The pros and cons of extending varsity lecturers' retirement age

UASU Secretary-General Constantine Wasonga (right) with Education CS Julius Ogamba during the signing of a return-to-work agreement. [Collins Oduor, Standard]

Secretary General Constantine Wasonga and his indefatigable Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU) advance brigade recently returned to the ‘barracks’ after a protracted and grueling spat with the government over pay issues. 

Arguably, when industrial action meets scholarship, it attains a rather beautiful flavour (if this could be said with a straight face about the rugged UASU warriors who are known for donning bushy beards, belting militant songs, and using roaring tones and menacing gesticulations to drive their points home).

However, against this particular foe, the powers that be dare not try their honed tricks of hoodwinking simpletons through mischievous fine print in disputed documents: Nothing escapes the stern scrutiny of professorial eyes!

Among the prized spoils Wasonga & Co. brought home was the well-publicised Sh9.7 billion Collective Bargaining Agreement, and with it, a significant extension of retirement ages. Going forward, all teaching cadres in public universities will hang their boots at between 70 and 74 years, a privilege formally reserved only for professors.

It is interesting to ponder the practical, professional and even anecdotal implications of the newly extended shelf-life of dons. Will the university students, for example, benefit greatly from the accumulated wisdom and experience of these walking libraries?

Or will the freshmen confuse the ‘ancient’, wizened teacher standing before them– nearly 60 years their senior - with the prehistoric Zinjanthropus Boisei he is teaching them about? The students could even orchestrate his quick demise to make way for their own opportunities for succession!

On the one hand, there is sufficient reason to argue for engaging professionals in academia way into their dotage. Firstly, and most obviously, this retention would ease the perennial shortage of qualified staff in higher learning institutions.

The Commission for University Education generally requires the ratio of full-time teaching staff to students in public universities be at most 1:7, and at least 1:18, across diverse fields ranging from medical to social sciences.

This is a far cry from the current dystopian situation whereby proportions nosedive to as low as 1:100 in many universities, despite supplementary support of external part-time lecturers.

And this is against the backdrop of the ever-increasing numbers of students. Overall, this route can have a cascading effect on the pension and retirement benefits bills, and void the common practice of rehiring retirees on contractual terms.

Secondly, Wole Soyinka, Albert Einstein, John Khaminwa and other hallowed academic types who have continued discovering and making impact even on their walking sticks demonstrate that mental acuity can defy the passage of time.

Astronaut John Glenn recently went back to space at 77. Donald Trump is set to ascend to the helm of the most powerful nation on earth at the ripe old age of 80.

Everyone agrees that to listen to typically oracular lecture by 90-year-old Soyinka today is to appreciate the brain-trust that is possibly wasted whenever statutory retirement consigns productive minds to a rural obscurity to till land surrounded by livestock relatively so early in their lives.  

In any case, by routinely retaining judges up to the age of 70, most legal systems worldwide have already tacitly legalised (pun unintended) the association of wisdom with grey hair. Informal statistics would seem to validate this: After his retirement, Hong Kong criminal court judge Wayne Gould retained enough cognitive lucidity to go ahead and create the famous computer app which enables mass-production and syndication of the popular Sudoku puzzles worldwide!

Still, eyebrows have been raised concerning the inevitable emergence in the universities of a new academic species in the form of septuagenarian Graduate Assistants, Tutorial Fellows and the like, given that the duties assigned to holders of those entry grades while they pursue their research are hugely psychomotor, and include supervising and marking continuous assessment tests , setting up experiments and maintaining equipment in labs, managing inventories, arranging examination booklets and generally, running departmental errands.

Will their acerbic irritability, understandably common with folk of advanced old age, cause them to defy and despise their far younger heads of departments?  

In one social media group, anecdotal projections envisioned age-compliant lecture theatres equipped with water dispensers, resting chairs, standby ambulances and walking stick allowances to cater for the grandparents.

When I expressed concern on whether their decreased physical abilities can withstand the demands of physical work, someone rather macabrely, reminded me that lecturers should not even retire and that they should best die in service!

On a much more serious note, given that all ranks lower than the professor grade at university are considered transitional stopovers as exemplified by the “publish or perish” mantra, guaranteeing every teaching Tom, Dick and Harry employment until 70 is the perfect recipe for academic barrenness.

For the sake of quality assurance in universities, it is only fair that contractual clauses spelling negative consequences for academic stagnation be simultaneously introduced and enforced. This will be the only way to coax scholars out of dormancy.

For now, my verdict is this: Let the oldies dispense knowledge. Brain still beats brawn.