Rule considers cash, not age

The mandatory retirement policy IU now has is not about age discrimination. It's about money. \nThe U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission may require the university to rewrite its stance on manditory retirement that forces administrators to retire at the age of 65. \nWhen the time comes to pay tuition, those in favor of rewriting the mandatory retirement policy might come to regret it. \nIU is not exactly flowing with cash right now. Students were recently slapped with a 7.5 percent tuition increase, and thanks to the sorry state of the state budget, more are on the way. And the University already faces paying $2 billion over the next 30 years to professors who retired over twelve years ago -- professors whom current students have never even seen, much less taken a class from. It seems unfair that students ought to be saddled with the burden of paying exorbitant pensions, especially in times of economic recession. It may be obvious that an administrator at 65 is just as spry and able as an administrator at 64, but it's also true that limiting the time administrators can work for IU keeps costs down because no one has to pay for a complex retirement plan. \nThere's a reason why the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which protects employees from mandatory retirement practice based on age, doesn't apply to state employees. Imagine how high taxes would be if government agencies didn't have mandatory retirement policies. It's not that government employees can't do their jobs after a certain age; it's simply that voters can't afford to have other people's pensions taken out of their paychecks. Likewise, at this University, the students are the voters and the administrators are the government officials. It would be useless to argue that administrators over the age of 65 aren't capable of doing their jobs, because they are. \nLook at Morton Lowengrub, for example. The former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences left IU after 32 years under mandatory retirement and then became vice president for academic affairs at Yeshiva University. Clearly, Lowengrub was not incapable as an administrator merely because he passed age 65. The longer administrators work at IU, the more IU students will have to pay for their retirement, and it is necessary to have some sort of limit on how long an administrator's employment at IU will be. In Lowengrub's case, it is the students at Yeshiva who will have to pay for the additional years that Lowengrub works, and not students at IU. \nClearly administrators are capable of great work after the age of 65, and no one wants to contest that. But IU simply can't afford to retain its employees without setting some sort of limit on their terms as administrators. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and even though that line has been at age 65 for the past 60 years, it has never been about age. It has always been about economics.