Old and Wise

The news from the old country was that another aunt was in the hospital.

"It all started with the youngest sister," father said as I readied myself for a long narration.  "Then your mother. And then the other. And now her."

Four sisters taking turns for medical treatment, some more near-death experiences than others.

"We have so many in our families who are over 70. And over 80."  Said my father who is only a couple of months away from turning 90.  "With so many at this age, somebody or the other will always be in the hospital."  There are a number of seniors and super-seniors even back in the old country.

This contemporary life of aged folks is quite a contrast to how the stories began.  One grandfather died in his mid-20s.  Compared to him the other grandfather lived a long life--he died when he was 51.

Here, the oldest President alive, Jimmy Carter, suffered a fall, was sutured up, and he showed up to do his work at the Habitat for Humanity project. The man is 95 years old, even a black eye and 14 stitches couldn't stop him!  His wife, Rosalyn, is no spring chicken either at 92 years.

And many of them here in my adopted country continue to work too!

About 1 in 4 adults age 65 and older is now in the workforce. That number is expected to increase, making it the fastest-growing group of workers in the country.

Of course, some do because of their financial situation:

Baby boomers have median savings of a little over $150,000 to get through what could be a 30-year retirement.

Median savings.  Which means that half of them--I don't consider myself to be of that generation!--have less than $150,000.

Back in the old country, whether or not the seniors and super-seniors saved for their retirement years, there is the tradition of children taking care of their elders.  And their considerable hospital expenses too.

"All normal post operation," said my sister's message about the aunt who had to be rushed to the hospital.

I sit thinking a lot about getting old.

It’s the Teaching, Stupid! Retire already!

Hey, I didn't have to compose that kind of harsh sounding phrases for the title of this post--they happen to be how two commentaries were titled or promoted; though, of course, I second those without any hesitation at all ;)

It seems like it has been forever that I have been complaining about the intellectual onanism that passes off as "research" at institutions like mine where teaching is the very reason why we exist in the first place.  I often feel like shaking people by their shoulders and slapping them on their cheeks (though, I worry that will only add to the orgasmic effect ... hehehe) in order to help them realize that we ain't no Harvard.  As I noted in this post from, gasp, three years ago:

an Ole Miss or my own university wasn't set up to become an alternative to Harvard!  These other institutions have missions that are distinct from those of a Harvard or Stanford.  But, even these universities think and work as if they are nothing but a Harvard-lite.  The focus on "research" at third-rung universities is a classic example--most of the research publications that faculty from third-tier universities are in third and fourth rate journals, which seem to have brought into existence only to serve as an outlet for the great pretenders.
It is the mission creep that is awful, and this occurs mostly at public institutions, whether they are community colleges or state universities. 

But, who cares about mission creep when it is students who pay the high price!

How does this get institutionalized?  Simple. Even teaching universities have forgotten that "it's the teaching, stupid!":

Research and publication are important, of course, but teaching forms the core duties of the vast majority of college professing jobs.

But, what do Kafka's esteemed gentlemen of the Academy do instead when they set out to hire faculty?

Most job advertisements in the humanities and social sciences make the bad mistake of positioning tenure-track search committees to learn much more about applicants’ research than their teaching. In order to make the hiring process better-reflect their needs, many departments should consider taking a teaching-centered approach to their next job search.
I understand why elite private and Research I institutions might pursue research-centered profiles of their candidates. Professors there can expect to receive significant and frequent paid leave time and research grants. It makes sense for these schools to find out as much as possible about their applicants’ research agendas.
Professors at most colleges and universities, however, don’t get such opportunities, and in fact they focus most of their time and energy on teaching. It puzzles me why search committees time and again, especially on the tenure-track level, take so little action to measure candidates on what they will ultimately spend most of their time doing as professors.

It is awful.  I doubt there are many other industries where there is such screwed up approach to hiring highly qualified personnel on the basis of something that has nothing to do with the prime mission.

As they get older, the faculty do not leave either, however awful or great their teaching skills might be.  Now, it is not that I am a great teacher.  But, I know for certain that even the worst of the teaching has to keep pace with the changes in the world.  I know I recognize awful teaching when I see, for instance, PowerPoint slides that have not been updated.

