CSUN STAFF GROWING OLD; 25% OF PROFESSORS ON VERGE OF RETIREMENT.

Byline: Robert Monroe Staff Writer

Call it the graying of CSUN.

The university expects as much as 25 percent of its 829 full-time professors to retire in the next four years, at the same time that the campus reaches record enrollment.

One-third of CSUN's full-time professors are at least 60 and as many as 50 of them could retire every year for the next three or four years, said CSUN Associate Vice President of Faculty Affairs John Mason.

Making matters worse, the university must fill 83 open positions. Of those, 32 are spots for which CSUN could not find the right candidates last year.

``It's not just us,'' Mason said. ``It's the whole country, so everyone is looking at the same time.''

The nationwide problem - one-third of all professors polled in a recent UCLA study were over 55 - raises the question about quality of education.

``Who's going to teach those students,'' said Pat Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose. Callan said technology might compensate for lower student/teacher ratios, and universities can attract candidates by bumping up salaries to competitive levels, but first schools have to recognize what they're facing.

``There's no one-size-fits-all solution to replacing faculty,'' he said. ``With some planning we can patch together solutions that can provide these kids with a high-quality education.''

Linda Sax, associate director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, said older professors don't necessarily mean more retiring professors since mandatory retirement ages were abolished in 1994. But campuses of old professors with hidebound teaching methods and part-time lecturers teaching at multiple colleges could work against students.

``Large numbers of students are being connected with faculty who may not be there the next term and that's to the disadvantage of the students,'' Sax said.

The incentives for professors to retire are great: Legislation signed Oct. 4 by Gov. Gray Davis gives professors more incentive to retire by lowering the age to 55 at which public employees can reach the highest scale of pension payments.

Also, an early retirement program allows professors in state universities to teach part-time for five years while collecting part of their pensions. The threat of its discontinuance might push educators to retire now while it's still available.

A hiring binge at Cal State campuses and the addition of two new University of California campuses in 1965 created spots for thousands of teaching positions. During the recession of the early 1990s, state universities persuaded many 20- and 25-year veterans to accept retirement packages.

CSUN Associate Vice President of Faculty Affairs John Mason said he can recall years when no one was hired - and he worries about the future.

``I'm a little nervous and one of the reasons I'm a little nervous is because it's so much work to hire people,'' he said.

CSUN Faculty Senate President Al Kinderman said those in the middle of their careers are increasingly scarce.

``What's going to happen is we'll have a lot of retiring faculty, a lot of young faculty and not much in between,'' Kinderman said.

Pat Nichelson, a former president of the California Faculty Association and a CSUN theology professor, said several colleagues have taken early retirement packages.

``For some people they may just decide to do it now rather than in a few years,'' he said. ``It's a generation that's going out that wasn't able to nurture a generation behind it. What that impact will be for students is hard to say.''

Two years ago, CSUN leaders pledged to offer full-time positions, which can pay up to $70,000 a year, to attract a new generation. But part-timers still made up nearly half the CSUN staff last year and they bring another potential with them, said Nichelson. It seems responsible for turning young doctorate holders away from teaching careers in favor of more lucrative and stable jobs.

``I think there are many talented young people who have all these academic credentials who get tired of banging their head on a wall and go somewhere else,'' he said.