Dear Editor:
A colleague recently applied for an advertised tenure-track teaching job at a nearby institution and received the quaint reply that he was “overqualified for the position.” The letter went on to say: “We are seeking a recent recipient of the PhD degree just preparing to begin his/her academic teaching career with the rank of Assistant Professor and at the beginning of the tenure track.” Since the applicant was perfectly willing to accept a beginning assistant professor’s salary, he found it strange that somehow having received his PhD seven years ago and having more than a decade’s teaching experience had overqualified him for the position.
Who is kidding whom? My colleague was turned down because he is “too old.” He’s forty-six, and when he entered graduate studies in the early 1970s he got caught in the market crunch that made young PhDs and ABDs into expendable items and/or academic proletarians laboring ceaselessly on the treadmill of partimership. My colleague has paid his dues in that academic purgatory peculiar to our profession, and now that some jobs are becoming available, he is being sacrificed on the scrap heap of scholarly obsolescence to make way for the more newly minted and tractable products of our graduate schools. This is not the only such experience he has had; only the more blatant. Another colleague of mine received word of mouth (sotto voce no doubt) confirmation that the same person had been rejected at another institution because of his age.
Does our profession care about the moral reprehensibility of this practice? Do we really wish to take a generation of scholars whom we encouraged to enter graduate schools, who persevered and completed their programs, usually while working for us at coolie wages, and flush them down the toilets of academe? A few years back we were rightly belabored for being insensitive to the evils of racism and sexism in our midst. Must we now add ageism to our catalog of crimes?
Jackson K. Putnam
California State University, Fullerton
