Cambridge University is facing new legal and internal challenges to its policy of forcing academics to retire at the age of 67. Around 120 current and former professors at the institution have signed a letter to the recently installed vice chancellor, Deborah Prentice, urging her to call a vote on abolishing the Employer Justified Retirement Age (EJRA) because of the risk of “brain drain”.
The university has already instigated a wide-ranging review of the policy — which has been used since 2012 to ensure older professors are moved off the payroll and to open up opportunities for younger academics — after Oxford University, the only other English institution to enforce retirement, lost a legal case against four of its former staff members.
Cambridge now also faces being sued over the EJRA itself for the first time after Ross Anderson, a computer science professor who was forced to retire in September, signalled his intention to launch a claim for unfair dismissal and discrimination.
Although he continues to work for the university once a week, Prof Anderson, who will be represented by the law firm Doyle Clayton, says he feels he has been “cut off in his prime”. “I’m still fit, still on top of it, still producing research at the rate of a dozen good papers a year. There are many other academics who continue to contribute into their seventies and eighties,” he told Times Higher Education.
Oxford lost its case last March after a judge ruled it had not shown the policy was a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”, partly because it lacked data on how many vacancies had been created due to the EJRA in the ten years it has operated.
Describing EJRA “immoral, illegal, unfair, uneconomic and bad employment practice”, the letter claims it harms the institution’s ability to attract world-class scholars, forces senior academics to move elsewhere to continue their research and causes stress and poor mental health for those approaching the mandatory retirement age.
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