Professors' average age increased over last decade

Tufts is sprouting grey hairs.

In the 2002-2003 academic year, approximately 12 percent of Tufts' tenure-track and tenured faculty were 65 years old and older, and 25 percent were over 60.

Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences Susan Ernst said this year's figures are nearly identical.

Trends at Tufts reflect figures across the nation. According to the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA, 36 percent of full time faculty across the nation are 55-years old or older today, compared to 24 percent in 1989.

With the possibility of professors staying into their fourth or even fifth decades, Ernst said Tufts administrators seek to find a "balance between senior faculty and new faculty with new ideas."

"We are hiring new faculty every year," Ernst said. "As an evolving [institution] with new ideas, young people is part of where we're going."

Simultaneously, Ernst emphasized the essential role that older faculty play at a research university like Tufts.

"People can be well into their sixties -- or more -- and still be at the top of their field," she said. "The quality of teaching [and] productivity is not proportional to age. [Senior faculty] provide lifetime learning and keep alive that institutional memory a university needs."

One reason for the increased number of older professors is the 1994 amendment to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 which prohibited colleges from enforcing mandatory faculty retirement at age 70.

The number of tenured professors in the School of Arts and Sciences has not changed since the 1994 amendment was passed, Ernst said.

Professors Sol Gittleman and Robert Gonsalves, in their 40th and 41st years respectively, are still considered two of the University's most well-respected professors.

Gittleman first started teaching on the Hill in 1964 and was a member of the German, Russian and Asian Languages Department until 1981, when he was named University Provost. He remained in this position -- second only to the President -- until 2002.

Today he holds the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professorship and teaches the "Introduction to Yiddish Culture" class in addition to advising 30 freshmen and several independent study majors.

Gonsalves has been a professor for 41 years -- the last 19 of which have been spent at Tufts. He first arrived at the University in the fifties and graduated in 1956 with a degree from the same department in which he now teaches: electrical engineering.

Though Tufts has changed from a small New England college to a well-known research institution since senior professors such as Gonsalves and Gittleman first arrived, such faculty say they remain up-to-date on educational and technological advances by attending conferences and publishing their work.

"So many of our senior faculty are so full of energy -- they are excellent researchers and good scholars," Ernst said. "They have definitely been able to evolve with the school."

As Gonsalves phrased it, "an old dog can definitely learn new tricks."

In 1993, a then 60-year-old Gonsalves' patented a "phase retrieval" application which helped NASA astronauts fix an optic flaw in the Hubble Telescope.

Gittleman and Gonsalves do not seem worried about the increasing age difference between the self-professed "old dogs" and their students.

"Today I am 51 years older than my freshman advisees," Gittleman said. "There's definitely an [age] gap but you work through it. When you spend your life with young people, you never grow up."

Gonsalves, like Gittleman, feels that the widening age gap between him and his engineering students does not affect his teaching. "There is no difference in the way I connect with the students today than how I connected with them when I first started teaching," he said.

Ernst agrees. "In general, senior faculty are very involved [in the University] -- sometimes even more so than their younger counterparts," she said.

Gonsalves has two journal applications that will be printed this year while Gittleman is working on the third volume of The History of Tufts.

However, some professors are concerned that as they age, they may not realize that their classroom abilities are gradually becoming impaired.

"It's part of senility to not believe it when it's happening to you," 73-year-old Harvey C. Mansfield, Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard, told The Harvard Crimson. "Being old is not great. Things start to go wrong and you don't always notice it."

Still, student feedback for Tufts' older professors seems to be positive. "I prefer older professors because they have more experience and know where they are going with their teaching," junior Jean-Baptiste Turpin said.

Students gave Gonsalves the 2000 Liebner Award for Excellence in Teaching and Advising in recognition of his continuing efforts.

Like the students, younger faculty also appreciate their senior colleagues for their experience. Assistant Professor of Chemistry David Lee arrived at Tufts just a year and a half ago, fresh out of his post-doctoral studies at MIT.

"I really enjoy having the older professors around -- they are a reservoir of knowledge. I go to them for everything from advice, to how to set up a lab and how to teach," he said.

For Gittleman, the feelings that come hand in hand with teaching are still brand new -- even 40 years later. "I still get nervous before every class," he said.