The University of Peers and Elders

For the past ten or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic – when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.” 

Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley – or anywhere – happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine. 

That magazine became Wired – and the company and community we built felt like pursuing an academic education, but with the real world as our campus. It came complete with a deep bench of “tenured professors” – Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, William Gibson – as well as the chance to revise and defend our “thesis project” on a monthly basis, in public and without a net. 

More than three decades later, as I began to confront an age I’ve always associated with irrelevance, I found myself once again yearning for an all-encompassing community of pure learning. Seven years ago I moved to New York, and as part of exploring what I might do there, I met with several academics at Columbia. I asked them if I might pursue a multi-disciplinary PhD across policy, journalism, business and computer science. Everyone I spoke to was confused by my question. Here I was, a person with more than 30 years of experience, in his mid fifties, asking about … getting a PhD? Why? You’ve already got a Masters, they advised. Why not join the faculty and teach? You could always write and research along the way. My desire to get a PhD was framed as both unnecessary and a bit strange. 

I took their advice and joined the academic faculty at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. I loved teaching, I had taught at Berkeley and knew that the best part was engaging with the students. But there was a problem: a lack of peers. The students treated me – appropriately, given the context – as a mentor, a professor, a person of higher status. But finding “equals” who shared my passions and interests – and who had the time to marinate in ideas and experimentation – was remarkably difficult. I stayed at Columbia for four or five years, but I ended up starting another company, which soon took me away from academia once again. 

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Two years ago we sold that company, and I took a position at Northeastern University, to see if perhaps a return to academia might now be in the cards. Predictably, I found myself frustrated by my desire to be a student, rather than a professor. College and university systems have been built to label people as one or the other, and this distinction is culturally codified by a deep-seeded framework of age. Students are 17 to 30 years of age, in general. Professors are in their mid 30s and up. Anyone over 35 who “goes back to college” becomes an exception proving that rule, if not a bad joke. 

But I think the time has come to reconsider this societal presumption. 

Those of us lucky enough to get to their fifties and beyond can now reasonably expect to have another 30 or more years of productive engagement with the world around us. This is a remarkable and unprecedented reality. Just one generation ago, the average life expectancy of an adult American male was 60 to 65 years. I was brought up with the expectation that you’d go to college, graduate in your twenties, work for 30 or so years, then retire. You’d enjoy a few “golden years” and gracefully exit the picture. 

To my parents or grandparents, the idea that after 35 years of work there’d be another 30 years of anything was outside their particular Overton window. Most of them did end up living that long – making them unusual in their peer group. That prompted my  revered maternal grandfather to advise me in his eighties: “John, if you can manage it, do anything to avoid getting old.”

Well, now that such a fate is a possibility, I have to face facts. It’s a privilege to be sure, but a healthy, proactive, well-educated person with financial security and access to quality health care can now expect to live productively to 90 and beyond. That’s…kind of bonkers. And it leads to a pretty serious question:

What do we do with all this time? 

This is a fundamentally ludicrous question to try to answer if you’re operating inside our current social structure. It leads to the kinds of responses I got from my peers at Columbia. As it stands, our society only encourages most of us to ask that question once – when we’re at college. Some of us are lucky enough to get a second shot at it when we enter graduate school. But by the time we’re 30, we’re supposed to be done with formalized higher education. 

Colleges and universities were once* built to cultivate an all-encompassing culture of learning, exploration, and open-ended curiosity. For a period of four or more years, students are encouraged to engage with ideas, to read deeply, to debate and wonder and think out loud. A university’s infrastructure and cultural mores exist to protect and foster this precious period of liminality: Students live, eat, study and socialize together. As a result, they end up partnering in remarkably productive ways – yes, in marriage, but also in the creation of new companies, new academic pursuits, and the kind of new thinking needed to solve our society’s most pressing problems. 

Why, given how long we’re living now, does this happen only once or at most twice in life? Is it wrong of me, in my late fifties, to want to steep myself in this kind of culture once more? Sure, this time around I probably won’t want to join a fraternity or experiment with psychoactive drugs (I, mean .. maybe?). But I could imagine a new kind of educational institution – one tailored for the elders of our society. I don’t think it’d work if we simply grafted it onto our current system of higher education. But it could certainly draft off of it. And I’m increasingly convinced that if we built it, lots of us would come. 

For now, I just wanted to set the table and put this out in the world, see if it sparks. And yes, I am aware of all the executive education and extension programs, the specialized mid-career fellowships exemplified by Neiman and the like. But I’m thinking of something more…immersive and intentional, something with heft and cultural throw weight. I’ll leave laying out my own sense of what this “university of peers and elders” might look like for another post. In the meantime, what do you think? 

*I’ve found that as college admissions have become intensely competitive, students are no longer encouraged to marinate in ideas, debate, and curiosity. Most of the students I’ve taught recently are obsessed with one thing: Getting the right grades, in the right classes, to get the right job. I think this is a terrible trend. 

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