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Is the aging of the American professoriate a problem for higher education? What, if anything, should colleges do about their aging faculties?
The most recent responses appear first
"The tenure question has furthered the part-time dilemma..."
"It is disappointing that The Chronicle would publish an article that plays into the hands of both teacher bashers and those who would stir up enmity between older people and younger people..."
"At least in my history department at a mid-sized state university 'new hires' aren't particularly young..."
"As one of the 'aging and graying' faculty faculty discussed in this feature,..."
"Eliminate lifetime tenure to get rid of the 'dinosaurs'..."
"At least two factors may contribute to an aging professoriate; an increase in average retirement age, and a decrease in..."
"As a student, studying in a field that demands its lecturers to possess a interest and knowledge of..."
"My dissertation focused on the effects of early retirement incentives (ERIPs) on the academic departments of..."
"As an adjunct who has taught both at the community college and university levels in Phoenix, I observed..."
"Check this out. It would appear that age discrimination is not the issue, but the relationship between part-timers and full-timers. I, being of the child-like age..."
"The glut of aged, tenured professors causes younger, "non-tenured track" professors to seek..."
"The Chair of the Department conducting job interviews mentioned to me that he was a particular age, which was exactly the same as mine. He described..."
"I strongly believe that aging shouldn't be an aspect to be criticized if you happen to talk about higher education. You have to respect..."
"As one colleague said to me after reading the article, the graying professorate, "Not me honey, I'm dying my hair!" In our system..."
"As one who joined the professoriate as a second career, and is over 55, I do not agree that one is necessarily professionally impotent simply because of age..."
"It's simply a generational effect. The increasing average age of faculty members mirrors the increasing average age of many professions,..."
"Two observations: 1) Genetics has a lot to do with how physically vigorous and mentally alert a person over 60 is..."
"The image of the cane in the graphics accompanying this feature implicitly equates age with infirmity..."
"In the CSU system of California, the problem of fewer young faculty is not necessarily the result of the older faculty not retiring..."
"A moment's glance at the age breakdown table in the report summary available on-line makes it clear that the increase in older faculty has nothing to do with changes in age discrimination laws..."
"The very question you pose is outrageous!..."
"Age discrimination exists in every sector. Even though it is illegal in the academic world as in business, it is, and has been, handled with a degree of subtlety..."
"If someone had observed that the percentage of Jewish or African-American or female or short professors has been increasing,..."
"Some faculty postpone their retirement probably because they don't want to see their programs and courses disappear..."
"Wow! This is a hot topic..."
"After reading all of the other responses to the feature article, I wish to disagree with the notion of mandatory retirements..."
"The government and society ought not to wish away the realities of aging and biology..."
"In my opinion, age of professors shouldn't be a great concern as long as professors continue to maintain some kind of professional connection..."
"Unfortunately, many 60- and 70-year-old professors do not keep up to date in their fields..."
"Such debates are a cop-out -- in most fields (not all),..."
"Let mine be the first response to support a mandatory retirement age for college professors..."
"I certainly value older people, and I am not so young myself..."
"Yes, there are professors who are not up to date on technology,..."
"What needs to be explored in this debate is the varying definitions of 'age'--employment laws and common decency prohibit the use of physical age as a point of discrimination..."
"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,..."
"In an ideal university system, older faculty members would be an honored segment of the academic community,..."
"What to do with the increasing percentage of aging full time faculty on American campuses?..."
"As a young professor looking for a full-time position after three years of teaching physics part-time, perhaps I can offer a different point of view..."
"Age is a poor measure of faculty supply because:..."
"If age discrimination countermeasures were taken as seriously as the efforts under way to undermine other forms of discrimination, this question would be regarded as politically incorrect..."
"This has, of course, been a predicted situation since at least the late 1970s as the generation of faculty that came in with the expansion in higher education in the 1960s reaches retirement age..."
"Little should be made of this issue on the basis of age and retirement..."
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Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education