Golden Age

The historian Jean H. Baker is working on an article about the suffragist Edith Houghton Hooker and thinking about her next one, on the disenfranchisement of Black men in Maryland at the turn of the 20th century. She’s 91. Samuel Jay Keyser’s Play It Again, Sam, a book about repetition in the arts, is in production at MIT Press. At 89, he is still the editor of Linguistic Inquiry, which he founded 54 years ago. Lucy Freeman Sandler’s latest book, Penned & Painted: The Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, was published when she was 91. Now 94, Sandler is studying images of the destruction of books in a 13th-century pictorial Bible made for French royalty.

Aging has been much on Americans’ minds lately: In addition to the high-profile debate over whether Joe Biden, at 81, was too old to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and the continuing questions about Donald Trump’s age at 78, there have been controversies within academe about the number of elderly professors. Whatever the discourse, these three exceptional scholars prove that high-level scholarly work can be done well past the age of retirement.

So what keeps them studying and writing into their 10th decade?

“I never really feel retired,” says Sandler. “I retired from teaching” — in 2003, after 39 years as a professor of art history at New York University — but “I didn’t retire from the thing that I’ve always loved to do,” examining illuminations in medieval manuscripts and writing about the meaning of what she finds.

Since she “retired” at age 73, Sandler has, among other work, published four books, co-curated an exhibition at the New York Public Library, and received a fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She shares an office at NYU with another professor and works there sometimes, when she’s not working from home (she has apartments in both Greenwich Village and London).

At 16, Sandler, then Lucy Freeman, attended Queens College, the public arts institution of the City University of New York, where she encountered her first art-history course, taught by Frances Godwin, an Austrian immigrant. Godwin lived in Manhattan with her husband, an interior designer for the B. Altman department store, and they would invite students to their “glamorous, bohemian surroundings,” which Sandler says was “thrilling for a kid from the Bronx.” Godwin “opened my eyes to the Middle Ages,” Sandler says. Later, John Plummer at Columbia inspired Sandler’s interest in manuscript marginalia, but when her money ran out, she dropped out of graduate school to work until she could afford to re-enroll. Eventually the art historian Harry Bober invited her to study, tuition free, at New York University’s Institute of the Arts. She received her Ph.D. at NYU in 1964 and was hired as an assistant professor that year.

A 1989 Guggenheim fellowship supported her most important work, on the Omne Bonum, often called the first alphabetical encyclopedia. Written between about 1360 and 1375 and never completed, the volumes include, in a preface, the author’s first name, James, but not his surname. In the early 1990s, Sandler was in the Bodleian Library looking at a massive Gospel commentary for another project. “I see it’s the same scribe,” she says, and “most of the pictures are by the same illuminator that this ‘James’ used in Omne Bonum.” Her detective work proved the identity of the encyclopedia’s author, James le Palmer, and Sandler’s Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, published in 1996, became a valuable tool for medievalists, reference historians, and lexicographers.

Today she is writing two articles that emerged from her research for Penned & Painted, her 2022 book. For the online journal Different Visions, she is examining a medieval illustration of a procession and drawing connections to the 20th-century public art of Joseph Beuys. And she is studying images of book destruction — mostly by fire, but in one case, “cut up with a pair of scissors” — in a Moralized Bible, the 13th-century French Bible picture book. She began a recent talk on that work by showing slides of the Tennessee pastor who burned Harry Potter books in 2022.

“Though I’m a ‘retired scholar,’ I’m not retired from scholarship,” Sandler emphasizes. “Friends are dying or becoming less active as scholars all around me,” but she is in frequent contact with other academics, some near her age, some younger. Some she has met at the British Library, through curators who put scholars in contact with one another when they use the manuscript room. She keeps in touch with a few former students whom she taught as undergraduates.

Her doctor says, “You’re just a lucky person,” Sandler says. But she believes she is healthy of mind and body at 94 because she has “a calling.” She has “always wanted to do research and to write about what I’ve found,” she says. “I still want to do that, and I can.”

Besides, “nobody asks your age when you want to publish something.”

For retired scholars, long past the pressures of the tenure track and the need to fill out their CVs to ensure promotion, publication is a less fraught affair than it is for many younger academics. Jean H. Baker is “not even thinking about” where she’ll publish her article on Edith Houghton Hooker, she says. An emeritus professor of American history at Goucher College, Baker wrote a 1987 biography of Mary Todd Lincoln that changed how other historians thought about the 16th president’s wife. Born in 1933 in Baltimore, Baker studied at Goucher and got her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins. She calls herself a “great promoter” of her city. After she retired from Goucher, at age 78, Baker taught American history at a prison in Maryland, to a class of 20 Black men. Because it took six months to get books approved, she had to “bootleg books” into the prison so her students “could do some honest research.”

These days Baker works from her Baltimore home, where she lives with her two dogs. In an interview over Zoom, she describes how her 2006 book, Sisters: The Lives of the American Suffragists, made her curious about the leader who championed the vote for women in Maryland, which she calls “an outlier” in suffrage history. In 1920, when the legislatures of 36 other states finally ratified the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, Maryland was not among them. Hooker was thus a “radical in a conservative state.” Maryland didn’t ratify the 19th Amendment until 1941.

