Canadian Journal of Sociology Online November-December 2005
We appreciate the thoughtful responses of Curtis and McLaughlin to our paper. We offer this reply to some important points they have raised.
The thesis of our paper is straightforward: mandatory retirement is a blatantly ageist policy that fundamentally violates human rights.
Mandatory retirement is not equivalent to a contract any more than sexist treatment of women employees should be seen as a mutually acknowledged default status in the workplace. (You knew what it was like when we hired you, what's your problem?)
None of this is controversial in age studies, a growing interdisciplinary outlook that includes Canadian sociologists, social workers, and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Our paper extends the age studies perspective into sociology itself and shows how the coming wave of forced retirements (2006-2011) will remove 40 percent of its practitioners, including many women who helped build a powerful feminist perspective in Canadian sociology. We suggest these losses could deal a devastating blow to sociology when the need for mentoring and professorial experience is at historic levels. Moreover, the enforced absence of older sociologists will help promote the ageist stereotypes that underlie mandatory retirement.
Tenure and compulsory exit at age 65 are not inexorably linked. UK universities have abandoned tenure, but robustly enforce mandatory retirement. Tenure is healthy in the US, which eliminated compulsory retirement at age 65 in 1986. Tenure prevails in Manitoba and Quebec, despite twenty years without mandatory exit. The University of Toronto abandoned mandatory retirement in March and never considered dismantling tenure. The strength of tenure arrangements rests on solidarity among all faculty members.
Curtis and McLaughlin raise the issue of "individualized performance indicators and benchmarks." Again, considerable experience in every jurisdiction without forced retirement furnishes little support for the belief that enhanced performance indicators are a necessary quid pro quo for eliminating forced retirement. Adequate performance is a fundamental requirement for all faculty, regardless of their age. In any case, talk of introducing performance indicators has been floating around the academy for many years.
Simply because there is no disciplinary consensus on mandatory retirement hardly means that we should withhold support from those whose jobs and careers are in jeopardy, for no reason other than their age. We are aware that if some other minority group were targeted for dismissal based on an arbitrary characteristic unrelated to their performance, sociology as a discipline would likely mobilize, and few would object to using strong language in the effort. That this is not true for academe's aged minority constitutes an unpleasant fact of our period. Our work is a contribution to bringing elders back into civil society as full citizens.
http://www.cjsonline.ca/soceye/retirementresponse.html
November 2005
© Canadian Journal of Sociology Online
