Canadian Journal of Sociology Online November-December 2005
David MacGregor and Thomas R. Klassen's abbreviated version of their "Forced Retirement and the 'Succession Question' in Canadian Sociology" promises some reflections on the consequences for sociology of what they call the coming 'age purge' of the academy. It fails to deliver on this promise. Perhaps they have discussed the matter in their longer paper. Most of the above-named paper presents a fantasy about academic life in the United States and about how Canadian academic life would be if only there were not mandatory retirement. The paper also offers an egregious distortion of an observation Curtis and Weir made in one of their pieces on the 'succession question.' I deal with the distortion before offering some cautionary notes on the professional and intellectual challenges the abolition of mandatory retirement might bring.
Curtis and Weir observed in 'The Succession Question in English Canadian Sociology'[1] that there was a serious hiring drought in Canadian departments for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Few young scholars, indeed very few in comparison to the hiring wave of the 1960s and early 1970s, could get jobs. One consequence of this was that the demographic profile of the discipline was skewed: an obvious fact, since we now face a large wave of retirements, as MacGregor and Klassen's essay documents, and many departments lack a solid mass of early to mid-career associate professors to pick up the burden. Curtis and Weir suggested in the piece that another consequence of the hiring drought was that the energy and innovative thinking of the generation coming on to the academic job market in the 1980s and 1990sthose not hired were under- represented in our departmental fora. A syllogism.
At the same time, during the hiring drought the level of competitiveness surrounding available appointments rose: young scholars found that the standards of performance and publication moved upwards. Readers who are fortunate to be about 55 years old, and thus, in MacGregor and Klassen's view, finally able to 'see where things are headed,' will probably remember a profession in which doctoral students were not expected to have publications in order to get grants, and in which entrants to the job market did not have to have conference papers, a book contract, and a polished teaching dossier in order to compete. Hiring conditions were very different for the cohorts of the 1960s and early 1970s, and it was not infrequent for people to be hired and to receive tenure without an earned doctorate. Extensive publication was often not considered a necessary condition for tenure, which in any case was instituted in many universities only in the 1960s. In the competitive conditions of the 1990s, Curtis and Weir remarked, many job candidates found themselves being interviewed by people whose paper qualifications were less than their own. They claimed that this was often an indignity, especially for unsuccessful candidates. MacGregor and Klassen assure us that older professors who have not published or done research have done a lot of teaching, have administrative experience and so could be the best judges of young scholars. I accept the premise, but I fail to see how teaching and administering constitute expertise in scholarship. Scholarship does not demand publication, but the point is that some sort of measurable research performance and publication record are most likely to be the stakes after the abolition of mandatory retirement.
MacGregor and Klassen manage to conclude that Curtis and Weir's enthusiasm for new hiring and their awareness of past abuses means they denigrate all older professors and wish to purge the university of everyone at age 65. My own position, which I think may be shared by many in the academy, is that I look forward with a mixture of dread and regret to the retirement of our active, energetic, engaged and committed colleagues; I look forward with eager anticipation to the retirement of our idle, obstreperous, disengaged and uncommitted colleagues. Regret is for the possible loss of the scholarship, experience and institutional memory of the former and dread is at the prospect of the formidable work load they carry being added to my own. Anticipation is for a more collegial atmosphere in which students and colleagues may engage with the energies and new ideas of younger scholars.
MacGregor and Klassen embrace Neil McLaughlin's recent call for an intensely competitive academic capitalism, for a hierarchical university system, and for private, fee-based elite institutions, calling it 'an informed analysis' and participating with him in a glorification of academic conditions in the United States. Curtis and Weir have responded to McLaughlin's position in a piece that readers will see shortly in the print Canadian Journal of Sociology.[2] However, MacGregor and Klassen invoke a simplistic notion of professorial solidarity and fail to engage seriously with the major challenges that will face us when mandatory retirement at age 65 is eliminated. They do correctly point out that mandatory retirement is demoralizing for many university professors who wish to continue to work and to remain productive in fields where they are often at the height of their expertise. Mandatory retirement is also essentially unfair to late starters or those with broken career lines, the majority of whom are women, and who face the prospect of inadequate pensions.
