At Indiana University, I'm Emeritus but not "Emeritus"

When old professors step down, they are called “emeritus professors”.¹ I retired from Indiana University in 2021, but I’m not emeritus. My book, Games and Information, has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese (twice). Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Oxford, and Tokyo considered me worthy of holding visiting positions. I’m googleable. So I’m pretty good. But even though it was given to all previous retirees in my department from time immemorial, I didn’t qualify for emeritus status.²

The label, “Emeritus Professor,” really just means “Retired Professor”. Cato the Elder said, “I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one,” and so it is here—I kind of enjoy being denied emeritus status. Or, as Emilio Segre said of the Nobel Prize, “Some winners confer honor on the Prize, whereas others derive honor from it.” I didn’t complain about not being emeritus when I retired. I figured I’d wait and bring the denial up at some apt moment. I’d just finished one in a series of fights with the Administration³, and even in retirement I might fight again and need an issue with which to embarass an evil Provost. Don’t fire off all your rhetorical ammo at once— save some for the next attack.⁴

In 2025, my hand was forced. The University started denying access to online journal subscriptions to faculty who were retired but not emeritus. I‘m still doing scholarly research, and I wanted access to the journals. So I applied formally for emeritus status. After several months it was rejected. I told people, and a member of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education heard and told the faculty senate that it was odd that Eric Rasmusen wasn’t emeritus. Thus, the denial is public now and thought I’d Substack it.

The story goes back to 2019, when a 300,000-follower Twitter account for stories of bad boyfriends, @SheRatesDogs, posted a screenshot of a November 19 tweet of mine in which I quoted

“Geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness,”

from an article titled,“Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably”.⁵ The SheRatesDogs tweet received 30,000 “likes” and the Indiana University Administration was deluged with complaints about the abominable Professor Rasmusen.

Provost Lauren Robel, boss of the main IU campus, and Idalene Kesner, Dean of the School of Business, were appalled. How could anyone say that women were intolerant of unorthodoxy, destroying academia with their bland conformity, and desire for everyone to follow the party line and not create trouble? Lauren was actually waiting for a chance to go after me— she told me she’d been building up a dossier of conservative things I’d said.⁶ Both women were professors with weak research output who had risen high in Administration. They were perfect examples of the “head girl” types that the author of "Women are destroying academia” talked about (think Hermione in Harry Potter): smart but utterly conventional girls who follow the Establishment line of strict orthodoxy and care about scholarly output only as a way to please the headmaster. They sent memos to thousands of people calling me reprehensible, sexist, racist, homophobic, intolerant of women, disrespectful to women, intolerant of racial diversity, unchristian, vile, stupid, bigoted, and loathsome (see Lauren’s statement, and Idie’s, if you want to see even more adjectives ).⁷

The Provost was one of the top two recommended by the faculty committee the next year to be President of the IU state university system, but she was rejected. It is rumored that she was rejected because of her over-the-top attack on me— administrators can be evil, but they’re not supposed to be emotional. Anyway, I was planning to retire anyway, though, and so I did.⁸

In 2025, though, my access to online scholarly journals was terminated because I didn’t have emeritus status. Unlike pretty much every other retired professor, I’m actually still doing research, with my Harvard Law friend Mark Ramseyer.⁹ But when I asked 5 years later for emeritus status, here is the email I received:

In 2026, however, at a faculty senate meeting, one of the Indiana Commissioners for Higher Education brought up my lack of emeritus status. The new Provost chairing that meeting, David Reingold, said this was the first he’d heard of me being turned down, in contradiction to Dr. Li’s claim in the letter that “the campus” had blocked me. So who turned down my request? Dan Li? The Dean? Some Assistant Provost? Jeffrey Prince, the Chair of my department in 2025? The “timing” excuse is an obvious lie. It’s quite easy to see whether someone deserves emeritus status; look at their curriculum vitae.

