USC Gerontologist Ruth Weg Must Retire After Turning 70, but She Says . . . : Don’t Count Her Out

Call Ruth Weg old--that’s OK. She’ll tell you, “I am old. There’s nothing wrong with the word old .” But don’t call her elderly. Elderly, she explains, is “frail, dependent, disabled. Elderly is used to conjure up an image. It’s a weapon. It’s ageism.”

Elderly is not Ruth Weg.

Weg, a septuagenarian in denim and boots with immaculately coiffed silver hair, has spent much of her life working to dispel the idea that, at a certain calendar age, one becomes a useless human being who should apologize for taking up space on this planet.

Older people, she has argued in classrooms, in writings, at lecterns, can continue to learn and to enjoy life with a passion.

But, last Oct. 12, Weg turned 70 and soon was informed by her dean that a retirement dinner was planned for her. She says that was the first she knew that she was leaving the faculty of USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Weg says. “This is the center on aging that I helped develop,” a place that has worked to dispel the idea of chronological age as an indicator of worth. She adds: “I’m not a physical laborer, so it makes no sense.”

And if anyone thinks she is retiring, Weg makes it clear, they can think again. She has a new book to finish and she’ll be looking elsewhere for a teaching job. “I’m part of the world,” she says, “and until I die I’ll remain part of it.”

When she heard she was “‘retiring,” Weg was angry. Although there is a university-wide policy of mandated retirement for tenured professors at age 70, it is not unusual for valued faculty to be hired back on an annual basis. She has not been.

(Since 1987, federal law has prohibited mandatory retirement, but universities are exempt at least until 1994.)

She thought of telling the Andrus Gerontology Center to skip the dinner and give her the money; at a salary of $57,500 after more than 30 years’ service, she doesn’t hesitate to say she’s been underpaid because she is a woman, and a woman who makes waves.

But, in the end, she decided to go along with the dinner.

So on April 22, about 150 friends and colleagues, students and former students, gathered at USC’s Town and Gown to fete Weg. Nice things were said about her by Dr. Edward L. Schneider, dean of the Andrus Center, of which the Leonard Davis School is the teaching unit, and David A. Peterson, director of the Davis School.

Holding hands with her husband, Dr. Martin Weg, 67, a dentist, she accepted the accolades with grace. She was lauded as “a magic teacher,” a role model for women and the aging. Barbara Solomon, USC’s dean of graduate studies, said Weg taught everyone that “there were militants with gray hair and radicals who were eligible for Medicare.”

It was duly noted that Weg has been chosen by the Andrus Center Associates to receive its 1991 excellence in teaching award. Praise rolled off speakers’ lips, phrases such as “passion for life,” “intelligence and determination,” “personal and professional electricity.”

Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, sent congratulations with “many growls.”

USC alumna Linda Grant, a former Weg student, assured dinner guests: “Ruth will go out fighting.” She was right.

When it was Weg’s turn to speak, she smiled sweetly and said: “I assure you, folks, I’m not fragile. And I’m not retiring.” Through “an accident of birth,” she added, she had reached 70 and “there is a punishment that follows.”

Weg’s real zinger was reserved for Schneider. She recalled that, when he was being interviewed by the faculty for the dean’s post, she had asked him, “What will your style of administration be?” and, in jest, he had replied, “Dictatorship.”

At evening’s end, Weg kicked off her purple pumps and, with her husband, took a spin around the dance floor as daughter Hanna, 25, a graduate student at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, zoomed in with her videocam.

Schneider says the decision not to ask Weg to teach in the fall was simply pragmatic. “We don’t have a need for her this coming semester because we have too many teachers. . . . If I had my druthers, I’d keep Ruth on. It’s definitely a financial decision.”

He adds: “It’s not a decision I make with pleasure. It’s a question of finite resources.”

He holds no grudge against Weg, he says, not even for her depiction of him as a “dictator.” Schneider says: “I wasn’t pleased, but Ruth has done it before, so it wasn’t unexpected. And I wasn’t alone (in receiving her barbs). I feel I was in a very select group of people.”

He said he would “rather not comment” on her teaching skills but added: “The teachers who will be teaching (her courses) in the fall, their ratings certainly are not below hers, let’s put it that way.”

According to Schneider, seven professors--including Weg--have been forced to retire since 1975. He said “several” had returned in some capacity.

A week after the dinner, Weg was in her office, re-reading letters from friends who’d been unable to be there. Their sentiments were expressed best, perhaps, by former student Jeffrey R. Lewis, now Republican staff director of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging:

“Frankly, I thought your reirement would only come when the school burned down or hell froze over. . . .”

