Half-Full or Half-Empty?: How Institutional Cooperation Could Turn a Wave of Faculty Requirements into an Opportunity

One challenge facing colleges and universities today is that an entire generation of scholars will be retiring in critical numbers over the next several years. A national survey conducted three years ago by the University of California at Los Angeles revealed that nearly one-third of the nation's full time professors were age 55 or older. Now, complicating the likely wave of faculty retirements, many higher education institutions nationwide will be experiencing budget cuts as deep as 5 percent. To those who see the glass as half-empty, departments will be losing faculty at a time when their budgets are ill-prepared to recruit and hire replacements, let alone expand into new areas of knowledge. But to those who see the glass half-full, these retirements present an opportunity to bring about substantive change without sacrificing what is of value. In this article, the author describes how the Five Colleges consortium copes with the changing faculty demography. The members of the Five Colleges consortium include Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith colleges, and the University of Massachusetts.