CSUN Loses Competitive Edge in Recruiting Professors : Universities: The high price of housing is dissuading faculty prospects. As a result, some officials forecast a decline in the quality of instruction.

Luring new professors to Cal State Northridge used to be a cinch. Interview banter swiftly turned to inquiries about the sunny weather, and then they were hooked.

But these days, job-hunting scholars instead invariably ask the question recruiters dread the most: How much do houses near the university cost? The answer sends them packing.

Despite the current real estate slump, the comparatively high cost of buying a house in the Los Angeles Basin, along with modest California State University system salaries and heavy teaching loads, have made wooing faculty to CSUN and other local state universities increasingly difficult during the past five years, administrators say.

“The appeal of living in this climate just isn’t making the difference it once did and . . . it seems to get a little worse every year,” said Keith Evans, chairman of the economics department. “It’s kind of like smog--the word is out.”

Mathematician David Finston, who reluctantly turned down a job at CSUN that would have started this fall, said: “It’s just very disappointing to discover that with the salary they offer, you can’t afford any kind of house really. . . . With more time spent teaching, more time spent commuting, it’s very difficult. I didn’t want those extra time factors to come out of my research and my family life.”

Administrators and faculty alike say looming on the horizon is a serious effect of the recruiting difficulties: a decline in the quality of instruction.

Many departments are filling the gaps with part-time instructors and lecturers, some of whom have yet to finish their doctorates. Administrators are bending rules and altering schedules, partly to allow faculty members to live farther away.

The flexibility has one obvious downside: It limits faculty-student contact at a university whose role is to foster that interaction. But such measures do help persuade top-notch candidates, such as Nancy Page Fernandez, to come to CSUN.

“They’ve been tremendously accommodating,” said Fernandez, a specialist in women’s history who has spent the past year teaching at Brown University in Rhode Island.

“I think departments know that their big problem is competing for women and minority candidates,” she said “ . . . and when you have things like high living costs, that’s something that can hurt a place like Northridge.”

The stark facts are that while the standard entry-level assistant professor salary at CSU campuses increased 85% in the past decade, from $17,940 to $33,192, the average price of a residence in the San Fernando Valley jumped 101%, from $126,610 to $255,425, according to the San Fernando Valley Board of Realtors.

Private industry in the Los Angeles area has also had to cope with that squeeze in its ability to attract workers, but unlike businesses, universities in the CSU system have little control over the salaries they can offer.

State university salaries are standardized around the state, and while the money goes far in places such as Humboldt and Fresno, it is skimpy in most of Southern California and in the San Francisco Bay Area, said Patrick Nichelson, president of the California Faculty Assn. The CFA represents 22,000 full- and part-time faculty members at 20 CSU campuses, including about 1,800 at CSUN.

For their salaries, full-time faculty members at the state universities are expected to teach about four classes a semester, which a recent CSU survey found is only slightly higher than that required at 35 comparable institutions that emphasize teaching over research. But that load is far greater than at research universities, such as UCLA, where faculty may teach only one course per semester and where salaries are typically higher.

Even many of those who eventually agree to come to CSUN soon consider leaving because of the housing costs.

A survey by the CSUN Foundation of 144 faculty and administrators hired since 1985, conducted in the spring, found that 41% were still renting, largely because they could not afford to buy a house. A quarter of those polled who owned houses or condominiums and half of those who didn’t said they were considering leaving Los Angeles because of the housing costs.

Loss of the competitive edge that once was provided by the Southern California climate and lifestyle couldn’t come at a worse time. Nationally, colleges are largely staffed by professors hired in the boom years of the 1960s, most of whom are nearing retirement. And, although estimates vary, most education experts agree that the pool of new Ph.D.’s is likely to continue shrinking.

With an anticipated need for 700 new faculty members in the next decade at the Northridge campus alone and 9,000 systemwide--estimates many consider conservative--administrators say a crisis may be fast approaching, even in disciplines within the liberal arts, which have been accustomed to an oversupply of academics.

