Karen A. Hartman
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The intellectual life of retired faculty members, whose numbers will skyrocket in the coming years, can be enhanced with adequate library support. This paper provides a descriptive study of the professional activities of emeriti faculty at one large public research university, assessing their needs for continued access to library resources and their knowledge of what library privileges they continue to have in retirement. The results of a brief survey of all public Association of Research Libraries (ARL) webpages to determine what peer institutions are providing for their retired faculty are also presented. The paper concludes with a set of policy recommendations for how academic libraries can better serve the needs of their emeriti faculty.
The retirement of the baby boomer generation in the coming decades is one of the most important socioeconomic forces shaping the future of public policy and business strategies in the country. It has attracted attention from all segments of society, from politicians to the healthcare industry to the housing industry. Persons over sixty-five are the fastest growing population group in the United States, and their numbers will begin skyrocketing in 2011 when baby boomers (people born between 1946 and 1965) start reaching retirement age. The number of people in the United States age sixty-five and older is projected to increase from about 40 million in 2010 to 55 million in 2020 and almost 70 million by 2030. The percentage of the U.S. population sixty-five and older will increase 15 percent between 2000 and 2010, but is projected to increase by almost 36 percent between 2010 and 2020.1
Although mandatory retirement policies became illegal in 1994, these demographic trends translate inevitably into a rapidly growing number of retired faculty in university communities.2 One third of all U.S. college professors are now fifty-five or older, compared to less than a quarter in 1989. The percentage of full-time faculty aged seventy and older has tripled in the past ten years.3 All of these figures foreshadow a large increase in the number of retired faculty in the coming decades.
Colleges and universities have always dealt with the retirement of their oldest and most experienced professors and their replacement by younger cohorts, of course, but the acceleration of this trend in the coming years could put many academic institutions under unusual stress. University libraries, as the “collectors, organizers, preservers, and disseminators of information,” are uniquely placed to help ease the stress faced by the university from the upcoming explosion of baby boomers retiring.4 Libraries not only could support the continued intellectual activity of these faculty in retirement, but they can also help preserve the corpus of their work and, as much as possible, make the accumulated knowledge available to future generations of university faculty.
Theoretical Background
The concept of intellectual capital provides a theoretical framework to help understand the stress that can be caused when an unusually large number of highly experienced members leave any organization. As sociologists, economists, and management theorists have long recognized, members of any organization collectively develop certain “human” or “intellectual capital” that is essential to the efficient operation of the organization. Some theorists define these terms narrowly, limiting them to those things an organization is designed to do. For example, Baron and Armstrong define human capital as “the knowledge, skills, abilities and capacity to develop and innovate possessed by people in an organization,” while they define intellectual capital as “the stocks and flows of knowledge available to an organization.”5 In both cases, Baron and Armstrong, representing a management perspective, focus almost exclusively on the organization’s ability to do what it was created to do.
Other theorists define these terms more broadly. Nahapiet and Ghoshal refer to intellectual capital as the “knowledge and knowing capability of a social collectivity, such as an organization, intellectual community, or professional practice.”6 While this definition clearly incorporates people in a formal organization learning how to best achieve the organization’s goals, because it includes more informal, amorphous “social collectivities” as well, it would also incorporate serendipitous discovery of new knowledge and innovative ways to achieve extraorganizational goals. This broader definition seems a better fit when thinking about what faculty bring to a university. But however defined, virtually any organization will benefit if it can somehow capture and continue to have access to the human and intellectual capital—or more simply, the wisdom—of its older, highly experienced members, even into their retirement.
This statement is particularly true of academic institutions and their emeriti faculty for several reasons.7 First, all faculty are members of larger though less formally organized intellectual disciplines that, like more formal organizations, have their own norms, values, worldviews, and standard operating procedures. The intellectual capital gained from professional activities in an academic discipline is crucial knowledge for junior faculty in that same discipline to acquire, information that more experienced—if sometimes officially retired—faculty are in a unique position to share in formal or informal mentoring relationships. Additionally, senior faculty often have national or even international reputations to bring to their departments and universities, and their prestige influences how the institution is viewed externally.8
Even more to the point, however, a core mission of research universities (their raison d’etre) is to generate new knowledge—knowledge that is open and freely distributed to people outside of the organization. It is the faculty whose job it is to produce this knowledge. Universities devote significant resources to the development of the research capabilities and careers of their faculty and typically see continued and often growing benefits from that investment as individual researchers become more experienced and better at their jobs. This falls under the broader meaning of intellectual capital, but it is extremely valuable to academic institutions—and they should want to continue to reap the benefits from their investment as long as they can.
There is very little extant research on what retired college and university faculty actually do in retirement, but what exists clearly suggests that a significant number of senior faculty continue to be professionally active in some manner. Faculty are an occupational group that demonstrates a lifelong commitment to work, and the boundaries between work and leisure are often blurred.9 In a series of interview studies with older and retired faculty, Dorfman and her colleagues found that 70 percent of senior faculty continue to be engaged in some type of professional activity well into retirement, with research and writing, followed by teaching, heading the list.10 “For many of the retirees, the secret of happiness in retirement was professional role continuity.”11 Thus it is in both the university’s and the retiree’s interests to develop the opportunity structures for retired faculty to continue being productive researchers and teachers. Universities should do everything they possibly can to retain the intellectual capital of their retired faculty, maintain the products of their faculty’s research careers (possibly in institutional repositories), and obtain as much new knowledge as they can from the continued professional activities of emeriti faculty.
Overview of Methods
One of the opportunity structures that is vital to the continued research productivity of retired faculty is access to library resources. Yet herein lies a dilemma. While public libraries offer innovative programs for senior citizens of all stripes, and guidelines have been developed for library services to older adults, there is no literature on what academic libraries are doing for emeriti faculty.12 In fact, we know very little about what types of library resources retired faculty feel they need to continue their research, nor even if they are aware of library resources that are available to them.
The aim of this project was to determine the extent of current use of library resources by retired faculty at Rutgers University, to assess their awareness of issues surrounding modern digital libraries, and to identify any general barriers that retired faculty experience in their use of the university’s libraries. During the first phase of the investigation, a number of small group meetings were conducted with a convenience sample of retired faculty and faculty anticipating retirement in the near future. The common themes from these discussions are reported below, with direct quotations that help illustrate the types of barriers that are experienced by retired faculty. The second phase of this research consisted of a systematic search of the library webpages of the public university members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to determine the suite of services offered to retired faculty. This brief survey of what other research universities are doing for retired faculty suggests that the problems faced by Rutgers faculty generalize to retired faculty at many other universities around the country. I conclude with a set of service and policy recommendations about how academic libraries can better serve the needs of their emeriti faculty.