Senior Faculty?

I‘m a senior faculty member at my law school. It doesn’t seem like that long ago I was junior faculty and one day I realized I was now one of “them”. I don’t even recall being “middle management” but I must have been so, for a few years.  So first as an elder law prof and second as a senior faculty member,  I’ve been interested in a couple of articles published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The first article, The Forever Professors appeared in the Chronicle Review on November 14, 2014 in the Opinions and Ideas section.  The next, Ageism in Academe, appeared Novembere18, 2014 in the Chronicle’s blog. 

There are a number of issued raised in this articles, and it appears there is a fair amount of interest, both with the Forever Professor piece and  The Ageism  post when you consider the number of comments posted to the two.  I’m sure we all cover aging and ageism in our classes and it engenders good discussions.

I wondered about whether to integrate in my classes the points made in these Chronicle articles (note, neither of these profs are law faculty-whether this is relevant or not). I am not going to summarize or comment on the two articles. I do encourage you to read them…and the comments…. and draw your own conclusions about the teaching points we can glean from them. Meanwhile, I’m going to ponder them further while I think about preparing for the next semester’s classes.