Edge of the Wedge

Like everyone else these days, college professors live longer. But that fact has not yet affected campus retirement rules. Somewhere between 65 and 68, no matter how chipper a Chips he may be, he steps down from his lecture platform and says goodbye to his students.

To at least one elder educator, spry, 75-year-old Alvin S. Johnson, president emeritus of Manhattan's New School for Social Research, this sort of thing is preposterous. "All the world knows," says he, "that the intellect does not stop at 65. Why, the best work of Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Voltaire, Goethe and Sophocles was done long after!" Last winter, white-thatched Alvin Johnson persuaded his New School successor, Hans Simons, to let him set up a faculty within a faculty of retired professors.

Johnson searched retirement lists from coast to coast, finally hired ten. As the New School reopened this week, students found the roster a mighty impressive one. Among the new New Schoolmen were courtly Albert Leon Guerard, 69, historian, biographer, critic (Art for Art's Sake), onetime professor of general literature at Stanford; fierce, fiery Thomas Reed Powell, 70, once Harvard Law School's top expert on the U.S. Constitution; genial, snow-haired Arnold Lucius Gesell, 70, pertinacious chronicler of child behavior (Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, etc.), former director of Yale's Clinic of Child Development; shy, spinsterish Cornelia Meigs, 65, biographer of Louisa May Alcott (Invincible Louisa) and professor of English composition at Bryn Mawr; Columbia Mathematician Edward Kasner (Mathematics and the Imagination), one of the world's top geometers.

To Alvin Johnson, the best place for such men & women is the expanding field of adult education. There, he believes, they can use their talents freely ("no roll calls, no fool examinations, no bibliographies that no one ever reads, no jargon that no one ever understands") and still not stand in the way of promotion for younger teachers.

Johnson hopes that other institutions around the country will follow the New School's example. "My little project is the edge of the wedge," says he. "I mean to put this idea over. And darned if I don't think I will."

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