These 90-Something Professors Are Still Publishing

Chronicle of Higher Education, These 90-Something Professors Are Still Publishing: 

"I’m a retired scholar. I’m not retired from scholarship."

The historian Jean H. Baker is working on an article about the suffragist Edith Houghton Hooker and thinking about her next one, on the disenfranchisement of Black men in Maryland at the turn of the 20th century. She’s 91. Samuel Jay Keyser’s Play It Again, Sam, a book about repetition in the arts, is in production at MIT Press. At 89, he is still the editor of Linguistic Inquiry, which he founded 54 years ago. Lucy Freeman Sandler’s latest book, Penned & Painted: The Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, was published when she was 91. Now 94, Sandler is studying images of the destruction of books in a 13th-century pictorial Bible made for French royalty.

Aging has been much on Americans’ minds lately: In addition to the high-profile debate over whether Joe Biden, at 81, was too old to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and the continuing questions about Donald Trump’s age at 78, there have been controversies within academe about the number of elderly professors. Whatever the discourse, these three exceptional scholars prove that high-level scholarly work can be done well past the age of retirement.

So what keeps them studying and writing into their 10th decade?

“I never really feel retired,” says Sandler. “I retired from teaching” — in 2003, after 39 years as a professor of art history at New York University — but “I didn’t retire from the thing that I’ve always loved to do,” examining illuminations in medieval manuscripts and writing about the meaning of what she finds. ...

“Though I’m a ‘retired scholar,’ I’m not retired from scholarship,” Sandler emphasizes. “Friends are dying or becoming less active as scholars all around me,” but she is in frequent contact with other academics, some near her age, some younger. Some she has met at the British Library, through curators who put scholars in contact with one another when they use the manuscript room. She keeps in touch with a few former students whom she taught as undergraduates.

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