There He Goes Again
Larry Summers is back, talking about the alleged problem of older professors, in a piece by the M-Bomb in today's Globe.
"The aging of the faculty, caused in large part by the absence of mandatory retirement, is one of the profound problems facing the American research university," said Lawrence H. Summers , who as Harvard president pushed for the hiring and tenure of more younger scholars. "It defies belief that the best way to advance creative thought, to educate the young, or to choose the next generation of faculty members is to have a tenured faculty with more people over 70 than under 40, and over 60 than under 50."
Summers may be right; he may not. It's hard to tell, because as far as I know, he's never presented any data on the issue. It is not necessarily obvious to me, for example, that older professor are not "the best way...to educate the young." I've had older professors who were far better than younger ones, in part because of their age and what they'd learned about teaching.
(Not to mention what they'd learned about life.)
It's an interesting soundbite, and like many of Summers' soundbite arguments, it sounds clever—"more people over 70 than under 40," snap-snap—but on some consideration, reveals itself to contain no internal logic, only implicit assumptions.
As I say, Summers may be right. But this is an argument he's never made thoroughly in public—though he did once say the same thing right in front of the elderly but still very competent Alan Greenspan—and it would be useful for him to explain what underlies those implicit assumptions.