At 70 years young this summer, I will retire. Looking back over my long career, I am proud I participated as a scientist and educator in one of the greatest universities in the country. My publication record is not as admirable as some, I never published in Science or Nature, but I my research regularly appeared with students in the primary journals in my sub-discipline. But enough about me.
In my career I cannot remember a more daunting job market than the one I have witnessed during the past 3-4 years. Recently, I sat on a search committee for a position in which we screened more than 250 applications. Of these, well over a third had stellar credentials. However, I have to ask how much a person really contributes on a manuscript to Science that has 15-20 authors, including essentially everyone in the home lab. This kind of publication inflation by labs who do it, is simply dishonest. But I digress. The job market must be at a the worst state it has ever reached. How others my age, with 30+ years of service and a nice retirement package sitting in investments, the bank, or under the pillow can look at themselves in the mirror each morning knowing that many young Ph.D.s are on food stamps, WIC, and unemployment is difficult for me to understand. It further mystifies me why those tenured faculty members and administrators allow individuals who are no longer productive, and largely incompetent in their fields, to hang around. Is allowing these sorts of parasites on academia to continue in positions they no longer deserve to occupy? What happened to post-tenure review? Each of us really needs to ask if we might serve our field better by eliminating some of these warm bodies. Choosing to retire is not an end, it is a beginning. Choosing to evict inactive and now incompetent faculty is not a violation of tenure, it is maintaining the sanctity of tenure. Yesterday, I spoke with a middle-aged Ph. D. He/She has been partially employed for over a decade. He/She has been in and out of jobs thanks to the financial difficulties so many institutions are faced with, combined with the corruption at the administrative level which so many of us is very familiar. His/Her retirement is zero, prospects are zero, and yet he/she continues to publish without any resources. How many are there that fit this mold? It is bad enough that many of our departments serve as homes for co-workers who no longer serve our discipline in any way, having long ago stopped publishing and now serve as little more than clogs in the system's plumbing. There is little to nothing most of us can do about these selfish former scientists. But the rest of us can still contribute, advise graduate students, and publish as retirees. It might be easier without teaching and committee responsibilities taking up our time. Will this email cause anyone to stop and thing? I doubt it. But, I look forward to a productive retirement in which I continue publishing, support our program, and the discipline knowing that having stepped aside, some other player is getting their turn at bat. I hope he/she hits a home run. Sincerely, Lone Ranger