Baker likes to write for general audiences, including an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that first ladies should be paid, and articles about Maryland’s complicated women’s-rights history for The Baltimore Sun. If the Hooker article lands “somewhere Marylanders could read it,” she’ll be pleased.

She is also writing the introduction for a republication of an 1832 Baltimore guidebook written by the son of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the architect of the U.S. Capitol and the subject of her 2020 book. Then she wants to explore the “Southernization of Maryland history” from 1898 to 1903, when new monuments were built to glorify Confederate leaders, and the state tried to disenfranchise Black men. Both represent a forgotten period of “white supremacy” in a state considered progressive now.

A former tennis champion, Baker still plays twice a week. But at her age, it seems wise to focus on articles rather than books, which take more time. And being 91 has its constraints. “In the old days,” Baker says, “I would just get in my car and drive” to Corning, N.Y., where Hooker was born and her personal papers are likely to be. Now Baker hires a local researcher to help her.

She is a member of a monthly discussion group for retired female academics founded by the art historian Diane Wolfthal. Scholarship is a solitary endeavor — all the more so after retirement, when many miss their daily interactions with colleagues and students, and when travel to conferences is no longer funded. When Wolfthal became an emeritus professor at Rice University, in 2022, she was inspired to start the 903 Club, “903” being the sum of the ages of its founding members.

The club meets once a month for 90 minutes over Zoom, where members take turns leading a discussion of a topic they’ve suggested. The discussions are intellectual, but the members’ research is not their focus. Baker appreciates the meetings’ “easy informality,” which makes it possible to talk about whatever anyone brings up. Discussion leaders sometimes assign readings. Recent topics have included turning points in members’ lives, an article about assisted suicide, and the U.S. Constitution. Baker suggested that last topic and led the discussion.

Every meeting begins with a short check-in. “We ask, ‘What’s new with you?’” Wolfthal says, and the answers can be “my book got published, or my exhibition opened,” or a relative or friend has died. “At our age, somebody might need support.”

Keyser, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (who goes by his middle name, Jay), meets regularly with a group of friends, too — four administrators he got to know when he was an associate provost. They have lunch together two or three times a year, and have been doing so for 30 years. Some are semiretired teachers and researchers, two became college presidents, and “all have active intellectual lives,” Keyser says.

Keyser got an earlier start on retirement than did Sandler or Baker. In 1998, when he had been associate provost for nine years, he decided he “wanted to do what I wanted to do, not what other people wanted or needed me to do.” He says he took his cue from Monty Python: “And now for something completely different.” Keyser told his dean, who had assumed the linguist would return to teaching, that he wanted to retire. The dean was shocked: Keyser was only 62.

For Linguistic Inquiry, the quarterly Keyser founded in 1970, he relies on nine younger associate editors to help him decide which submissions to include. He sits on two MIT committees, one to reward staff members who have served a quarter century, and another to honor the best grad-student teacher. He has been part of the quarter-century group for 15 years, even though its term limit is three. “I keep offering to resign,” Keyser says, but the other members refuse. “If they find me useful,” he is “glad to give back” to MIT, his academic home of 60 years.

As for MIT’s relationship with its retired faculty members, however, Keyser says, “my own experience is that we, the retired, are telephones off the hook.” Students “probably think we’re dead. Most of us are.”

Like Sandler and Baker, Keyser has continued to be productive as a scholar. He was 84 when The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century was published. His new book, Play It Again, Sam, stemmed from that work and examines how poetry, music, painting, and photography exploit “the ability of the brain to detect repetition,” he says. It will be published next year, as will The World Is Filled With Empty Places, a CD of Keyser’s poetry set to music by the composer Peter Stevens.

A trombonist with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, Keyser is the player in the flashy tie in this tribute to Duke Ellington, in June. Listen to his solo at 5:15. In an interview with a reporter over Zoom, he plays a lively “Ain’t She Sweet,” and asks her how she likes his hair, urging her to tell readers he uses mousse.

It is his 38th year with the orchestra. Since 2014, he has played from a wheelchair. After a spinal-cord injury, he wrote Turning Turtle: A Memoir of a Man Who Would “Never Walk Again” and self-published it to “help family members who have had someone close suffer such an injury.” He uses a walker at home and a wheelchair when he goes out.

Keyser drinks an ounce of Scotch every evening, “except on Saturdays,” he says, “when I eat an ice-cream cone.”

There’s no question that aging can make research more difficult: The physical and mental labor required, especially when travel is involved, can be exhausting. But without the professional anxieties of mandatory publication or the distractions of teaching and administrative work, the rewards of the scholarly life become easier to savor.

This past winter, before jetting from New York to London in May, Sandler went to Rome with her daughter and a friend. They spent a day in the Vatican.

“I can stand and walk around a museum for an hour and a half. Maximum,” Sandler says. So they found a wheelchair, “which was kind of humiliating.” But they stayed the whole afternoon.

“It was unforgettable being wheeled into the Sistine Chapel,” which “even in February is like the New York City subway at rush hour,” Sandler says. The guards took over. “They wheeled me in, and they plunked me down at sufficient distance,” where she could lean back and look up, “underneath Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment.’”

And there she sat. Everyone left her alone. The perfect arrangement for the solitary scholar.

“It was wonderful,” she says.