My friends tell me this will be fixed if I go to the Provost or Board of Trustees. Very likely correct. Universities are moving out the Woke Era, and the new leadership is different. But I want to tell the story. I want the people of Indiana to see the corruption of Indiana University. Indiana University has new leadership. 2019’s President McRobbie, Provost Robel, and Dean Kesner have all left. But when the low-level administrators are corrupt, it’s hard for people at the top even to know what is being done in their names. Helen Andrews’s new term “Race Communists” is appropriate for those deans and deanlets and deputy vice presidents. Many, many people need to be fired. That’s not easy to do unless one can expose the extent of the rot. Indeed, one might make a case for firing everyone, every professor and administator (the janitors are okay), and starting afresh.

Provost Reingold had no idea I’d been refused emeritus status. He has the authority, but unless his subordinates tell him about a situation, he doesn’t have the power.¹⁰ The citizens of Indiana, a very conservative state, are ultimately in charge of Indiana University. The Trustees have all been chosen by Republican governors. But it is hard to take back the university from the hard left, unless those in authority are willing to be brave and do something which in a private company is routine but in a university, rare¹¹— fire people, very publicly, for incompetence.

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Footnotes

1. The nominative plural of the Latin adjective “emeritus” is “emeritae” (for women) or “emeriti” (for men or a mixed-sex group). And perhaps the accusative is proper here, which would be ”emeritas” or “emeritos”. The question is an interesting technical one. But what people would actually say in English is “emeritus professors”, so let’s go with descriptive grammar and leave prescriptive for discussion in the comments.

A tip, though: it really shows boobosity to say, “Let me introduce Susan Smith, Emeritus Professor of English”. You should say “Let me introduce Susan Smith, Professor Emerita of English”. This is so even though “professor” is masculine noun. The intricacies of propriety are fascination— and do have a logic. Here, clearly it just sounds better off the tongue to say “professor emerita”.

This is a long footnote, but fewer footnotes, fewer interruptions. One more item. I put the word “EMERITUS” on the board and asked my seventh graders to find any English words they could. I’m trying to teach them not to give up when see a fancy word, but to make educated guesses as to their meaning. I was hoping for “merit”, of course, but I got “me”, “I”, and “us”. Perfect for a grammar review. (Plus, they missed “it”.)

2. You can take a look at my web page, my curriculum vitae, and my “Abstract of published papers”. Decide for yourself whether I’m in the bottom 10% at Indiana or not. You can check my colleagues in the Business Economics and Public Policy department too.

3. 1995: I was initially turned down for tenure, because of high-level politics at the Trustee level, I think. (2002— someone said I was the easiest promotion to full professor ever, though). 2003: On a blog I said homosexuals should not be schoolteachers,and the President publicly condemned me. 2015 or so: My department chairman appointed an assistant professor after refusing to hold a departmental vote he knew he’d lose, and the Dean supported him. 2019: I quote a sentence on psychological traits and the maleness of geniuses and the Provost publicly condemns me. Maybe there are more. I should write up the stories. See “Your daily reminder that professors being cowards is a ~10x bigger problem than actual censorship is” (2026). I should have gotten in trouble more, like Richard Herrnstein:

For Dick, being a tenured professor at Harvard was not just the perfect job, but the perfect way to live his life. It was too good to be true; there had to be a catch. What's my part of the bargain? he had asked himself. "And I figured it out," he said, looking at me with that benign, gentle half-smile of his. "You have to tell the truth."

4. My best-known scholarship is in the field of “game theory”, strategic planning. See my vitae. Game theory gets very mathematical, but it has simple applications like the question of how much ammunition to fire now and how much to save for later— which actually is a mathematical question, but one that translates to simple adages like “Save some for later.”

5. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, which mean pretty much what a nonscientist would think, are two of the “Big Five” personality traits, standard in psychology. Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Openness are the other. (It’s similar to Myers-Briggs, but academics like the Big Five better). I tweeted the genius because I thought it was interesting and plausible, but I wondered if it was true. Come to to think of it, I don’t remember any of the hundreds (thousands?) of responses saying it was true or false; the hostiles ones just said it was evil to say it regardless of whether it was true.