Almost always, it seems like only the good teachers retire!

By any measure—course enrollments, teacher evaluations, testimony from students and colleagues, peer observations and evaluations, and even RateMyProfessor.com—I’m a fine teacher, even an exceptional one, though hardly perfect: One student called me, in writing, an "über bitch." Although I don’t have the energy I had when I was 40, or even 50, compared with most professors in their 60s, I’m an Amazon. I’m also far smarter and cagier about how to teach than when I was a young whippersnapper never more than a couple of steps ahead of my students.

She "signed an "irrevocable agreement" with Hofstra University that paid me a bonus to retire "early."  No, even in her case, the early was not really early: "In my case, that meant at the age of 66."

So, we have a double-whammy at the teaching universities all over the country: a great number of faculty whose interests are in "research" and not in teaching and who don't retire even when it feels like they are way past their expiration dates.  The tyranny of the senior-citizen faculty, which I have blogged about before too (like here, here).

I agree with the author when she writes:

What’s far more likely is a version of what I observed in my own department—an art-history professor in his late 70s who prowled the halls up until a few years ago. He didn’t appear to be able to use email, and we all knew he was a terribly easy grader. Even so, he faithfully met his classes and always attended department meetings, where he hardly ever said a word.

In other industries, this would lead to dismissal because of professional incompetence.  But, not in higher education!

The inconvenient truth is that faculty who delay retirement harm students, who in most cases would benefit from being taught by someone younger than 70, even younger than 65. The salient point is not that younger professors are better pedagogues (sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t), but that they are more likely to be current in their fields and to bring that currency into their teaching.
Septuagenarian faculty members also cost colleges more than younger faculty—in the form of higher salaries, higher health-care costs, and higher employer-matched retirement contributions. Even if these costs pale in comparison to paying for bloated administrations, it’s wrong to pretend they don’t matter.
Worst of all, their presence stifles change. I’m not talking about mindless change for change’s sake, but the kind of change necessary to keep an institution thriving.

Ah, yes, reminds me of how one senior-citizen faculty had the arrogance to tell me that I wasn't respecting the hallway culture--a culture that badly needs changing!

The author notes:

I want to face retirement the way Prospero, directly addressing the audience at the end of The Tempest, voluntarily surrendered his magical powers:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: ...
            Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant.

Yes, I too would like to voluntarily surrender my powers, whatever little that I have.  Though, that time is a long, long time into the future, despite what others think, and it should work well with the other master-plan that I have ;)

More on the senior citizen faculty

According to my blog statistics, an earlier post on the problems related to senior-citizen faculty in higher education is one of the more visited posts.  The interesting aspect is that visitors did not come there because they searched for it.  (So, how then did they visit, you ask?  Hey, there is more than one way to Rome, because, after all, all roads lead to it!!!)

So, given the economics of it all, it is not a surprise that many university systems have implemented, and are trying, variations of policies that would provide incentives for the senior-citizen faculty to walk away from their offices forever.  Like this in Texas:

More than 130 tenured professors at Texas' two flagship universities have accepted buyouts that are expected to save their financially constrained departments nearly $18-million a year.
The offers, which included up to two years of pay for some liberal-arts professors, have provided a needed cushion for faculty members who were ready to retire, a bonus for some who wanted to move to other jobs, and new leases on life for a few lecturers who were due to be terminated. But they also created end-of-semester headaches for department chairs who had to quickly reshuffle their teaching rosters.
The retirement incentives are the latest responses by the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station to continued state budget cuts. State universities absorbed a 5-percent cut during the 2010-11 biennium and have been asked to plan for an additional 2.5-percent cut this fiscal year and a possible 10-percent reduction over the next two-year budget period, which starts this coming fall.

