The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

The image of the cane in the graphics accompanying this feature implicitly equates age with infirmity and in that sense really underwrites the whole discussion and the issues emerging from it. Given the rise in the mean age of the professoriate, the task facing the leadership of higher education is how to assess competence over time and, more important, how to determine when the question of competence becomes the paramount question. The issue is not age discrimination; rather, the issue is helping senior faculty learn to engage in candid self-assessment so that they can make informed decisions on continuing as active teachers and researchers versus retiring.

In eight years as a department chair I found that those least likely to engage the question of their own age and to consider or elect the option of early retirement were, generally speaking, those exercising the greatest degree of denial about their own professional attainments, or lack thereof. These are faculty who would be better informed about career options if a compassionate, long-term system of post-tenure review were in place to help them track performance over time, so as to determine an appropriate time for retirement.

Higher education leadership, caught up as it is in corporatization, needs to refrain from seeing the demographics of the professoriate as providing an opportunity to cheapen further the mission of undergraduate instruction. Professors should be replaced with no less than assistant professors, and when possible, aggregated salary lines should be used to hire more faculty than the number retiring. We have an unparalleled opportunity to use resources already allocated to invest in the future of our profession. All that is required is that rarest of leadership skills: wise, far-seeing, and compassionate stewardship.

: -- Stuart Peterfreund, Professor of English, Northeastern University (posted 8/31, 3:05 p.m., E.D.T.)

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