FAQs

Q. What is the Employer Justified Retirement Age [EJRA]?
A: The EJRA is an internal policy in Cambridge University, that forces University Teaching Officers to retire at the end of the year they turn 67, unless they successfully apply for an extension. Even if granted, this only gives them a fixed term non-Officer contract, often just 3 years, to complete one research grant or to complete supervising one PhD student. 

Q. Is the EJRA legal?
A: Forced retirement on the basis of age is unlawful under the Equality Act because it discriminates against a group of people based solely on a 'protected characteristic' (in this case, age). This is as illegal as any other form of discrimination, such as forcing people to retire on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, or disability. 

The EJRA is a legal loop hole that allows an employer to get around the Equality Act if and only if the employer (in this case Cambridge University) can show that it is a proportionate and therefore justified way of achieving 4 goals: inter-generational fairness, succession planning, fostering innovation, and preserving academic autonomy and freedom. In other words, the university needs to show that the EJRA produces the claimed benefits at high levels, and it also need to show that those claimed benefits outweigh the negative effects of forcing people to retire. 

The content of this website leads to the conclusion that the EJRA is not justifiable (i.e., it does not lead to these 4 goals, so the J in EJRA does not apply) and therefore the EJRA is illegal. 

Q. What would be an example of a legal EJRA?

The airline industry successfully uses a legal EJRA because it can justify that older pilots may pose a safety risk to passengers if as they age their motor reactions or vision may on average fall below a minimum safety standard. But in a University setting, the relevant skills for an academic employee are intellectual and scholarly abilities, and verbal abilities required for teaching. There is no evidence that at age 67, academics lose these abilities and indeed many academics are at the top of their academic game at this age. 

Some argue that the EJRA is being used in place of performance management, but in law this is an illegal use of forced retirement. All employees should be subject to performance management, irrespective of age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, etc., You can have an academic who is age 40 who is no longer able to demonstrate they can perform duties such as scholarship, teaching, and generating grant income, and you can have an academic age 75 or 80 who can amply demonstrate they can do all of these things at a world-class level. 

Q. How might the university show the 4 benefits outweigh the negative effects of forcing people to retire?

A: The university can do this through the use of reasoning, and/or by asking staff involved in hiring and promotion, and/or by analysing statistics from Cambridge University's HR records, and comparing this with data from other institutions, e.g. with data from HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency). The university has used all three in its efforts to justify its use of the EJRA. 

Those efforts have been challenged in the response on this site to the University’s Data Report. Specifically, Cambridge University has used flawed reasoning (e.g., "to get rid of some unproductive older academics, it will force all older academics to retire, even if they are super-productive"), and it has used flawed data analysis, leading to eroneous conclusions (e.g., in Oxford, where there is an EJRA too, Paul Ewart was able to show that the percentage of vacancies that the EJRA produced was about 4% at best, but in the process about 30 senior academics were forcibly retired each year, which is not proportionate. When the statistics are calculated without bias, the same applies to Cambridge). 

Q. If Cambridge does not show that its EJRA is a proportionate way of achieving its goals, can it be held guilty of discrimination?

A: Yes, this would be age-related discrimination if the university cannot prove that the EJRA is a proportionate and hence legitimate way of achieving its goals.

Q. Who else has an EJRA in the UK?

A: In England and Wales, only Oxford and Cambridge Universities have a fixed retirement age. Oxford recently raised theirs to 70, which like 67 is an arbitrary number, and the Penty Report proposes increasing it to 69 for Cambridge, again an arbitrary number and one year less than Oxford. In Scotland, only St Andrews has a fixed retirement age. Every other university in the UK abolished its retirement age. The same is true in the U.S. including universities such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. All other universities in the UK aside from these 3 instead offer voluntary retirement on the grounds of age, and this works perfectly well. Indeed, most academics choose to retire at age 71 or 72, and most universities who offer voluntary retirement schemes also implement performance management for all staff, not just those over a certain age. 

Q. Do all university employees have to retire?

A: No, only university teaching officers. Prior to the Equality Act of 2010, everyone had to retire at the age stated in their contract. After the Equality Act, the retirement age for support staff was abolished, and under Cambridge University's current proposal, academic-related or administrative staff will also not have to retire. 

