The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

At first, as one in the over 55 cohort, I was tempted to lecture on the opportunity an aging professoriate presents to begin an reexamination of our youth-obssesed culture, to point out that age and wisdom have in almost all generations gone together, to argue how good it will be that my children will have such experience available to them in college. And, while all that may be true, I also have to acknowledge, humbly, I hope, that in my case being over 55 seems so irrelevant to anything except the fact that our seventh child will be born next April and that I will be 79 when said child graduates from college. (Which requires the kind of financial planning, TIAA/CREF tells me, called "as much as you can as quickly as you can" and skip the mortadella.) So, I keep hoping there is a major reversal in our understanding of "age" underway and that a professoriate long in the tooth can be seen as a fact of life, embraced joyfully, well, cheerfully, at any rate, or, as my 37 year old eldest son said, "You are WHAT!"

: -- Joseph McDonald, Associate Prof., Head, Information and Learning Support Services, Benedictine College (posted 8/30, 12:10 p.m., E.D.T.)

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