I would hypothesize that faculty in the sciences stick around way less than those in the social sciences and humanities.  The logic here being that the nature of inquiry in the sciences requires a great deal of constant updating of one's technological skills and bringing in research money, which is not necessarily the case in the humanities and the social sciences.  In the non-science fields, the situation is analogous to owning a car that you have fully paid up--every single day that you can get from using it, without going in for any major repair work, is a wonderful return on the investment :)

So, would you retire for a buyout?  And, no, I am far too young for your tempting offers, though many times it seems that many of my faculty and administrative colleagues wish that I were gone :)

A rarely discussed topic in academe: the senior-citizen faculty

A few years ago, when I was in California, a friend retired the moment he became eligible for the reason that he did not want to stand in the way of a younger person hoping for a teaching career.  And, yes, his replacement was fresh out of grad school.
It is quite a tough challenge: on the one hand, we gain from the immense knowledge-base that a senior faculty brings.  On the other hand, every single day past retirement is another day that a PhD remains off the tenure-track.  Further, the compensation package of a senior faculty typically is far more than that of a new hire. 

The slowing of retirement since the end of mandatory retirement under federal law, in 1994, has added another growing problem to the job-market mix. At the University of Pennsylvania—the only place for which I can get more or less exact and timely data—we have gone from having no faculty members over 70 in the School of Arts and Sciences, 15 years ago, to 28, or 7.3 percent of the 383 tenured faculty members, in 2010. And the median age of tenured faculty members has risen to 55.
Seven-plus percent is a substantial proportion, especially since each of those senior citizens is arguably blocking at least two assistant-professor slots. Penn could probably add upward of 40 new assistant professors in the School of Arts and Sciences, without significantly increasing its instructional budget, if everyone over 70 retired. (Whether Penn's administrators would actually do that much hiring is, of course, an entirely different matter.)

Anyway, the author, a professor of English and Education at Penn, notes that in the context of the harsh realities of (un)employment in the humanities.  Yes, not a new topic to this blog! And, I should note that the retirement factor is simply one of the many issues that are discussed in that essay. 
The essayist concludes on the following note:

I would much prefer to define our current job-market difficulties as a problem in underdemand rather than oversupply. The facts, however, cannot be denied. After a generation of dithering, we need to act decisively to minimize the damage that our practices are inflicting on thousands of talented young women and men whose aspirations and idealism are jeopardized by our institutional inertia as well as by our laissez-faire, wishful thinking that the job market will simply take care of itself. If we should have learned one lesson from the current financial crisis, it is that all markets need vigilant oversight.

Chart of the day: why we have fiscal problems

So, after retirement, at the official retirement age, and on an average, one can look forward to almost two additional decades of life here in the US.

This is when social security benefits kick in, along with Medicare, ...

You make the call :)

The importance of saving money. Or not!

The market meltdown and your 401K

Don't look. Seriously, don't look. I have no idea what's going on with any of my equity investments, because that is not short term money that I need to keep my eye on.
If you look you will get upset, and you will be tempted to do something stupid. I can't guarantee that the market won't drop further and you won't regret having held on. But as a general rule, selling into a massive liquidity crisis is a pretty bad idea. Selling in a panic because your assets just dropped 30% is almost certainly a bad idea.
The good news is that while the stock market can take a long time to recover, it historically doesn't actually go down for more than a couple of years.
Yeah, that's not very good news. But unless you're planning to retire right now, my advice remains the same: don't look.

Sage advice from Megan McArdle

Pensions: what is bad for GM is bad for the country too?

In the op-ed piece in the NY Times, Roger Lowenstein offers a compelling argument on a major reason why GM is on the edge of bankruptcy: retirement/pension benefits. He then ends it with:
Responding to the same temptation to offload expenses into the future, public employers have committed to trillions of dollars in future liabilities. In New Jersey, a huge pension liability has created a budgetary nightmare for the state. The city of Vallejo, Calif., burdened by police pensions, recently filed for bankruptcy.

Just as G.M.’s shareholders bore the burdens of its pensions, states and cities will have to force taxpayers to sacrifice in the form of service cuts, tax increases or both.

It is too late to restore G.M. to its former grandeur. But if public officials do not show courage by quickly funding the pensions they have promised to their workers, taxpayers will soon find themselves in an even worse crisis than the one G.M.’s shareholders are facing now.