Yet it would be seriously misleading to believe that all university professors will be able to decide when to retire once mandatory retirement is abolished. Legislation will simply make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of age. On what grounds then will universities discriminate among faculty? How will such discrimination be organized? How will we discriminate against colleagues when age is no longer an acceptable criterion? And we will most certainly be constrained to discriminate, for some of the work of policing the profession will continue to devolve upon us. MacGregor and Klassen offer us no insight here. As champions of academic capitalism, they focus only on academic stars: the Nobel prizewinner off to the United States, the leading thinker in politics off to Texas, others off to Quebec. What about the rest of us? Their rosy picture of the academic doing the part of her job she likes best until she decides freely to retire may not be completely naive. But surely we can also envisage her being assigned two sections of Introduction to Sociology and second year Methods with no teaching assistance, while she is expected to publish and get a research grant. Miss the target once, see your chair; miss it twice, have a sharp interview with your dean, miss it three times and you are dismissed. University administrations are already attempting to use the opening created by the possible abolition of mandatory retirement to renegotiate tenure provisions. They will likely seek to expand clauses covering 'dismissal with cause' to include failure to achieve specified academic performance targets. If they succeed, the move could easily mean the introduction of 'performance indicators' and 'productivity benchmarks' into our working lives. One might also expect to see administrative units and departments using punitive bureaucratic measures to pressure those they do not wish to employ to resign or to miss performance targets. This is also part of academic capitalism.
I are not suggesting the future is already decidedly dystopian, for these are matters that will be negotiated on a university-by-university basis. If there is a severe shortage of professors, as predictions suggest will be the case, the professoriate will be in a strong bargaining position. Universities are eager to rid themselves of what they see as the salary burden produced by professors nearing retirement, but they also face a serious projected shortage of new entrants. A competitive job market will likely reduce the (already relatively small) salary differential between senior and junior faculty.[3] It is quite likely that entry qualifications will again be relaxed and the conditions of exit rendered more supple. Moreover, if decisions about dismissal were based on peer review, we could imagine that conditions for dismissal would become even more stringent than they are now.
Because professors are in such widely varying circumstances, flexible arrangements in terms of salary, performance, and workload would be in our collective best interest. And university administrations may realize, as the experience of the University of Toronto suggests, that older professors will welcome fractional appointments, and that administrators can thus keep the experience of senior professors while freeing up funds for junior appointments. Universities may attempt to negotiate separate agreements for senior faculty, offering individuals career extensions in exchange for contractually limited appointments. Other scenarios are obviously possible, but we should not be lulled into believing that every academic will be able to stay at work as long as will suit her. Nor should we fail to consider what Canadian sociology would look like under a competitive regime of individualized performance indicators and benchmarks.
In such a regime, the measurement units for performance would likely be standardized and discrete. The long term project would most certainly be threatened and the material conditions for the production of scholarly monographs made more difficult. The social space for the survival of the quirky and the eccentric scholar would be restricted. Sociologists would be under greater pressure to rush to publication, to follow grant money, and we would very likely see an extension of careerist tactics. What about challenging one's students in terms of workload or social prejudices and seeing one's course evaluations sink? Some measure of teaching performance would most likely be included and falling evaluations can be read as growing incompetence. Given the pressure provincial administrators are already exercising to increase graduate enrollments and to reduce time to completion for graduate studies, we might expect some performance indicator to be in place here as well. Curtis and Weir's article pointed to existing pressures for the vocationalisation of the university; these are not likely to decrease. And the scholar who reads voraciously, always has a reference handy for students, has an open door and is eager to debate and discuss, but who doesn't publish or get research grants? Off to Texas, I guess.
Bruce Curtis
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Carleton University
http://www.cjsonline.ca/soceye/curtisretirement.html
November 2005
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