6. To her great credit, she phoned me up to read me her press release calling me racist, etc. It wasn’t a very good dossier she had on me. She missed some things I wrote that would have been much more offensive to liberals than what she had. And she attributed to me certain conservative opinions that I did not believe, due to her careless reading of what I’d written. Sooner or later she would have gone after me. I think I irritated her in the faculty senate by being one of the small (one or two or five) minority of professors who voted against silly motions. I’m glad she didn’t have Stalin’s powers. She thinks I am a bad man.

7. I published a fisking reply going over the Provost’s false claims one by one, and an article titled “Fire Professor Eric Rasmusen? Or Fire Provost Lauren Robel Instead?”.

8. Why did I retire? I mean to write a whole Substack on that. I could afford to. I was tired of economics and wanted to retire while I still had time to start something else (like Substacking). I thought I wasn’t good enough to keep publishing in the top journals and I was frustrated with my departmental colleagues’ lack of interest in discussing ideas instead of ephemera. Possibly I was just lazy (well, I am lazy, but I hoped retirement might make me work harder).

9. Professor Ramseyer and I are currently working on a data-driven study of immigration and crime in Japan. We don’t know our conclusions yet.

Here are some things I published since retirement. Not very important, but you can see that I’ve kept on using my brain and pen. Other things I’ve worked on:

1. J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric Rasmusen, “Ostracism in Japan,” Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 19(2): 326-347 (August 2024) https://doi.org/10.1017/asjcl.2024.13. Groups ostracize members. Sometimes they do so to enforce welfare-maximizing norms, but other times ostracism reduces welfare. Japanese villages have long used ostracism as a tool for conformity, and the targets have sometimes sued in response. The cases that have reached the courts disproportionately involve welfare-reducing behavior by the community; for example, ostracism against targets who report corruption. The targets usually win the civil cases against ostracizers and prosecutors usually win the criminal cases. Yet the targets seem not to have sued for financial or injunctive relief, and the prosecutors seem not to have pushed for prison terms. Instead, they have used the courts for an informational end: to certify and publicize innocence. This end is of minor importance in normal litigation, but crucial for ostracism, as we explain using a formal model. We use case examples and the model to explore the factors that cause disputes to lead to ostracism and ostracisms to lead to litigation. https://doi.org/10.1017/asjcl.2024.13.

2. “Brief of Amicus Curiae Eric Rasmusen in Support of Respondents in 22-555 and Petitioners in 22-277, NetChoice v. Paxton,” United States Supreme Court (2024). The large social media platforms are natural monopolies and common carriers, which should be regulated to forbid discrimination on the basis of political position. Texas and Florida did this, and their laws did not violate the 1st Amendment rights of the Tech Lords: they protected the speech of the millions of users. Standard economic theory tells us that natural monopolies should be regulated, and Twitter is more like the phone company than a magazine. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-555/298407/20240123110046414_Rasmusen%20Amicus%20Brief%20Filing.pdf.

3. Eric Rasmusen, “Amicus Curiae Brief of Eric Rasmusen in Support of Appellants, Members of the Licensing Board v. Planned Parenthood,” Indiana Supreme Court. Plaintiff was granted a preliminary injunction against the new Indiana abortion law. In the appeal, I argue that the trial judge did not adequately attempt to balance the equities, and so should be granted no deference. https://www.rasmusen.org/published/2022_abortion_amicus_brief.pdf.

4. Eric Rasmusen, “Review of Mario Ferrero: The Political Economy of Indo-European Polytheism: How to Deal with Too Many Gods“ Journal of Economics(Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie), (forthcoming). https://www.rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen-2023-polytheism_Zeitschrift.pdf.

10. Jean Tirole won a Nobel Prize partly for this idea. The boss has the authority But he doesn’t have very good information. His subordinates have very good information. They’re in touch with operations. But they have no authority. Thus, they may have more power. Information is power. A talented boss, however, will figure out how to get the subordinates to reveal their information. This is game theory again— very practical stuff.

11. To be sure, universities often fire someone for saying the wrong thing, but not for doing the wrong thing.