While retirement can “feel like jumping off a cliff” for some professors, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs C. Dianne Martin said a new program for emeriti faculty will look to soften the blow starting this fall.

The Society of the Emeritus Legacy Project will help keep professors in touch with GW after retirement through a mentorship grant program, an activities committee, a lounge on the Mount Vernon Campus and a multimedia web project to honor long-serving professors.

“When you retire, that’s it, they give you a party and you go. This keeps people more connected,” said George Bozzini, an associate professor emeritus of English and president of the Society of the Emeriti. “When you have a group that has this much cohesion, you can do something with them and for them. We can serve the University, and the University can help us feel more wanted and needed.”

The office of the provost will budget $5,000 for the grant program next year, which will dole out 10 small awards to emeriti to mentor new faculty or direct undergraduate research projects. Martin said two Ph.D. students will also spend the summer creating a website and interviewing emeriti faculty to tell tales of their scholarship and memories of teaching.

Martin has spent the year planning the University’s role in a changing faculty life cycle. More faculty are staying at colleges longer, during a time when departments are seeking younger faculty with budding research portfolios – an issue facing universities nationwide, she said.

“We have a university that wants to bring in new faculty, so we can’t have people come in if people don’t retire. We’re trying to make it accepted, so people will think it’s a good thing,” Martin said. “This helps them to still be a part of the GW community.”

The emeriti project is part of a larger effort to incentivize retirement options, as the University aims to roll out new formalized retirement options for the faculty in the fall, Martin said.

The University is considering three retirement plans, including an immediate payout plan and a phased-out retirement plan.

Those plans would make faculty retirements more transparent, Martin said, overhauling a system that “tends to be very idiosyncratic.”

“People go to their deans and they try to cut deals. There’s not transparency. Some of the arrangements are marked confidential, ” Martin said. “This would level the playing field.”

Emeritus status, largely honorific, is granted to distinguished retiring faculty with long histories at GW. Nineteen faculty members earned this title at the Board of Trustee’s February meeting, bringing the total number of emeriti professors to more than 300.

Emeritus professors get free parking and access to Gelman Library and the Lerner Health and Wellness Center. Monthly luncheons also bring some local emeritus faculty together, during which many called for expanded programming.

“What I see is a whole new wave of emeritus faculty,” Martin said. “We have had some people who have been here a long time, and now we want to embrace this new group of retirees in a much more robust way, because they act like they want to stay connected and be a part of this.”

Robert Dyer, a professor of marketing who has taught at GW since 1972, will retire this year and was awarded emeritus status in February. He praised administrators’ efforts to help retiring faculty feel linked to GW, adding that he too would look to stay involved.

“It’s not going to end with the stage screen coming down and you’re out the door and not connected. I’ll be able to keep my hand in exactly as much as I want to,” Dyer said.

The lounge will be created on the Mount Vernon Campus, Martin said, because the satellite campus has more parking.

Dyer recounted that a University-wide faculty lounge in the Marvin Center had brought faculty together, something he hoped emeritus faculty would replicate.

“Everyone likes to sit around and tell stories,” he said. “There’s something about being able to collectively share memories and have a place to do that.”