Laurel Weldon, dean of Simon Fraser University’s faculty of arts and social sciences, and Dr. Gloria Gutman at the April 22 reception celebrating the naming of the university’s Gerontology Research Centre in honour of Gutman’s service and lasting impact. The event was held at SFU Harbour Centre. (photo from SFU)
Simon Fraser University has honoured Dr. Gloria Gutman, a pioneer in the field of aging, by naming the Gerontology Research Centre, which she founded, after her. They have also bestowed upon her an honorary doctor of laws.
This is not the first recognition of Gutman’s work in her areas of research, which include, but are not limited to, seniors housing, health promotion, elder abuse, LGBTQ+ aging, age-friendly hospitals and communities, and advance care planning. She has been awarded the Order of British Columbia and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and been appointed to the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honour.
“I really feel grateful for the opportunities that SFU gave me, and the honorary degree in particular – universities very seldom honour their own,” she told the Independent in a recent interview. “Usually, if you look at who are the recipients of honorary degrees, it’s people from elsewhere.”
Almost as a proof of point, Gutman received an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Ontario in 2010 for her work “as an international authority in the field of gerontology.”
Part of the appreciation for such awards is that they highlight her field, said Gutman. “That’s the important thing for me, that it puts the word gerontology, or aging, or the concepts that I’ve worked on, or areas that I’ve tried to work on, brings them forward, gives them visibility. So, the honours are really a way of continuing to promote the organizations, the academic units, that I work for.”
Laurel Weldon, the dean of SFU’s faculty of arts and social sciences, which includes the gerontology department, has known Gutman for a few years. “But,” Weldon told the JI, “I first heard her on the radio being interviewed about Martha Stewart’s cover for Sports Illustrated!”
In 2023, Stewart became the oldest model to be featured on the magazine’s cover. In her convocation address last month, Gutman expressed the goal of a future of “aging without ageism,” which “involves making assumptions about a person’s abilities, values or role in society based solely on age rather than their individual characteristics.”
While their research areas overlap, including on gender and age discrimination, Weldon said, “the real way I’ve got to know Gloria has been as dean of the faculty in which she is a very active retired faculty member, applying for grants, running conferences, giving me her input and background on the department of gerontology and the Gerontology Research Centre.”
By the time the JI reached Gutman for a 10 a.m. Zoom interview on June 18, she had already been a panelist in an international webinar on witchcraft (in the larger context of financial abuse of the elderly) and attended a webinar on the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. It was a typical start to the day for Gutman, who was heading to a FIFA watch party in the afternoon.
“I’m essentially a curious person, and I attend a lot of different webinars, some where I know nothing about the topic, mainly because I want to learn,” she said.
In her convocation address, Gutman talked about “not being afraid to undertake work in an area or sub-area that is unfamiliar. In my case, it was being invited to lead a research project on seniors’ housing. When offered that job,” she recalled, “I blurted out, ‘But I don’t know anything about seniors’ housing.’ I was told, ‘You have 90 days to learn.’ I read everything I could lay my hands on and became a 90-day expert.”
After having been invited to the FIFA watch party, Gutman told the JI she used AI to learn all the fundamentals of soccer and how the World Cup worked – she became “a three-day expert,” she said.
In her knowledge on aging, however, Gutman is a decades-long expert, though she attributes her career choice to happenstance.
“It was serendipitous,” she said of becoming a gerontologist.
Gutman lived in Calgary for some of her childhood – though she was born in Seattle – and her late husband, Gary, was from the city. Because of these connections, she did part of her post-secondary schooling there, at the University of Alberta’s satellite campus (which became the University of Calgary in 1966).
Gutman, who had majored in English and psychology at the University of British Columbia, said she went to the U of A English department and was told, basically, “Why don’t you go home and have a baby?” (She and her husband would have three children.) Her experience with the psychology department went differently.
Faculty member Dr. A.E. David Schonfield, a pioneering figure in gerontology and the psychology of aging, suggested Gutman do a master’s in the field – and she did.
After about five years in Calgary, the Gutmans moved back to Vancouver. Her husband continued to build his practice as an accountant and Gutman started her PhD at UBC. “At that time, nobody was doing aging, so I had to do it in social and developmental psychology,” which then covered ages 0 to 14, she said.
