You may be one of them, if the statistics are correct. The median age of American professors today is 55. You have a fairly respectable portfolio of publications. Your students speak highly of you. You have served on most college committees, go to meetings, and work on community projects. Early one morning, your department’s chairperson pops the question: “When are you retiring?” Noticing your puzzled demeanor, he awkwardly adds that a recent “inventory” shows that an overwhelming percentage of your college’s faculty have more than 25 years of institutional service.
Thanks for the context, but is this really news? Hadn’t economic hardship significantly curtailed recruitment and hiring over the last several years, resulting in proportionally greater numbers of long-tenured faculty? Were you supposed to atone for the budgetary shortfall, demographic shift, faulty forecasting, and ill-advised planning?
The whole situation troubles you. Was it a question necessary for strategic purposes? Was it merely a tactless comment, or a subtle hint? You are not paranoid; you are outgoing, widely respected, and looking good for your age. It is just that the colleague with the Botoxed résumé (yes, the one in line to replace you) had also recently asked. The latest diversity seminar warned against such kinds of exchanges, and you have thoroughly sanitized ordinary language, scholarly papers, lectures, jokes, remarks, and every other possible chance of misdemeanor. Any remotely classist, sexist, racist, disablist, ageist, or insensitive term has been carefully deleted from your vocabulary. And your credentials are impeccably compliant with those culturally acceptable standards.
Moreover, enlightened academic souls like you realize that human dignity is not contingent, but that, as Immanuel Kant said, all rational beings should treat themselves and all others never merely as means but in every case also as an end. Then you reassuringly recall that Kant was writing those words, and his influential Critiques, when he was over 57.
Yet you remember poor John S., a professor long on experience but short of breath after his first stroke. During his last professorial years, although as relevant, witty, and alert as ever, he repeatedly heard the very same question. You also remember Dr. Mary W., always knowledgeable, reliable, and helpful, whose missing tooth soon fated her. And Dick the Whip, the gentlemanly debater with the sharp mind and clever humor, whose detached retina and magnifying glasses became the favorite subject of his detractors’ snide remarks.
These three outstanding educators, their names disguised, were true role models of professionalism, dedication, productivity, and wisdom. They were doomed more by their peers’ gazes than by the clock. But you were thirtysomething then and, though sympathetic, knew that was never going to happen to you. Retirement, and middle and old age, looked as remote as winning the Nobel Prize. When did the speed by which you climb the stairs and find your office keys start to weigh more in your performance appraisal than the quality of your academic teaching, research, and service? When did your head’s gray hair start to count more than your brain’s gray matter?
Filing a claim, phoning your lawyer, or calling it quits would be premature. Instead, you get a bigger key ring, visit the gym, dye your hair, and start a diary. You keep quiet about your arthritic pains and medical appointments. Oh, yes, you also forward this reflection to your contacts and, ever so gingerly, surreptitiously, you drop a copy in some mailboxes and slip it under several office doors.
