Tokyo

The University of Tokyo is to extend the mandatory age of retirement from 60 to 65, despite sharp criticism from many of its professors. The increase will be phased in between 2001 and 2013, adding one year to the retirement age every three years.

The proposal has been hotly contested since it was put forward last December. Critics argue that it will enhance the power of established professors and block already congested career paths for young researchers. But the university president, Shigehiko Hasumi, says that the extension will help to move the university towards a “global standard” based on “diversity of nationality, sex and age”.

Ken'ichi Arai, director of the university's Institute of Medical Science and a member of its senate, agrees. He says that flatly refusing to let those over 60 continue their work is age discrimination and a barrier to producing a university system “based purely on achievement”.

Detractors allege, however, that the initiative is motivated not by lofty principles of equal opportunity, but by a desire to protect would-be retirees from declining post-retirement employment prospects and changes in Japan's pension system.

In Japan, the pensionable age for public employees, including university professors, is also being raised from 60 to 65 — on the same 13-year schedule as at the university. In addition, the once-abundant opportunities for retired professors to augment a scanty pension with positions in private universities have been drying up.

Takashi Masuda, who retired from the university's faculty of sciences this March, believes that eliminating the need for retirees to seek employment elsewhere will make professors complacent. He has set up a webpage to air the opinions of faculty opposed to the change. Extending the retirement age will make it more difficult for young researchers to get positions, Masuda says. This will be especially harmful in the sciences, he adds, where the most productive work is often done by scholars in their 30s or 40s.

Supporters and critics of the age change agree that its effectiveness will rest on new evaluation systems and other relevant policies that university departments must implement as it comes into force.

Although optimists see the initiative as part of a larger move towards an achievement-orientated university system, others are less sanguine. According to Masuda, the change was passed by the university senate with no real debate, and little serious consideration will be given to improving the evaluation system, either. “The department heads won't want to make any hard decisions that they don't have to,” he says.

⇒ http://www-masuda.cs.uec.ac.jp/~masuda/retirement.html