After finishing her PhD in 1971, Gutman taught Psych 100 for 10 years at UBC. She developed the first psychology of aging course ever to be taught in the province. She was a part-time assistant professor when she asked her dean for a full-time position. He refused, describing the study of aging as a “flash-in-the-pan phenomena.”
“The next day, I called out to SFU, made an appointment with Jack Blaney, who, at the time, was the dean of continuing education, and I went to see him,” said Gutman. “I was called the coordinator of programs in aging, but my first job was to create a program to coordinate.”
While still at UBC, Gutman had written a proposal for the development of a research centre on aging in response to a call for proposals from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The competition was delayed, and there was a second call for proposals when she was at SFU, so she wrote one – the Gerontology Research Centre at SFU was established in 1982.
Gutman also wanted to create a gerontology department, and she did. It began as a post-baccalaureate diploma, grew to a master’s program, followed by the addition of a minor and a PhD.
“I would define myself as an academic entrepreneur,” Gutman told the JI. “The people that have developed research centres, or who have developed a teaching program, tend to have similar kinds of characteristics and part of it is curiosity. And the other is identifying a gap and leaping in.”
And yet another, she identified in her convocation address, is: “You can’t be a one-person show if what you develop is to be sustainable. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a team to develop successful academic and research units.”
Despite all her successes, Gutman had to retire after she turned 65, as mandatory retirement was a widespread policy in that era. She was director of the GRC and the department of gerontology until 2005.
“The way the Gerontology Research Centre is structured is that it has a director and it has research associates, so I stepped down as director, but could still be a research associate of the centre,” she explained. “And, having been a full professor in the department, could be a professor emeritus…. But I never used the term for the first 10 years after age 65, because people roll their eyes sometimes when they see it. They figure you’re passé.”
When Gutman wrote the proposals for the research centre, she identified three areas in which it would specialize.
“The first one was housing for the elderly, which is what I had started and where I became the expert at UBC,” she said. “The second one, I looked around the campus, [and asked] who’s doing what? And there was a professor in the criminology department who was interested in crime and victimization of the elderly … and the third one, there was a professor in sociology who was interested in changing demography and lifestyles.
“We started out with those three and, gradually, then I added health and aging when I realized I was a health promoter,” said Gutman. “And, subsequently, I got interested in technology, so we added a fifth theme to the research centre, which was gerontechnology.”
Currently, Gutman – who has held many high-profile roles in national and international associations – is the vice-president of the International Society for Gerontechnology, is on International Longevity Centre-Canada advisory committees and is a member of the Research Management Committee of the Canadian Frailty Network. She has a long list of monographs, articles and books.
“What I said in my convocation address,” she said, “is there are the people that retire and are happy to sit in their rocking chair; the people who unretire themselves and go back to work, but in something different; and then there’s the never-retires.”
She’s in that last category. “It’s still interesting,” she says of her work, “and these issues come up, new issues, every day.”
That said, she makes sure she leaves the house every day. Up at 6 a.m., she usually shuts off the computer by 3 p.m. and goes out to do her 6,000 steps. She watches TV in the evenings. Her six grandchildren, ranging in age from single digit to university-age, don’t live in the city, “so I don’t have access to grandkids here,” she said.
In the Jewish community, Gutman (née Chertkow) was on the original advisory committee to develop the L’Chaim Adult Day Centre. She noted that Leah Deslauriers, who heads the program, is an SFU gerontology grad.
Gutman’s father attended L’Chaim, which brought Gutman back onto the board. “And,” she said, “when my husband [was] in his last years, that was a lifeline for me, as I cared for him at home in his last six months. It was one of the few places that I felt it was safe to leave him…. It gave me respite.”
She also has been on the board of the Louis Brier Home and Hospital, consulted with JQT (Jewish Queer Trans) Vancouver and other organizations. Notably, B’nai B’rith was a family endeavour of sorts.
Weldon, the SFU dean, describes Gutman as “an impressive, energetic, brilliant person. She is great at identifying important research topics and themes and has incredible persistence.”
“I am so happy that SFU was able to recognize and elevate Gloria Gutman in this way,” said Weldon. “It is so well deserved and, in this day and age, it’s wonderful to see someone who has worked hard, been a conscientious contributor and mentor, and who has done so much for her students, colleagues, the university, discipline and community, be recognized.”