Q: Isn't it common sense that if people do not leave, there will be fewer jobs for existing staff? In that sense, doesn't the EJRA create vacancies?
A: Although it seems intuitive that the EJRA creates vacancies, intuitions are often wrong and in fact the EJRA does not create vacancies. All the EJRA can do is to change the time at which a vacancy is created. That vacancy is not created by the EJRA as it would be created anyway, at some point in time, for a whole host of reasons, such as people leaving to go to another university, or people choosing to retire, or people no longer being able to work through illness, disability, or death. Expressed differently, the EJRA does not create posts that then become vacant – the posts are there with or without an EJRA. 

Q: Wait! Doesn't the Penty report use some fancy technique called Little's Law to prove that EJRA creates vacancies? What's up with that? It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to realise that letting people retire when they want will curb the rate of new job creation!

Well, no. Imagine a very popular building (which we can call Cambridge) with a long line outside. If everyone inside stays for 37 minutes (in years, this would be the average retirement age for a Cambridge faculty member without an EJRA, assuming that they get into the building at age 35 - this is what statistics from the US tell us), the line moves slowly. Now, imagine you tell everyone they can only stay for 34 minutes (i.e. you apply an EJRA). This doesn't immediately let a brand-new person in, but it does mean everyone in line gets in 3 minutes earlier. You have a wave moving down the line: the first person gets in 3 minutes earlier, then the next person 3 minutes after them (still 3 minutes earlier than they would have), and so on. Eventually, this "wave" reaches the end of the line, and that's when someone who wasn't originally waiting gets to enter the building. The longer the line was to start with, the longer it takes for this to happen. Your three minute time saving is distributed across the entire queue. So if you assume that Cambridge and Oxford are super-desirable places to be, that line is super-long. Now convert everything to years. If you assume 100 people waiting, if the average career of an academic is approximately 35 years and the EJRA shortens this by 10%, then an extra job will appear once every 350 years! 

Q: Show me the math. I can handle it.

Imagine a university with a fixed number of positions. On average, faculty members stay for 37 years (assuming that they get into a permanent post when they are 35 years old) unless a new retirement policy is implemented, requiring them to retire at 34 years (i.e. when they are 69). Analysis using Little's Law:

1. Initial situation:

   • Average time in the system (W) = 37 years (the number of years that faculty stay if there is no EJRA)

   • Number of positions at the university (L) is fixed (let's call it N)

   • Arrival rate (λ) of new faculty is constant (but not explicitly stated)

2. New policy:

   • Average time in the system (W) is reduced to 34 years (they retire when they turn 69)

3. Application of Little's Law:
   L = λW Where:
   L = average number of items in the system (number of faculty positions)
   λ = average arrival rate of new faculty
   W = average time a faculty member spends at the university

4. Analysis:

   • Initially: N = λ * 37

   • After policy change: N = λ * 34

The number of positions (N) remains constant; only the time spent at the university changes. So the Penty assumption is that the vacancy creation rate goes up (λ), to keep N constant. However, the increase in the rate turns out to be negligible (see below). 

5. Time savings:
   Each faculty member's career is shortened by 10% (around 3 years) (37 - 34 = 3)

6. Time for an extra person to enter:
   To create a completely new vacancy, we need to accumulate enough time savings to equal one full 37-year career. Positions needed to cycle through = 37 years / 3 years saved per position = 12 positions

Therefore, a specific post/position needs to be occupied by 12 people sequentially during a given period of time before an extra person can occupy the post for the average duration of each post- holder in the sequence. They need to go sequentially. If they go through in parallel, i.e. at the same time, the time available at the end of their careers is only the few years saved by the EJRA bringing forward their retirement. This short period is not enough to allow one person to have a full career in any of these posts. 

In addition, the increase in the vacancy creation rate arising from the EJRA, taking account of vacancies created for reasons other than retirement and also voluntary retirements at the age set by the EJRA, is only a few percent (2 - 4%).

