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Academic Tenure and Voluntary Retirement

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

A topic I promised to write about earlier, and a source of frequent discussion in academic circles. Specifically, I would like to address the point, often made by a variety of people (including some eminent scientists) that older scientists should retire soon, although they are not legally required to (in the United States), because they are less creative and innovative than younger scientists. This would help make it easier for younger scientists to find jobs and flourish, and for science to advance more rapidly.


Of course, the flip side of this question is related also to those countries which enforce retirement ages on their scientists - are they missing out on some serious 'senior scientist' creativity? (Some background: in the US the retirement age for academics was 65 until 1982, and 70 until 1994, when Congress removed mandatory retirement altogether).


I do not pretend to have a definitive solution to this issue; so what follows is designed to sharpen the questions, rather than provide answers.


Questions, Questions


i) How do you define creativity? Any definition I can come up with seems susceptible to counterexamples. Should we define creativity by the number of patents? Feynman had none. By number of publications? Feynman had about 40, 20 less than I do right now. By the number of citations? I know of entering assistant professors in astronomy who already have as large an h-index as Feynman (62). Are they really that creative?


ii) Is it true that physics is a young person's game? I have specialized this question to the science I am most familiar with. The question is often answered in the affirmative using the examples of Newton (who proposed his theory of gravitation at 23 years of age), Clerk Maxwell (electromagnetic theory at 31), Einstein (relativity etc. at 26), etc.


But if we look at the entire population of contributing scientists and over a long period of time, the conclusions might differ - one study, for example, finds middle-aged scientists to be the most productive [1]. Others have found that scientists who made outstanding contributions at a younger age make important discoveries even later in their careers. I think there are several factors which feed into this.


For one, life expectancy was lower, for example, in the earlier part of the twentieth century, for example, when the Nobel prizes came on; it is said often as a half joke, that the two conditions for receiving a Nobel are a) to do great work when you are young and then b) try and survive as long as possible.


If you made a discovery later in life, the odds would be stacked against you receiving the prize before you died (indeed it is sometimes suspected that the Nobel Committee waits for some scientists to pass, so it can stick to its rules of no more than 3 sharers and no posthumous prizes). Now that the life expectancy has gone up, scientists creative at older ages succeed in snagging Nobels as well. Two recent nonagenarian prize recipients include Arthur Ashkin (at 96) and John Goodenough (at 97) both of who did their prize-winning work in their late forties.


A second factor is that the amount of physics (and presumably any other science) to be mastered before one can enter research has gone up over the years as knowledge has advanced. So it takes longer to make a creative contribution - some amount of mastery over the existing principles seems to be necessary for this.


iii) What does my experience of my own field suggest? About 25 years spent doing atomic, molecular and optical physics seems to suggest that there is a distribution in creativity. Certainly some young superstars have burst into the field with early contributions that were spectacular (one of my favorite examples is Shina Tan).


However, typically it takes time to evolve a deep look into a theoretical problem, or build a machine which can execute cutting edge experiments, not to speak of large collaborations which may be necessary for achieving ambitious results. Most scientists seem to begin contributing deeply when they hit middle age. In fact, I know several prominent cases where the concerned scientists only began to hit their stride once they reached 60!


Then there are also those projects that only senior scientists can be trusted with, typically big science-type undertakings. It would be difficult to think of a 30-year old leading LIGO, for example: Barry Barish, who shared the Nobel prize for the detection of gravitational waves in 2017, was past 60 when he became director of LIGO in 1997. Should we have retired him?


Conclusion


In my own case, I feel in my middle age I am doing work I could not have even imagined tackling in my twenties and thirties, and that there is still so much more to learn, improve on, and be creative about.


One of the advantages of aging is that once the barriers of tenure and promotion have been crossed, one can become more ambitious, and open to risk-taking by striking out in new directions. Since one has built some cachet by this time, colleagues are also inclined to take one seriously. These privileges were not available to me as a young scientist, to say the least.


So my tentative conclusion is that abolishing the mandatory retirement age for scientists in the US was a wise decision. And that retirement should be a personal decision. Nonetheless, it would be good to see some quantitative data addressing the issues raised in this post.


[1] Is Science Really a Young Man's Game? K. Brad Wray, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 137-149.


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