Off they go, like it or not, once they hit 65. Them’s the rules at British universities.
Terry Eagleton, you may recall, likes it so little that he’s suing the University of Manchester for consigning his 65-year-old ass to the dustbin of history.
Now there’s Jan Åke Gustafsson, a Swedish professor recently awarded the “2009 Fernströms Great Nordic Prize, a one million kronor ($146,000) award, for ground-breaking research in the area of nuclear receptors.” Gustafsson’s mistake was turning 67, which is when you get canned if you’re Swedish.
“I can’t believe it,” he told the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.
“It feels as though I still have much more to give.”
Since January of this year, Gustafsson has devoted much of his time to establishing a new, $30 million research centre in the United States at the University of Houston in Texas.
And he doesn’t expect his advancing age to be an issue for his colleagues in the United States.
“During the whole decision making process in Houston, not a single person has asked how old I am,” he told SvD.
“It’s irrelevant there. The only thing that counts is competence.”
Reason #7,641 why European universities – with one or two exceptions – will never begin to approach American.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:51PM
Well, there’s putting Terry Eagleton out to pasture at 65 and then there’s the professor here who prefaces every note to the president of the Colleges with "I have been teaching here since before you were born."
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:53PM
Absolutely, Michael. None of this is to defend retaining actual coots.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:04PM
Took me a minute to figure out that the headline was not meant literally. (What harm has Fulica atra ever caused?)
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:12PM
Yale had mandatory retirement at age 70 until it became illegal (in 1993!)– and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same sort of thing happened elsewhere. Yes, American universities will generally do the right thing with respect to age discrimination– and if they don’t, they’ll get sued.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:52PM
My Polish colleagues are absolutely amazed that we don’t make faculty and staff retire at 65. "What if they, you know, get a little ga-ga?" they ask. Not a problem, I say. We just have them advise the occasional senior thesis and keep a close eye on them otherwise. Sometimes, they just talk about the Golden Age, which is inevitably 25 years before the present moment, and sometimes they produce a brilliant book. We can’t predict one way or the other. Occasionally they’ll accept a retirement offer they can’t refuse, and occasionally we have to carry them out horizontally. But in general, we value their wisdom and experience. The Poles are simultaneously aghast and envious.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:53PM
I anticipated you might do that, RJO.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:58PM
Polish Peter: Admittedly, they can get ga-ga. That is a risk. I recall, many years ago, at who knows what university, a very elderly professor interrupting a faculty discussion of new course requirements with a long description of a tea he had with the Queen Mother.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:21PM
John B. Fenn was forced to retire at Yale at age 70 in 1987. He moved to Virginia Commonwealth University and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2002/fenn-lecture.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bennett_Fenn
September 22nd, 2009 at 8:46PM
Cambridge also forced Quentin Skinner to retire. He was picked up immediately by Queen Mary University of London, where he is said to be very happy. Meanwhile my own colleague Robert Darnton, older than Skinner, was lured to take up a new many-hour-a-day job as librarian of Harvard. As an incipient coot, I prefer our system–but I wish we had an actual way to deal with abuses, instead of just hoping that the dean can charm the useless coots out of the trees and into retirement, and I can’t see what form it could take.
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:21PM
Canadian universities are slowly overturning the requirement to retire at 65. This is a very good thing, because after the last financial meltdown took its bite out of my retirement savings, I will likely need to work to age 90 to be ABLE to retire.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:25PM
Tom: LOL.
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:06PM
I remember a concerned department chair here grabbing a younger faculty member at commencement and assigning him to prevent the department’s oldest member from wandering off on the procession in.
September 24th, 2009 at 4:50PM
I have to say, by far my worst grad school professors are also the ones who are over 75. 65 might be a bit early, but I can definitely see where they’re coming from. My favorite quote from my octogenarian econ professor – "’Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ – what is that from, the Bible?"
More witticisms of his (from one class!) can be found here: http://cherrispryteaintsobrite.tumblr.com/post/184870546/i-am-paying-a-crazy-person-to-teach-me-economics
Sometimes the brain just starts to go.
September 24th, 2009 at 5:06PM
Absolutely true, Mary Anne. Universities need ways of getting those whose brains have started to go out of the classroom. But I don’t think mandatory retirement is the answer.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:47PM
Well no, I suppose making it mandatory isn’t a good idea. But there ought to be some sort of structured weeding-out process. Like how people over a certain age need to take driving exams more often.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:07AM
MIT found the solution: move their offices to a Gehry building and let the vertigo do the dirty work.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:26AM
Omri: Funny!
November 25th, 2009 at 4:18PM
Coming in late on this, but the issue looks rather different to those of us just entering the profession. And it seems to me to be no coincidence that the retirement age is being questioned in Commonwealth countries just as the baby boomers start to reach 65. Entry-level academic jobs are scarce enough; the idea of them being made even scarcer because of individuals loftily regarding their academic positions as life appointments is pretty galling to anyone under, say, 35. At some point, the baton must be passed. Otherwise, there’ll be no one around to receive it when it finally drops from the cold, dead hands of the academic gerontocracy.