San Jose Mercury News, Stanford University Confronts the Graying of Academia:

Many workers yearn for retirement — the goodbye parties, the golf course, maybe even a gold watch. But Stanford University has the opposite problem: Nobody wants to leave.

Hoping to create more space for young scholars, Stanford has revamped its generous "Retirement Incentive Program" — for the second time in a decade — to nudge more old-timers toward the door. "Our senior faculty are wonderful. I love them all," Provost John Etchemendy said at a recent meeting of the Academic Senate, publicizing the plan. "But we're getting fewer people into the faculty, and that's because people are staying longer," he said. "The faculty is aging."

Hired in large numbers during a 1960s and '70s higher education boom, Sputnik and civil rights-era professors now represent the majority of Stanford faculty. In 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, about 53% were older than 50, up from 43% in 1993. The under-45 crowd had fallen from 42% to 33%.

And like a seat on the Supreme Court and papal office, university tenure is lifelong. With the brightest students, best libraries and labs, and lighter teaching loads than at most state schools, professors at elite research universities have little reason to retire. …

The growing gerontocracy stirs vigorous debate. "A lot of us think of 60 as the new 40," joked Stanford geophysics professor Mark Zoback, 62, an expert on the San Andreas Fault. …

But former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers told the Boston Globe that the aging of faculty "is one of the profound problems facing the American research university. It defies belief that the best way to advance creative thought, to educate the young, or to choose the next generation of faculty members is to have a tenured faculty with more people over 70 than under 40," Summers told the Globe.

(Hat Tip: Inside Higher Ed.)