Persons of tenure: less fortunate than they may seem.

摘要

The title of this editorial suffers, perhaps, from my weakness for witty language; nonetheless, as you will see, it is not insincere. The early life of virtually everyone in the industrialized world consists of-indeed, is dominated by-a seemingly unending sequence of submissions to evaluation by one's elders and supposed betters. In most walks of life, the character of this sequence shifts from one in which most such evaluations profoundly determine one's subsequent trajectory to one in which a series of "second chances" predominates. Academia is a career in which that transition, i.e., the last truly seismic hurdle in one's ascent to security, occurs particularly late: Most professors achieve the curious version of job security known as "tenure" in their middle to late forties. A reasonable inference from this state of affairs is that the quality of professional life enjoyed by those who have passed this hurdle will be elevated in similar measure to the comparative humiliation (yes, I do know I am over-dramatizing) suffered by those for whom it lies ahead. I think it may be useful to review a couple of ways, of particular relevance to the combating of aging, in which that inference is in error-indeed, in which those who reach the top rung of academic seniority suffer disproportionately from the way in which their world works.