To arrive at this figure for the effect of the EJRA on the vacancy creation rate, VCR, we use approximate figures and assume first the following:

·       The number of posts, N, is constant

·      The same number of people at each age

·       Career length is 30 years (appointed at 37 retired by EJRA at 67)

·       Vacancies created only by retirement at EJRA

Now, if everyone extends their career past the EJRA for 3 years i.e. a 10% increase in career length, there must be a 10% reduction in the VCR to maintain N constant. So, the EJRA, by preventing these extensions, increases the VCR by 10%. 

But at least 50% of vacancies arise for reasons other than retirement. Therefore, the contribution of EJRA to the total VCR is reduced to 5%. (i.e. 50% of 10%) Furthermore, at least 50% of those reaching the EJRA would retire voluntarily. Therefore, the contribution of EJRA to the total VCR is reduced to 2.5%. These figures are based on data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, HESA and internal university data and surveys. Varying the figures within reasonable limits results in the change in VCR caused by EJRA is in the range 2 - 4%.

 This effect of the EJRA is so trivial that it is not a proportionate means of creating vacancies to achieve the aims - as judged by Employment Tribunals. 

Q: Doesn’t the EJRA prevent “bed-blocking”?
A: Again, most people think intuitively that the EJRA prevents older people from blocking an opportunity that could be used by a younger person. However, statistically, this does not actually happen. That’s because most people in other universities where there is no EJRA choose to retire, so forcing out people at age 67 or 69 does not significantly block opportunities for younger people. 

As mentioned above, a robust statistical analysis by Professor Paul Ewart in Oxford University, which has been upheld in a series of employment tribunals, shows that shows that the uppermost bound of the reduction in vacancies from the abolition of the EJRA is only around 4%.  If the EJRA at Cambridge University is lifted to 69, the level of the reduction in vacancies will be around 2% or even lower. This is disproportionate to the damage caused to the 30 or so individual academics who are forcibly retired each year, and to the university as a whole who lose the benefits of highly productive senior academics who often bring in millions of pounds in research income, and bring an intellectual perspective of 30 or 40 years of research experience that a younger academic does not. 

In short, we need academics of all ages, genders, ethnicities, races, with or without disabilities, if we believe in equality, diversity and inclusion, and the bed-blocking argument turns out to be fallacious.  

Q. Surely the EJRA improves recruiting opportunities?

A: The EJRA does not improve recruiting opportunities because the EJRA discourages applicants who are at a senior level from applying to Cambridge.  Other universities are more attractive at the chair level as in Cambridge there will be a very limited period in post.

Q. Is it difficult to fill posts with senior professors because of EJRA?

A: Yes. An example is that Prof Doug Fearon who is now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and who did seminal work on stromal cells after he left Cambridge University. It has taken 12 years to re-elect someone to his chair. Many high profile external candidates declined the job in part because of EJRA, and instead used the offer in Cambridge to leverage a senior position in their home institution. 

Q. Doesn't the EJRA promote academic freedom? Isn't is the case that Cambridge academics can do whatever we want academicaly, without risk of being fired, because the university does not have a performance evaluation system? Surely this is a good reason to keep the EJRA?
A: The parliamentary guidance relating to an EJRA expressly excludes its use as a proxy for performance management. The University of Oxford lost at Tribunal for the clear reason that absence of performance management is not a legal justification for an EJRA and does not achieve a legitimate social policy aim. And it is not the case that academics at Cambridge or Oxford have greater academic freedom than academics at other universities, because of the EJRA. 

Q: Isn't abolishing the EJRA at Cambridge University extremely expensive? The report says that it will cost Cambridge University £7.4 million! Is this true?
A: First, the stated goals of the EJRA are not to save money by forcing expensive older faculty to retire and to be replaced by cheaper, younger people. If saving money were the main argument for the EJRA, it would be outright illegal. Furthermore, such assumed cost is – at best –  very questionable, as it overlooks the enormous contributions in grant money of some of our more senior colleagues. Data from the UKRI shows that 17% of the sum total of awards went to PIs aged 60 or older. These are also the largest awards, suggesting that they support the larger and therefore more exciting programmes of work. This means that EJRA in fact leads to a 20% reduction in Cambridge University’s income, putting Cambridge at a competitive disadvantage compared to universities like Imperial or UCL who do not have an EJRA. Universities exist not just to train postdocs but also to grow world leaders who can bring in big grants and hire postdocs, and EJRA prematurely deprives Cambridge of world leaders.

