Nerd Notes: The Changing of the Guard in Academia -- Old and New Professors

There's change in the wind on university campuses as older professors begin to retire, opening up positions for younger academics. This seems obvious, but there's an additional twist, as this New York Times article points out.

Many of the retiring professors are liberals, leftists, and radicals who came of age in the 1960s. Their younger replacements tend to be less . . . Well, this is what the NY Times says:

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.

. . . Individual colleges and organizations like the American Association of University Professors are already bracing for what has been labeled the graying of the faculty. More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969. How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets.

Yet already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade. At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology. At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military.

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce. But a new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression.

. . . When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

“These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says.

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations . . .

I shall be pleased to be a member of the New Guard of moderate young academics, I think. I am tired of radicals. Besides, I've run into one too many gray nerd still mentally reliving long-faded glory days of Berkeley in the late 1960s. I wasn't even born yet. What was/is radical and chic to them is history to me. I'm thinking about the future.

Read the prediction about moderation with Stanley Fish's recent support for non-confrontational classrooms.