Interestingly, I’ve known far more people getting hired as assistant profs for their “young star” qualities and for having gone through grad school really quickly than the other way around – but that may well vary by field (I’m not in a field where anyone runs groups!).

The thing about faculty not respecting a Dean because of age – yeah, that would be wrong, if that person had the qualifications expected of an Academic Dean, i.e., being a full prof. In my area it’s just really hard to reach full by the time you’re 36. So is the faculty not respecting the age, or are they not respecting the lack of rank? If someone has the appropriate rank and then the faculty won’t follow them – well, that’s the same as if they won’t follow a woman, gay person, etc. But if someone doesn’t have the appropriate rank, then I don’t think they can expect the faculty to follow them. My question was just how likely it was that someone would reach that rank by 36. Certainly they may well.

If you read over the comments on the two linked blogs I think it is clear that there is some confusion over what type of “dean” position we’re talking. Dean of Residential Life type is one thing. But the most interesting discussion comes from assuming we’re talking a position of some real power like Academic Dean, Dean of the Faculty or whatever it might be called.

This sucked me in because of the obvious parallels to the situations of plain old assistant professor hires. A couple three of my peers who are in fact young or appear young have situations that smack of ageism of this type. It spans from the rather neutral “surprise” that someone so apparently young is running their own group to some more suspicious behavior.

In the case of administration it is curious because there are two things going on. One, can the person actually perform the duties of the office in terms of the management, hard decisions, organization, etc. Two can the person lead the faculty. This one is tricky. You might say “well this is the Dean, you must respect the position”. But we all know how faculty think that they run things. So if the Dean cannot gain the respect (grudging or otherwise) of the faculty this can be a problem. A fascinating one because if the problem was lack of respect due to it being a woman, minority or gay person, well, we all know how that would go.

36 years of age is not a protected class of course but perhaps it should be in academia.

Her prose definitely rubs me the wrong way, though…