Abolish EJRA
at Cambridge University
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EJRA (Employer Justified Retirement Age) in Cambridge University
EJRA (Employer Justified Retirement Age) in Cambridge University
does not create vacancies
does not create vacancies
Imperial College, UCL, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other top world class universities all achieve academic freedom and innovation, intergenerational fairness, equality, diversity and inclusion, job creation, and academic excellence, without an EJRA.
It’s time for Cambridge to do the same.
The university claims that EJRA creates inter generational fairness.
The university claims that EJRA creates inter generational fairness.
It does the opposite.
It does the opposite.
Currently, Cambridge University forces academics to retire at age 67 years old, side-stepping the Equality Act by using an EJRA, saying this policy is justified and proportionate. It is neither of these things.
Please read the FAQs on this website to discover how the EJRA in Cambridge is illegal, immoral, uneconomic, and discriminatory.
The university's main argument in favour of EJRA is that older academics block academic positions that younger academics are waiting to move into.
But the reality is that university can only ever create a small number of jobs in Cambridge for younger academics.
What Cambridge does do brilliantly is turn academic talent into international leaders in their fields of research. Yet when they reach their academic peak, winning top prizes in their area of specialism and bringing in significant grant income which creates positions for PhD and post-doc researchers, EJRA forces such senior academics to retire.
The effect of EJA is to reduce the university's grant income and to reduce the University's ability to train young talented academics. In this sense, EJRA actually disadvantages the younger generation.
In addition, the UKRI provide data on grant awards by age of the PI. In their last report, 17% of the sum total of awards went to PIs aged 60 or older. These are also the largest awards, illustrating how academics over 60 years old bring in significant funding for younger academics to work on exciting research programmes. In this sense, EJRA is disadvantaging younger academics.
EJRA also disadvantages older Cambridge academics because they are no longer allowed to apply for grants. This has an obvious negative effect on the University's ability to do its job of educating future academic leaders.
The university claims that EJRA is necessary to create vacancies for younger academics
The university claims that EJRA is necessary to create vacancies for younger academics
It is not.
It is not.
EJRA does not create new academic jobs. It simply brings forward a vacancy when an academic job becomes vacant, usually by just a few years.
All EJRA can do is change the time at which an already existing job becomes vacant due to retirement. More than half of all vacancies arise for reasons other than retirement. In addition, most academics in other universities where there is no EJRA choose to retire at 71 or 72 or earlier, so having a forced retirement age at 67 or 69 increases vacancy creation rates by an insignificant amount, between 2 – 4%.
If the average career of an academic is approximately 30 years, and EJRA shortens this by 10%, then an extra vacancy for this post appears once every 300 years.
In addition, Cambridge is not adding new professorships. The number of professorships has actually gone down since EJRA was imposed. The graph below shows this very clearly.
We invite you to look at the FAQs on this website to learn about other myths about EJRA.
Note that Oxford, the only other university in England with an EJRA like Cambridge, has consistently lost at Employment Tribunals because their EJRA was judged not proportionate and therefore unjustified age discrimination.
Both Oxford and Cambridge claim EJRA significantly increases vacancies for younger people, but statistical analysis shows this increase is at best marginal, around 2 - 4%. The Employment Tribunals judged this to be “trivial” and the EJRA therefore unlawful because it discriminates on the basis of a "protected characteristic" (age), without justification.
In this sense, EJRA is no different to sexism, racism, or ableism. It is simply discrimination. It is time to abolish it.
Number of professorships at Cambridge
Number of professorships at Cambridge
The university claims that EJRA allows effective succession planning.
The university claims that EJRA allows effective succession planning.
It does not.
It does not.
Consider a senior professor in Cambridge who is leading a research group or a research centre.
EJRA means that these world class leaders are prevented from taking on PhD students or applying for grants from age 62 years, even if they have a Nobel Prize or are a Fellow of the Royal Society.
So, do they stay around to help succession planning? Not at all. They move to another world class university where there is no EJRA when they are about 60, so that their own research career is not abruptly curtailed at 62.
This unpredictable brain drain has the impact of reducing succession planning since such senior academics are unlikely to notify the university ahead of time that they are actively looking elsewhere. They just leave.
And EJRA means it is very difficult to recruit a replacement professor who is a world class leader say in their 50s, who knows they may be forced to retire within 10 years. Why would they move to Cambridge?
Read the letter to the Vice Chancellor and signed by 120 Cambridge University Professors, demanding that the EJRA be abolished, on the grounds that it is illegal, uneconomic, anti equality, diversity and inclusion, discriminatory, out of date, and poses massive reputational risk to our university. That letter is in the Background section of this website.
The university claims that EJRA preserves academic autonomy and freedom.
The university claims that EJRA preserves academic autonomy and freedom.
It does not.
It does not.
The university claims that fundamentally it is for each academic to decide for themselves what to research, without fear for our positions.
Supporters of the EJRA have argued that "This allows us all to be risk-takers; to test out ideas that are radical, unpopular, untried or beyond the edge of what might usually be considered ‘our fields’. But it is exactly in this type of space that some of the most outstanding research takes place, and Cambridge has a far greater impact on the world than its physical size would suggest because of this freedom. Nothing, however, is without a price, and the necessary consequence of the absence of a review that could lead to the end of employment is the fixed retirement age for academics in tenured posts."
The employment tribunals have consistently ruled that the absence of an effective performance management review is not a legal reason to impose an EJRA.
In addition, any extension to the retirement age is subject to a decision by university administrators. This also stifles academic freedom.
An example of arbitrary contract extension denial was the case of Professor Sir Michael Pepper (see the FAQ page). A world class leader in his field, he moved to a university in London when his request to extend his job past 67 years old was blocked at the School of the Physical Sciences.
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