Jan-Åke Gustafsson never got an official retirement notice from the University. But that’s because the 63-year-old chairman of the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at the Karolinska Institutet didn’t wait around for it. When a recently retired colleague warned Gustafsson, who was quickly approaching Sweden’s upper mandatory retirement age of 67, that emeritus professors aren’t taken seriously in Sweden, he began to realize it was all too true. Emeritus colleagues received fewer and shorter grants and were more segregated from their departments. “It was in the air,” he recalls. “As far as I can understand, the word ‘emeritus’ doesn’t mean anything meritorious. It means used, spent.” He began to plan an exit strategy.
Age discrimination was outlawed in the European Union in 2000, yet many senior scientists across Europe, as well as Japan, are forced from their ...
