The grey (time) zone of academia

The growing cohort of aging professors is raising intergenerational tensions on campuses

The Editorial Board

The Globe and Mail

Published September 13, 2026

Here are the core points from the Globe and Mail editorial, distilled clearly and structured for quick understanding.

(As summarized by Microsoft’s CoPilot service)

Main Argument

Canadian universities are increasingly dominated by professors working well past traditional retirement age, creating intergenerational imbalance, financial strain, and barriers to faculty renewal.

Key Facts

• Mandatory retirement ended in the early 2000s; since then, the share of professors 65+ rose from 1.7% (2000) to 12.1% (2024).
• 25% of full-time academic staff are now over 60, while <15% are under 40.
• There are more professors aged 69+ than under 35.
• Older professors often have lighter teaching loads, smaller classes, and more schedule control.
• They also cost universities significantly more: full professors at major research universities earn a median $196,725, and those over 65 may cost ~50% more when benefits are included.

Consequences

• Fewer opportunities for younger academics, who end up in precarious sessional roles (~$10,000 per course).
• Reduced hiring of women and racialized scholars, who are more represented among recent PhDs.
• Potential stagnation in research and teaching innovation, as older faculty may act as “gatekeepers” to new ideas.
• Some professors collect pensions plus salary (“double dipping”), adding six-figure sums to compensation.

Administrative Challenges

• Universities cannot force retirement.
• Federal rules require pension payouts starting at age 71, making dual payments unavoidable if professors continue working.
• Administrators often prefer contract hires because they cannot predict when tenured faculty will retire.

Proposed Solutions

• Require older professors to maintain full teaching and research loads equivalent to younger peers.
• Track and publish output metrics (courses taught, PhDs supervised, research produced).
• Use public transparency—similar to a Sunshine List—to pressure underperformers.
• Offer positive incentives:
  • Phased retirement with better terms
  • More generous buyouts
  • Opportunities to stay involved through contract teaching or research grants
• Consider age-based departure agreements, similar to law firms or judicial retirement ages.

Editorial Conclusion – The Globe and Mail

Universities risk becoming gerontocracies. To preserve innovation, diversity, and generational balance, institutions must actively manage aging faculty and create clear pathways for faculty renewal.

A DIFFERENT TAKE

Canada leads the G7 in the percentage of working adults who have completed post-secondary education. Despite this, our GDP is not increasing faster than it is in other G7 countries. This calls into question the purpose, approach and productivity of our post-secondary education industry.

The problem isn’t ‘weak teaching’. Rather, the problem is policymakers’ underlying naive belief in human capital theory. Occupational knowledge is learned primarily on-the-job. The education industry sells itself as selling both critical thinking and job-ready skills. For most graduates, it does neither. Students overwhelmingly go to college to get better jobs. 

It would be better to take a leaf out of Henry Mintzberg’s (Managers Not MBAs) and stage adult learning throughout a student’s working life. In that way, they would learn skills ‘just-in-time’ and would be exposed to rapidly changing technological advances as they occur.

Restating the actual argument

Naive human capital theory (in the Becker tradition) treats education as directly building general, transferable productive capacity — pour in years of schooling, get out proportionally more productive workers, get out more GDP. Policymakers absorbed this as a straightforward input-output model and built funding formulas and public messaging around it. But most occupational competence is tacit and context-dependent — it’s acquired by doing the job, under real constraints, with real stakes — and can’t be pre-loaded into an 18-to-22-year-old sitting in a lecture hall years before they’ll use it. Meanwhile, the education sector markets itself on two promises — critical thinking and job-readiness — and for most graduates in most fields, neither promise is well-kept: the critical-thinking claim is hard to measure, and the job-readiness claim collides with the fact that specific occupational knowledge decays or fails to transfer by the time it’s actually needed.

Mintzberg’s argument, and why it’s the right reference point

Managers Not MBAs is specifically an attack on front-loaded, pre-experience professional education. Mintzberg’s line is that management “is not a science, it’s an art — a craft based on experience,” and putting people with no management experience in a classroom to study management just produces people fluent in analytics and technique but without actual managerial judgment, which is confidence without competence. The alternative he built, the International Masters Program for Managers, only admits practicing managers, sent by their employers, and structures the program as short modules (originally five two-week blocks over 16 months, now similar) spread across a year-plus, so managers cycle back and forth between classroom and workplace, bringing live problems in and taking new frameworks back out. The design principle is that the classroom’s job is to help people reflect on and make sense of experience they’re actively having, not to substitute for that experience.

Generalizing that beyond management education is exactly your “staged, just-in-time” proposal: rather than one dense four-year front-load followed by 40 years of assuming the credential still applies, interleave shorter, recurring bursts of formal learning across a career, triggered by what the person is actually encountering on the job at that moment. This has real institutional precedent outside Mintzberg too — Germany’s dual apprenticeship system (Duale Ausbildung) interleaves classroom and workplace training from the start rather than sequencing them, and the OECD floated “recurrent education” as an explicit alternative to front-loaded schooling back in the 1970s, with limited uptake. Canada’s own co-op model (Waterloo being the flagship example) is a partial, front-loaded version of the same instinct — alternating work terms and study terms — but it’s still compressed into the undergraduate years rather than spread across a working life.

Why this hasn’t happened at scale, which connects back to everything upstream in this conversation

A few structural forces resist it, and they’re the same forces that came up earlier:

• Financing logic: Canadian postsecondary funding — both public transfers and personal student debt — is built around a single, large, front-loaded investment. A staged model shifts costs into mid-career, disrupting income and requiring either employers or the state to fund recurring adult learning, which nobody’s institutional budget is currently built to do.
• Signaling incentives cut the other way: this is the tension with the credentialism argument. A single, front-loaded, hard-to-fake credential is a better signal for exactly the reason Spence’s theory says it is — it’s costly and irreversible, obtained once at an age before the person has much of a track record to be judged on otherwise. Staged, just-in-time learning is harder to compress into a single legible signal an employer can screen on cheaply, which is precisely why employers — who benefit from outsourcing screening costs to universities, as you noted earlier — have little incentive to push for it even if it would produce more useful skill.
• Institutional incentives of universities themselves: enrollment-based funding and prestige hierarchies reward universities for attracting large cohorts of young, full-time, on-campus students, not for delivering short recurring modules to working adults, which is a lower-margin, logistically harder business to run.

So the obstacle isn’t that the Mintzberg model is untested or has no path — it’s operating successfully at the margins (IMPM, German apprenticeships, some Canadian co-op programs) — it’s that Canada’s financing structure, employer screening incentives, and university funding models are all mutually reinforcing around the front-loaded, single-credential status quo, even though that status quo is worse at producing the thing everyone claims to want.