The Emeriti Program emerged from a three-year, in-depth look at the issues related to retirement and retiree health care costs in higher education, sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This study, the Mellon College Retirement Project, was headed up and conducted by Dr. Linda Evers Cool and Dr. Kenneth E. Cool.
Linda Evers Cool is Founding Director of Emeriti Retirement Health Solutions. She served as lead investigator of a study of faculty retirement behavior and institutional retirement incentive policies at national liberal arts colleges since the lapse of mandatory retirement in higher education in 1994. Dr. Cool is also Professor of Anthropology at Union College. Previously, she served as Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty at Union College and, earlier, as Associate Academic Vice President at Marist College.
Her scholarly interests have focused on regional identity and politics from a cross-cultural perspective, with a special interest in the role of the elderly and their negotiations of power and identity in transitional societies. Her gerontological scholarship has been published in the Anthropological Quarterly, the International Journal of Aging and Human Development, the Journal of Social History, and a number of edited volumes focusing on gerontology in the social sciences. She has conducted fieldwork among the Corsican ethnic population in France, the Portuguese immigrant community in the United States, and the retiring faculty cohort at national liberal arts colleges. Dr. Cool was a founding member and past president of the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology.
She was awarded the bachelor's degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College and completed her Ph.D. in the same field at Duke University. She received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for her graduate and post-graduate research.
Kenneth E. Cool is President of Emeriti Retirement Health Solutions. He served as senior collaborator on a concurrent research investigation of faculty retirement behavior and institutional retirement incentive policies at national liberal arts colleges Previously, he was Director of Academic Planning and Program Support at Vassar College for twelve years, with responsibilities at the intersection of academic affairs, fund raising, and financial management. At Vassar, Dr. Cool coordinated strategic planning efforts for the first $200 million capital campaign. Previously, he performed similar administrative responsibilities in fund raising, sponsored research, and institutional planning at Santa Clara University.
His early career at Stanford, New Mexico, and Santa Clara focused on teaching and scholarship in foreign languages and comparative literature. He received a Fulbright graduate fellowship and a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship for his work in those fields. His literary scholarship has been published in the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Stanford French Review. Dr. Cool received his bachelor's degree in French from Davidson College and was awarded the Ph.D. in romance languages and comparative literature from Duke University.
