Like so much else in American life, deciding when to retire from academe has evolved into a strictly private and personal matter, without any guiding rules, ethical context, or sense of obligation to do what’s best—for one’s students, department, or institution. Only the vaguest questions—and sometimes not even those—are legally permitted. An administrator’s asking, "When do you think you might retire?" can bring on an EEOC complaint or a lawsuit. Substantive departmental or faculty discussions about retirement simply do not occur.
University professors may be more educated than the average American, but now that there’s no mandatory retirement age, their decisions about when to leave prove that they are as self-interested as any of their countrymen. When professors continue to teach past 70, they behave in exactly the same way as when we decide to drive a car on a national holiday. Who among us stops to connect the dots between our decision to drive and a traffic jam, or that traffic jam and global warming?
Despite the boomer claim that 70 is the new 50, and the actuarial fact that those who live in industrialized countries and make it to the age of 65 have a life expectancy reaching well into the 80s, 70 remains what it has always been—old. By the one measure that should count for college faculty—how college students perceive their professors—it is definitively old. Keeping physically fit, wearing Levi’s, posting pictures on Instagram, or continually sneaking peeks at one’s iPhone don’t count for squat with students, who, after all, have grandparents who are 70, if not younger.
To invoke Horace, professors can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll come right back in. Aging is Nature’s domain, and cannot be kneaded into a relativist cultural construct. It’s her means of leading us onto the off-ramp of life.
Professors approaching 70 who are still enamored with hanging out with students and colleagues, or even fretting about money, have an ethical obligation to step back and think seriously about quitting. If they do remain on the job, they should at least openly acknowledge they’re doing it mostly for themselves.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some professors, especially in the humanities, become more brilliant as they grow older—coming up with their best ideas and delivering sagacity to their students. And some research scientists haul in the big bucks even when they’re old. But those cases are much rarer than older professors vainly like to think. (...)
The average age for all tenured professors nationwide is now approaching 55 and creeping upward; the number of professors 65 and older more than doubled between 2000 and 2011. In spite of those numbers, according to a Fidelity Investments study conducted about a year ago, three-quarters of professors between 49 and 67 say they will either delay retirement past age 65 or—gasp!—never retire at all. They ignore, or are oblivious to, the larger implications for their students, their departments, and their colleges.
And they delude themselves about their reasons for hanging on. In the Fidelity survey, 80 percent of those responding said their primary reason for wanting to continue as faculty members was not that they needed the money but for "personal or professional" reasons. A Fidelity spokesman offered what seemed to me a naïve interpretation of that answer: "Higher-education employees, especially faculty, are deeply committed to their students, education, and the institutions they serve."
Maybe. But "commitment to higher education" covers some selfish pleasures.
by Laurie Fendrich, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: Scott Seymour
