...if I really, really get going...
Newly Tenured — at Age 68...“If someone had told me that I was going to start on a tenure track when I was 62, I would have laughed,” [Victoria Lichterman] says.
“But now I’m 68 and indeed, it’s been there, done that.”
Lichterman, an assistant professor of humanities, received tenure at New York City College of Technology this year, having signed on as a full-time junior faculty member six years ago at age 62 after a couple years as a part timer. “She’s just one of us, who came to tenure late in life,” says Cathy Santore, chair of the humanities department at City Tech, which is part of the City University of New York. “She’s worked extremely hard and with so much energy, I worried about her because I thought she’s just knocking herself out. She wants to keep up with the younger faculty but she went beyond what some of them are doing.”
“Actually,” Santore says, “she’s teaching me about age. When I said to her, ‘Victoria, you don’t have to work so hard,’ she said, ‘Oh, when you get to my age, you’ll see….You’ll just be so delighted that you can still do it that you’d like to do it"...
Well done! BTW, one of her research topics sounds fascinating: "the history of white writers speaking through black characters."