Education at its best rescues us from ignorance and bias. Many of the nation’s 17 million undergraduates study racism, sexism, homophobia, ethnic and religious hostility, and other types of prejudice. Now more and more faculty members, reasoning that we are not just gendered and racialized by culture but also assaulted by age discrimination, are including the study of age and ageism.
It’s high time. Many students enter college full of wrong ideas about old people and nasty attitudes, picked up from our increasingly ageist society. When Toni M. Calasanti, who teaches the sociology of aging at Virginia Tech, asks her students how to tell whether someone is old, some mention slow drivers and unfashionable clothes and say that older people “smell funny.”’ Other students laugh, emboldening their peers to come up with even more pejorative statements.
While other oppressed groups are present in many of the nation’s classrooms, midlife and older students usually are not, with the exception of those at community colleges, which draw larger numbers of adult students. Erin Gentry Lamb, who teaches biomedical humanities at Hiram College, has written that most students initially “do not recognize age as an identity category similar to race or sex, have never heard of ageism, and find it difficult to picture themselves growing old.”
Welcome to The Chronicle’s first special report devoted to age diversity on campuses. This annual issue also features compelling personal essays dealing with identity and disability — be sure to check them out.
Ageism seeps down from above. An emerita English professor at a distinguished state university wrote me about her own painful encounters with age discrimination when her department started assigning the most-prestigious courses to younger faculty members. “The dean kept our birthdays on his desk blotter, hoping he could encourage us into early retirement so he could use our salaries to hire junior people for less,” she said. “I feel a lot younger since I retired.”
Such discriminatory labor practices favor cheaper, younger adjuncts who lack the labor rights that tenure provides. Some deans regret the incentivized losses of senior professors, who often take on mentoring and service roles that only experienced people can carry out. These budgetary trends, combined with verbal attacks on tenure and “deadwood,” have a powerful ageist effect and diminish the quality of department offerings.
Fortunately, colleges are in a position to combat misinformation, as well as age-stereotyping and discrimination, through pedagogical interventions. Emerging adults have not yet been repetitiously exposed to the “make room for the young” arguments so prevalent in the workplace or to the duty-to-die discourses suggesting that impaired elders should refuse medical treatment. Many students want to become competent decoders of reality by better understanding racism and sexism and are receptive to understanding ageism, For others, the culture wars have not poisoned the discourse around age: Students do not call learning about elders “politically correct,” as if that were a bad thing.
Many scholars are using a range of pedagogical tools to combat ageism, and many are using them in the classroom. Students themselves can share discoveries and concepts. When I teach, I open my classes with what I call “the age barometer” — I ask students what age-related remark or encounter made the greatest impression on them that week. Recently a film student cited Lily Tomlin’s Grandma, a movie about a woman who helps her granddaughter get an abortion. A rock fan shared with me the complaint Madonna made about age discrimination in the music industry when she accepted an award at age 58: “To age is a sin.”
A prelaw student might bring in an article reporting that while 23 percent of all claims filed by the public with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016 involved age discrimination, only 2 percent of the cases actually wound up on the EEOC docket. An ageism card, similar to one developed to attack racism, can be used to raise students’ consciousness about age bias. I myself created such a card, which states:
You just made an ageist remark or behaved in an ageist way. Perhaps you didn’t know it. Permit me to bring this to your attention.
Such remarks and conduct demean individual targets. They have a political impact like that of racism and sexism: they marginalize, silence, and deform an entire class of people (the old). Ageism degrades our social world. It will bring you a more bitter old age. Thank you for reading this.
While other oppressed groups are present in many of the nation’s classrooms, midlife and older students usually are not.
When Kate de Medeiros, a gerontologist at Miami University of Ohio, handed copies of the card out to her students, they recorded on a shared Web page some of the many ageist behaviors they had witnessed, and added their own indignant commentaries. Ageism had been something new to them, the professor reported, adding: “It’s always exciting to see their attitudes change.”
E ducation decreases negative stereotypes about aging, says Leni Marshall, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, who has reviewed 30 years of research on the inclusion of age studies into humanities curricula. In an essay about teaching age studies — with marquee stereotypes in its title, “Polyester Pants and Orthopedic Shoes” — Lamb, the Hiram College scholar, wrote, “Because their critique is self-generated, I find that my students react with buy-in rather than resistance.”
Many courses that successfully teach about aging require students to interview older community residents. Sarah Lamb, an anthropologist at Brandeis University, offers an extra assignment based on a model from Sages & Seekers, an advocacy group that brings different generations together for their mutual benefit. Students (the “seekers”) can earn extra credit by meeting with members of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis (the “sages”) for nine one-on-one sessions.
The undergraduates start off conscious of the age gap, perhaps afraid that “old people” will be too different, or perhaps shy about their own conversational abilities. At the end they read aloud the essays, called “tributes,” that they wrote about their sages. They are delighted by the closeness of the relationships, which opens up possibilities of better conversations with their parents and other older people. A student named Emily says, in a YouTube video, “For me to be able now to walk down the street and look at someone seventy-plus years old, and know I could connect with them on any level, is just the greatest feeling in the world.”
Sages demonstrate what “experience” means: The longer the life course has been, the richer the exchange of material — considerably more life lessons than can be conveyed in nine interviews. Admiration for older people, hard to achieve in social life, seems to emerge readily from open-ended talk that already assumes value in the encounters.
Although we live in the era Before Anti-Ageism, materials abound for teaching life-changing agewise courses. In English, for example, ageism stalks classic literary texts such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It, featuring Jaques’s gloomy speech about the seven ages of man, as well as vampire fiction and love poetry. Women’s studies, philosophy, and the social sciences also offer plenty of material to help students learn about ageism.
One teaching resource in particular stands out: The North American Network in Aging Studies provides a monthly update of popular and scholarly publications, some of which emerge from the field’s interdisciplinary journal, Age, Culture, Humanities.
If there is a hope of undoing ageism in the academy and in society at large, that momentum may arise from the students who thrive in classrooms where age is part of the curriculum. They absorb early on the lesson we all need to take to heart: Solidarity across the life course is normal, and ageism abhorrent.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a scholar at the Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, is the author of Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (Rutgers University Press, 2017), from which this essay is adapted.
Corrections (9/25/2017, 4:19 p.m.): This article has been updated to correct the title of an essay by Erin Gentry Lamb. It is “Polyester Pants and Orthopedic Shoes,” not “Polyester Pants and Obstetrical Shoes.” The article also incorrectly identified the publisher of the journal Age, Culture, Humanities. It is the Athenaeum Press of Coastal Carolina University, not the North American Network in Aging Studies. The article has been updated accordingly.
