Growing Old in Academe

Retirement has garnered considerable attention from observers of democratic politics in the past few years. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump himself—all have been run through the gauntlet of the aging questions. How old is too old? How long beyond “being in our prime” do we hold out for staying in place? For politicians, these are obviously partisan-inspired questions with obviously partisan-inspired answers. But they are being asked not only in relation to politics and the political realm. The dangers posed by the growing accumulation of wealth and power among elderly Americans is even the subject of a thoughtful book, Gerontocracy in America, by Yale University legal scholar and historian Samuel Moyn. So what about the hangers-on in my own line of work? Are we threatening to turn the groves of academe into the graves of academe?