculty.

Duke’s Provost Peter Lange said the university has had discussions about retirement with faculty of all ages.

“Generally, our discussions are related to performance or a faculty member having indicated that they might step down their activity,” Lange said.

Philip Gura, a 61-year-old English professor at UNC-CH, said he is still going strong. He said many professors in their 60s are still in a position for maximum impact on campuses.

“I am not considering retirement. I’m vigorously publishing two books coming out this year, and my teaching evaluations have been strong,” he said.

“If we are talking about people from the age of 50 to 65, you are looking at people at the peak of their research, well-established in publications, and winning many teaching awards.”

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