On the back of Weg’s door hung a green T-shirt that read, “We’ve met the aging and they are us.” This does not keep Weg awake nights. “I would like to work into my 80th year,” she says. “I presume by then my energy level will be somewhat diminished.”

This “so-called retirement,” as she puts it, is only another of the challenges she’s been meeting for most of six decades.

A child of European immigrants, she grew up poor in Manhattan. But she was a scholar and, by the age of 8, had decided on a career in medicine. She hadn’t counted on such realities of the 1940s as discrimination against women applying to medical school.

Frustrated, she did the expected: Soon after graduation from Hunter College with a degree in biology, she married the boyfriend from her teen years and had two children. With her youngest child in nursery school, Weg enrolled at New York University with a more realistic goal: an advanced degree in biology/physiology.

When her first husband accepted a film job in Los Angeles, Weg entered USC, earning a secondary teaching credential. For two years, she taught junior high and high school before returning to USC for a master’s degree in biological sciences and, in 1958, a Ph.D in zoology.

Upon graduation, the biology department appointed her to head a smog research project and teach several courses. Her professional life was in gear; her marriage was disintegrating.

With the 1960s came a second marriage and, in 1965, when Weg was 44, she gave birth to Hanna. It had not been a gallstone, as had been first diagnosed.

An offer that put her on tenure track at the Gerontology Center followed a few years later; Weg was excited about the opportunity to be a pioneer. “Women dug the trenches,” she says. Now that it’s a field of the future, she adds, “The big shots are men.”

One of several professors who did the initial planning for the Leonard Davis School, which opened in 1975, Weg helped develop curricula and for two years was dean of students. Her special interests include sexuality in the later years, appropriate nutrition and promoting positive images of aging.

What kind of message, she wonders, is a school of gerontology sending out by telling her goodby at 70? An “unconscionable” action, Weg charges.

Weg sees herself as a thorn in the administration’s side, a stirrer-upper in a university she views as “hidebound and conservative.” She figures they were happy to have a chance to get rid of her.

Weg has been named professor emeritus which, she points out, “gets me nothing.”

Is there a negative message for older people in Weg’s involuntary retirement? “Not at all,” Schneider says. “I’m in the field because the issue of the rights of older people is very important to me. But if I don’t manage my school in a fiscally responsible manner, we won’t be able to do anything for elderly people. We’ll be closed.

“We treasure Ruth,” he says. “We’d love to keep her.”

Dean Peterson says he is “very hesitant” to discuss the performance of any faculty member. Although Weg has been a “distinguished” professor, he adds that “she often feels that she deserves more than we are able to provide” in the way of support services.

Weg was “one of the pioneers” in gerontology, Peterson says. “She is very well known in the field (and) has contributed a lot. . . .”

However, he adds, his understanding is that past-70 faculty are retained only in “exceptional cases . . . this is not an exceptional case,” one in which the class load could not be taken over by another or the professor is “so exemplary” as to be irreplaceable.

Ruth Weg marches on. “I’m optimistic,” she says. “The future is different for the aging. Even the now is different than it was 10 or 15 years ago.” No one, she says, has yet determined that “beyond 70, people suddenly become sub-human, a new creature who can no longer think, can no longer relate and no longer has human needs.”

She wants society to abandon its stereotyping: “When you learn very young that one stops expanding at 65, you fulfill that prophecy.”

Weg is proud to have been a messenger for positive aging. Still, she acknowledges having made career mistakes: “There are some of us who will not keep our mouths shut. I know how they play the games, but I will not play them.”

She is speaking out, she adds, “for the issue. I’m through being angry. I just feel it should never happen again.”

And she will continue to be a champion for the aging. Wrinkles at 90 are inevitable, Weg will tell you, but diseases like arteriosclerosis, cancer, hypertension and emphysema can be averted or at least delayed. And, she adds, “it’s never too late” to resolve to live a healthfully prudent lifestyle.

“Genes play a role,” she says, but “how we live” can modify genetics. “So much of what we become is what we do to ourselves,” she explains. A dancer as a young woman, she now swims regularly, eats a low-fat diet and is blessed with low blood pressure. She attributes being a creative, energetic 70 to “tremendous motivation and a passion for life.”

As for this idea of retirement, she says, “there are people who have postponed living until they were through working. We need to live while we work.”

Now, she’s planning her professional future. “I’m still voracious about wanting to learn.” She hopes to take part in a federal study on women’s health. She intends to continue spreading the word about “what aging can be like, should be like.”

And retirement? She explains with a smile: “That was just a rumor.”