One Idea to Ease Faculty Into Retirement: the ‘Terminal Sabbatical’

Faculty members can work as long as they want, a right that began with the end of mandatory retirement in 1994. Many haven’t been shy about exercising that right, and the American professoriate is decidedly grayer than a generation ago. This creates complications for colleges, including by limiting their flexibility in making decisions about budgets and about academic programming. All this was on the minds of Widener University (PA) administrators when they conceived of a new option they’d like to begin offering soon: the terminal sabbatical.