More on the senior citizen faculty

According to my blog statistics, an earlier post on the problems related to senior-citizen faculty in higher education is one of the more visited posts.  The interesting aspect is that visitors did not come there because they searched for it.  (So, how then did they visit, you ask?  Hey, there is more than one way to Rome, because, after all, all roads lead to it!!!)

So, given the economics of it all, it is not a surprise that many university systems have implemented, and are trying, variations of policies that would provide incentives for the senior-citizen faculty to walk away from their offices forever.  Like this in Texas:

More than 130 tenured professors at Texas' two flagship universities have accepted buyouts that are expected to save their financially constrained departments nearly $18-million a year.
The offers, which included up to two years of pay for some liberal-arts professors, have provided a needed cushion for faculty members who were ready to retire, a bonus for some who wanted to move to other jobs, and new leases on life for a few lecturers who were due to be terminated. But they also created end-of-semester headaches for department chairs who had to quickly reshuffle their teaching rosters.
The retirement incentives are the latest responses by the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station to continued state budget cuts. State universities absorbed a 5-percent cut during the 2010-11 biennium and have been asked to plan for an additional 2.5-percent cut this fiscal year and a possible 10-percent reduction over the next two-year budget period, which starts this coming fall.

I would hypothesize that faculty in the sciences stick around way less than those in the social sciences and humanities.  The logic here being that the nature of inquiry in the sciences requires a great deal of constant updating of one's technological skills and bringing in research money, which is not necessarily the case in the humanities and the social sciences.  In the non-science fields, the situation is analogous to owning a car that you have fully paid up--every single day that you can get from using it, without going in for any major repair work, is a wonderful return on the investment :)

So, would you retire for a buyout?  And, no, I am far too young for your tempting offers, though many times it seems that many of my faculty and administrative colleagues wish that I were gone :)