Are professors too old? Or are we looking at the wrong measure?

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Author’s note: Apologies for the radio silence last week. I was working with my business partner on our first paid gig, helping a unit from our campus with some strategic planning. But in total transparency, this post has been causing me some serious trouble. While the topic is important, I know what I am saying will certainly upset some people. What I’ve realized this past week, as I agonized, is that there is no right way of saying it, so here it goes.

A recent opinion piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Professors are too Old: the academy’s gerontocracy problem is worse than anyone admits”, caught my attention. The crux of the piece is that without forced retirement, faculty are in fact incentivized to stay in their roles far longer than they should.

The author states that between 2000 and 2010, the number of faculty over 65 has doubled, and that in the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard, there are more tenured faculty over 60 than under 50.

For anyone who has worked within the academy, this can’t be a surprise. We’ve always preferred age. When you think about the “sage on the stage,” I doubt you are conjuring up an image of a young firebrand. Wisdom has long been associated with age and, by extension, experience.

But age isn’t the real problem.

When I think about things that could be improved in the academy, I think about outdated structures and systems that don’t serve the current needs of our community. On the student side, we see the outsized influence of “student experience” and by extension the idea of students and parents as consumers to be kept happy, rather than citizens to be educated.

Consider Harvard’s recent push to cap the number of A’s. By giving out so many A’s, colleges and universities (it is not entirely a Harvard/Ivy problem) have essentially made the grade meaningless. On the university side, we’ve seen an explosion of administrators and mid-level managers. One recent report suggests that, on average, there are now 3 times as many administrators and non-faculty staff on campuses as there are faculty.  This makes sense as a response to the consumerization of students, who now demand increased services, and the growing tracking requirements for accrediting bodies, research grants, and contracts. Faculty are neither trained as customer service representatives addressing the needs of angry parents whose kids failed, nor are they business managers able to track spreadsheets and produce reports.

So, we’re all caught in this cycle that seems impossible to break.

Despite this, there are glimmers of hope.

David Brooks’ latest piece in The Atlantic, entitled “Something Big is Happening on Campus: There’s a lot going right at universities, if you’re only willing to see it”, points to several examples of faculty inspiring and challenging the next generation. I see these same bright pockets on my own campus in flashy moments that advance our community and in small one-on-one discussions with students reflecting on class material, and future goals and desires.

Academic leadership and the current incentive structures of the academy have forgotten the core values of higher education: learning (in the form of both teaching and research), integrity (a commitment to “big T” truthfulness), community (knowing we have to learn in collaboration with other people), and audacity (questioning orthodoxy and seeking new perspectives).

Communities desperately want academics to show up and work with them to improve their lives. Students want to be challenged so THEY can come up with new ways to see the world that account for their unique perspectives and experiences and not just replicate the thinking of adults in their sphere. There are big problems in the world that need to be solved.

We’ve built this system. These outcomes are not inevitable. But we all need to take the first few brave steps to question what seems unquestionable. We need to see the limits of what we know and see as faculty of all ranks. We need leadership to stand with faculty to take a new direction that brings us back to the core values of higher ed.

This is where the proliferation of older faculty becomes a benefit, not a curse. We need you to help us create the space for these changes to happen. We need you to take advantage of your tenure and time in rank to build upon the foundations that you have helped to create, recognize the opportunities for advancement, and work together to find a different pathway forward. I know it’s a lot, but I can promise your junior colleagues are ready, willing, and able to take those first steps alongside you.  

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