ust two months before his death in January 2024, Harvard Law professor Charles A. Fried sat before a wall of blackboards, teaching his final class.

When colleagues and former students gathered to wish him well, he thanked them, then added: “As nice as this has been, I did prepare a lesson for today that I do intend on teaching.” A pragmatic nod, perhaps, to the enduring primacy of Fried’s work and purpose.

Lifelong academics like Fried are becoming increasingly common. Between 2003 and 2023, the share of Harvard professors retiring after age 75 rose from 5 percent to 44 percent. In 2023, 37 percent of Harvard’s tenured faculty were aged 65 or above.

In a way, this growing population of older university faculty invites a particularly personal, sensitive dimension to academia. How, for instance, does aging feel in an academic environment? What do senior, tenured faculty think about their own mortality in the context of their work?

We interviewed six Harvard professors across a variety of fields, from medicine and chemistry to economics and history — inviting them to reflect on their mortality, their academic and personal lives, and the legacies they hope to leave behind.

Reflection

A pediatric intensive care specialist by practice for more than 35 years, Harvard Medical School professor Robert D. Truog is no stranger to matters of death.

“The tragedy of mortality has always been very palpable,” he says.

At HMS, Truog teaches legal medicine, anesthesiology, and pediatrics, and directs the Center for Bioethics. Much of Truog’s academic writing draws on those experiences. His research examines the ethics of brain death and its relationship to organ transplantation — where to draw the line between biological death and the death of consciousness. He has also worked with the World Brain Death Project to define the neurological criteria for death itself.

“Thinking about those questions and dealing with the reality of those situations has been maybe the most impactful part of my whole career,” he says.

In his clinical work, Truog has spent decades confronting life’s final moments. “To be at the bedside of people when they are dying, to be there in those moments, to be making the decisions about, do we try to resuscitate this person, or do we let them die?” Truog says. “Those have just been part of my core being.”

Deferral

When I arrived at Harvard, I was by far the youngest faculty member,” says Elias J. Corey, a professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “Now I am by far the oldest, and everyone who was in the Department at Harvard when I arrived is gone.”

Corey came to Harvard in 1959. Now 97, he has retired from teaching but continues to conduct research. In the living room of his home near the Quad, pieces of molecular models lie scattered across the coffee table beside copies of his scientific publications.

He shakes his head when we bring up death.

“I don’t even think about it,” he says. “I don’t want to think about it.”

Instead, Corey chooses to live “one day at a time,” investing his energy in research and personal study. “I like to use my time to learn and generate new ideas and carry out research that turns out to be impactful and that empowers my fellow scientists,” he says.

Other professors share similar sentiments.

“It’s a part of existence for me,” says John Womack Jr. ’59, an emeritus professor of Latin American history and economics, referring to his work. Academia, he tells us, has long been the central pillar of his life — at times even superseding relationships with his family.

Now retired, he devotes himself to scholarship more than ever.

“I would like to be young enough and free enough and, hell, finished enough that I could go visit some places that I’ve never been,” Womack says.

“But I’m 88 and I’ve got a lot of work I want to finish, and so I don’t have time for much else,” he adds. “And so I read a lot and pay attention to what’s going on, but I don’t find much that I can devote myself to.”

Leaving Something Behind

Despite decades devoted to scholarship, the professors we spoke with avoided framing their careers in terms of legacy.

In fact, when we raise the question with Claudia D. Goldin, professor of economics and 2023 Nobel laureate in economics, she interrupts. “You just leave something behind. You don’t leave a legacy.”

“That’s not part of my way of thinking.” Corey says to us when we ask.

After lifetimes of discovery and achievement — Nobel prizes, Harvard professorships, and influential roles in government and academia — we expected these scholars to speak in terms of lasting impact and recognition.

Yet only Christine M. Korsgaard, professor emeritus in Harvard’s philosophy department, hints at a kind of enduring impact, and even then not in terms of her own status or reputation.

“You should try to think and write as if people were going to read it for centuries. But not because you think they are, because that’s how to do it well,” she writes in an email.

None of them say they entered academia seeking prestige. If anything, some even describe their careers as accidental. Richard J. Zeckhauser ’62, a political economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, recalls applying to Harvard’s law and business schools, convinced he was going to be a businessman, before an advisor suggested pursuing a Ph.D. in economics. “I never really planned ahead very well,” he says.

Instead of worrying about legacy, what many professors seem to fear is experiencing intellectual death: the loss of purpose that comes from losing the ability to think, research, or contribute.

“I do think about the idea of ‘When will I no longer be able to produce original ideas?’” Zeckhauser says. “Because that’s what I’m supposed to do and enjoy the most.”

Meaning of Life

Research, however, is not the only source of meaning in these professors’ lives. If scholarship is not everything, what else matters? Here, their answers began to diverge.

Truog offers one framework. Maybe, he says, “it’s not measured in terms of accomplishment. It’s measured in terms of what you’ve been able to give to others.”

For some, that giving takes the form of mentorship.

Much of Zeckhauser’s fulfillment comes not from publications or professional recognition but from serving as a guide for students. Among them is Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, with whom he still keeps in regular contact.

Meanwhile, Korsgaard takes a holistic view of her own purpose. “Our lives get meaning from the sense that we are making a valuable contribution to that larger human story,” she writes. Teaching graduate students moral philosophy, she says, means grappling with what it means to act rightly — and why it matters to be a good person.

Ultimately, she writes, “I think it is being a good person that, more than anything else, makes you free.”

Meanwhile, Zeckhauser points to the importance of happiness and satisfaction — “which is to some extent thinking you’ve contributed to society.”

Family matters as well, he says: “You have to be fortunate with your family. I think it’s very important — did you end up marrying a person whom you respect and love?” Raising children and grandchildren, he adds, has helped him “think more clearly about what’s important in life.”

When we ask Corey about the meaning of his life, he rises from the couch and walks to the fireplace mantel. He hands us a framed photograph of him and his wife, who died last year, taken at the 2001 Nobel laureates’ reunion in Stockholm.

Then he points to another photo: his wife in an orange-red polo, their three children smiling beside her. “We lived in this house for almost 70 years,” he says, glancing around the living room. “Our kids grew up here.”

The End

To some professors, intellectual inquiry seems infinite.

Though Korsgaard is formally retired, she writes, “I hope to keep writing philosophy forever. I’m hardly going to run out of questions, am I?”

For Goldin, the value of academia lies precisely in its pursuit. Research, she explains, “is intrinsic in the sense of someone who is trying to find the truth about something.”

Yet that pursuit does not translate into a desire for immortality. The six professors tell us that their commitment to scholarship comes not from a belief that they will ever complete their work, but rather from recognizing that they contribute only one small part to a much larger body of knowledge.

“Sometimes I’ve thought that if I lived forever, I might actually be able to figure something out,” Korsgaard writes. “But the fact is, no one has any idea how that will turn out, and it doesn’t matter.”

Truog wouldn’t wish for immortality, or even a “drastically prolonged” life. “It seems to me to be a denial of what is a deeply universal phenomenon of birth and death,” he says.

But what to think of the inevitable end?

It’s the “right thing,” Truog says. “When it comes, it will be the right thing. It makes room for that next generation. It creates space on the planet for others. It’s what should happen, and will happen.”

— Magazine writer Adrienne Fung can be reached at [email protected].

— Magazine writer Anne Sun can be reached at [email protected].