With many professors balking at the idea of retiring, some institutions are creating emeritus colleges to give older faculty a new venue and allow space for new instructors.

Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed has this analysis:

Recent data suggest that baby boomer professors largely won’t retire at or even around 65. That’s concerning to administrators who value their institutional knowledge but also want to make room for newer faculty with fresh ideas — and lower salaries.

While some professors cite financial concerns as their reasons for postponing retirement, greater numbers cite intellectual concerns – more specifically, falling off a kind of intellectual cliff after a lifetime engaged in ideas, often collaboratively. That makes encouraging these professors to retire more complicated than offering buyouts or other purely financial incentives.

In one study, for example, 60 percent of faculty surveyed said they both expected and hoped to work past the traditional retirement age. In another study of baby boomer faculty, 89 percent of those who planned on delaying retirement for professional reasons said they wanted to stay busy and productive. At the same time, university presidents put mandating the retirement of older, tenured faculty — who since 1994 have had no forced retirement age — at the top of their institutional reform wish lists.

But what if professors didn’t have to choose between retirement and staying engaged?

A growing trend in higher education – the emeritus college – is an intellectual bridge to retirement for a growing number of professors. And while there’s no data yet to show that they’re making a real difference in retirement rates, the proliferation of emeritus colleges suggests administrators have deemed them a good return on investment.

Designed as more erudite twins of traditional socially oriented retirement organizations, emeritus colleges already are well-established at some institutions across the country. Other continue to pop up. There are currently between six and eight, according to the Association for Retirement Organizations in Higher Education (AROHE). Most have been established since 2001.

Emeritus colleges are attractive to a growing number of institutions for their potential to make more meaningful the honorary but often hollow rank of “emeritus” professor, and offer a “renegotiated” path to retirement to faculty in general, said Roger Baldwin, a professor of higher, adult and lifelong education at Michigan State University who has studied such colleges.