Q. If Cambridge staff (academic and non-academic staff) voted for the EJRA in 2012, are we now saying that was wrong?

A: The placet for the 2012 EJRA was: Retirement from office does not have to mean the end of academic life: we all know colleagues whose scholarship, teaching, research and other contributions have flourished, or even blossomed, after formal retirement. Furthermore, the proposed policy allows extended employment beyond the retirement age in an unestablished capacity when it is in the mutual interest of the University and the individual. There is also the continuing option of voluntary research agreements for active researchers. The combination of new recruitment with mechanisms for retaining exceptional researchers and scholars beyond the retirement age promotes fairness across the generations.

This was an essential consideration, especially for those who needed grant funding to continue their work. Unfortunately, the current EJRA is not that which was originally agreed upon.

Q. Don't American universities have retirement ages?

A: No. That was ended in 1991. A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine examined this very issue and decided to recommend the abolition of a mandatory retirement age in the US. They concluded that the evidence before them did not justify continuing the exemption of tenured faculty from the overall federal policy of prohibiting mandatory retirement on the basis of age. Specifically, they found that at most colleges and universities, few tenured faculty would continue working past age 70 if mandatory retirement was eliminated (as was subsequently done). Most faculty retire before age 70. At a small number of research universities, more than 40 percent of the faculty who retire each year did so at the then mandatory retirement age of 70. Their evidence suggests that faculty who are research oriented, enjoy inspiring students, have light teaching loads, and are covered by pension plans that reward later retirement are more likely to work past age 70. These are precisely the faculty Cambridge should want to keep. No American university today has a mandatory retirement age and they seem to manage fine.

Q. At what age do most academics choose to retire in other universities?

A: Around 70-71 years, which suggests that EJRA brings a job forward by around 2 years before it would occur anyway. 

Q. Are the Penty Report recommendations justified?

A: No, the Penty Report contains multiple errors and regrettably a lack of transparency. See the rebuttal by Linton et al, or the Oxford rebuttal by Ewart. The conclusions of the Penty Report are neither justified nor correct. This renders the Cambridge University EJRA disproportionate, unjustifiable and open to legal challenges in Employment Tribunals or the High Court, which carries reputational risk for Cambridge University.

Q. But doesn't the Penty Report have hard data on retirements at Cambridge?

A: Yes, it does. But it persistently conflates retirement-generated vacancies and EJRA-generated vacancies throughout. The two are very different.

Q. With the EJRA, can’t I just retire and carry on with my research?

A: If your research does not require grants, post-docs or students, you may just retire and carry on with your research, although office or workspace may not be provided. If you need to obtain grants and want to supervise PhD students or work with postdocs, then you cannot just retire and carry on with your research, unless you go through a process of approval, which is currently hard to obtain.

Q. If I hold a tenured post and am many years away from retirement, does the EJRA affect me?

A: Eventually, the EJRA will affect you. For example, compared to earlier generations, it is likely that you only got a permanent post around age 40 rather than around 30. This means the EJRA may shorten your academic career even more. With lower salaries, higher and longer mortgage costs, retirement even at 69 is likely to have a major impact on your standard of living. In addition, don't forget that USS has drastically cut your retirement benefits. Unlike the cohorts who retired well before 2012, your pension is much lower than before. Finally, early or mid-career academics often don't pay much attention to how the EJRA will affect them, until they approach the age of forced retirement, but it comes around for everyone. 

Q. When in my career does the EJRA affect me?

A: Sooner than you think! As you approach retirement it is probable that you will not be able to take on PhD students three or four years prior to retirement, and applying for research grants will become harder if the grant go beyond the retirement age.

Q. Is EJRA absurd if it takes 30 years to grow a world-class leader?

A: Yes, one view is that to create a world-class academic leader takes about 30 years, starting at the end of the PhD at age 25. The most successful academics are around age 55, when funding bodies trust them to manage huge multi-million pound grants to run big research centres, consortia, or research programmes. So if our best academics are at their peak at 55 or 60, it is absurd to cut them off at their prime. It is hard to replace them with a 30 or 40 year old, as the funding bodies expect world-class leaders to have an established track record of managing huge grants and with a huge body of work behind them, before they will trust them to lead large research groups. 

Q. What if I want to retire? Without an EJRA, will I be able to?

A: You can leave at any time. Whether you would like to go somewhere else or retire completely is up to you. However, if you should choose to retire, you should discuss with the USS to find out what your pension would be.

Q. Can I extend my contract in Cambridge instead of retiring?

A: Subject to assessment of a proposal for extending, and establishing a source of funding, a UTO may be able to continue for a specified period, but only as a non-officer.

Q. Does the EJRA improve diversity?

A: No. Improving diversity is not one of the stated aims of the EJRA in Cambridge. It was one of the aims in Oxford in their original version (2012) but as it was clear that their diversity statistics were getting worse instead of better after the first EJRA (pointed out in Professor Paul Ewart's HESA research) relative to the Russell Group, it was dropped in their revised version in 2017.

 A rigorous statistical analysis of Oxford and Cambridge diversity data by the eminent statistician, Dan Lunn, shows some interesting trends in Cambridge, especially when disaggregated into disciplines. Overall, Cambridge performance regarding proportions of women in academic posts lagged the Russell Group significantly. Of added interest is that post-introduction of the EJRA, the number of women appointed to temporary posts increased whereas those to permanent posts decreased. There is absolutely no evidence that the EJRA did anything to improve diversity at Cambridge or Oxford. 

Q. Are there examples of the Cambridge brain drain?

A: The following is a short list of just some of the many people who have left Cambridge and have cited the EJRA as a major factor in their decision to leave:

• Gerard Evan moved to the Francis Crick Institute and is now Professor of Cancer Biology at Kings College London after reaching the mandatory retirement age at Cambridge. 

• Sir Colin Humphreys (CBE, FRS, FREng, FIMMM, FInstP) moved to Queen Mary University of London as Professor of Materials Science after reaching the mandatory retirement age here. 

• Martin Kilduff, the Diageo Professor of Management Studies at Cambridge University, left Cambridge at the age of 60 to go to University College, London as Professor of Organizational Behavior. 

• Peter McNaughton, now Professor of Pharmacology at King’s College London, left his post as Shield Professor of Pharmacology at Cambridge in 2013 because he was approaching the mandatory retirement age. 

• Juliet Mitchell (FBA), was Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge and Founder Director of the Centre for Gender Studies. After retiring, she moved to UCL to take up a Research Professorship.

• Sir Michael Pepper, Pender Chair of Nanoelectronics, University College, London, left Cambridge in early 2009 (prior to the EJRA) due to reaching the mandatory retirement age. He joined the UCL London Centre for Nanotechnology and the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. He built up a new research group, has raised two Programme Grants for about £6 and £7 million and is now preparing another one. He has had some major equipment grants and smaller grants, received various awards and honorary degrees, including the Newton medal, the most prestigious award of the Institute of Physics. 

• M. Hashem Pesaran, left Cambridge in 2012 following mandatory retirement and is now John Elliot Distinguished Chair in Economics at the University of Southern California. 

• Simon Tavaré (FRS, FMedSci) was a Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge from 2003 to 2019. He was Director of its MPhil in Computational and Systems Biology (2004-2014) and Director of its Wellcome Trust 4-year Ph.D. program in Mathematical Genomics and Medicine (2010-2017). From November 2015 to November 2017, he was President of the London Mathematical Society. After reaching mandatory retirement age in Cambridge, he left to take on the role of Professor of Statistics and Biological Sciences at Columbia University in New York.

• Glyn Winskel (FRS) left his post at Cambridge on reaching the mandatory retirement age to join the University of Strathclyde as Professor of Computer and Information Sciences. He was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society this year. 

Equally patently absurd is that even if you win the Nobel Prize in Cambridge University, or any other equivalent prize as a marker of remarkable esteem in your field of scholarship, you are forced to retire at age 67. Most other universities do not risk losing their highest performing academics and they are quick to employ Cambridge's best academics when we force them to leave.