“For many years history Ph.D.’s were unable to find jobs, so there’s a reservoir now,” said Tom Bader, chairman of the history department. “But we know that stream is limited. Quality people--right now they’re there, a few years in the future they may not be.”

Where shortages already exist, in mathematics, sciences, computer science, engineering and business, an even bleaker scenario is foreseen, said Judith Hunt, dean of faculty affairs for the CSU system. “I expect, within a five-year period, we’re really going to see the bottom drop out of our ability to recruit,” she said.

Already, teaching positions in several departments have been left unfilled for more than a year as candidate after candidate declined offers. The rejections stir frustration among those involved in the hiring process.

“Last year we made five job offers for an assistant professor’s position at Northridge, and they were all declined. Three of the five spoke specifically of the high cost of living,” said Dean Skovlin, chairman of the chemistry department. “You put in a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of energy and it all comes to naught.”

A systemwide study of faculty recruitment and retention in 1987-88, released to CSU trustees this spring, showed the top reasons candidates declined offers were, in descending order: a better job offer elsewhere, inadequate salary, a heavy teaching load, and high housing costs. But Hunt, who helped analyze the study, said housing costs probably played a role in the top three reasons as well.

According to that study, however, a relatively healthy 84% of the faculty searches at Northridge that year ended in appointments, 88% of which went to the first person offered the job. The statewide average for successfully filling openings was 72%.

Administrators say that the situation has worsened since that data was collected, and Hunt acknowledged that those figures do not include candidates who withdrew before an offer was made, a glitch the study preparers are attempting to address in future recruitment research.

Only a few department chairmen are willing to say they already have had to settle for hiring second best. But all agree that luck and a growing awareness that they must cater to special needs has played a crucial role in being able to continue hiring strong candidates.

“This year, we ended up hiring people that I think we’re going to be happy with, but we might have been happier with others,” said Phil Emig, chairman of CSUN’s mathematics department. “We’ve been lucky, but I don’t want to count on it.”

Three of Emig’s first offers for four openings this fall were rejected, including one extended to Finston, a 36-year-old mathematician with tenure at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Finston yearns to return to Southern California, where he completed his graduate work. But after months of negotiations, he took an associate professorship at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces instead.

There were many factors to ponder: salaries were comparable--about $40,000 a year--but New Mexico State offered him a lighter teaching load, a shorter track to tenure and the opportunity to advise doctoral candidates.

Finally, though, Finston said it came down to trading his 2,400-square-foot house in Virginia for a cramped condominium in the Valley or a long commute to more affordable areas of Los Angeles.

“I agonized over the decision,” he said. “There were people on the Northridge faculty I would really have enjoyed working with.”

Salaries at all CSU campuses are set by the Legislature, based on a formula devised by the California Postsecondary Education Commission, partially taking into account salaries at comparable institutions as well as California’s cost of living.

The faculty union is gearing up for discussions with the education commission this fall, and on the table will be housing allowances, university home loans and salary differentials for the more expensive parts of the state, Nichelson said. But he said alternatives to the standardized salary scale are repulsive to faculty because they fear a hierarchy of campuses will evolve.

“It’s a very sensitive subject,” he said. “It would be uniquely irritating to much of the faculty.”

The CSUN Foundation established a real estate division earlier this summer to address the housing issue, and it plans to develop an information booklet about Valley neighborhoods to use in recruitment. Real estate manager Philip Loughman said he is looking into reducing escrow fees through special arrangements with escrow companies and providing real estate advice through brokers.

Ideas for the future include coordinating an equity partnership program, in which existing faculty and administrators would help their newer counterparts buy houses for a share in the profit several years later, and building a satellite university village.

With little latitude to raise salaries, and no money for housing assistance, departments have turned to offering other enticements, such as moving allowances, reduced teaching loads in early years, guaranteed summer teaching to provide additional income, and early tenure consideration. In the CSU study released this spring, campuses reported they had used some form of incentive in 86% of their appointments,

In some fields where the university faces increased competition from the higher-paying corporate world, salaries that are 22% higher may be offered. Currently those fields include most of the disciplines in the schools of business, engineering and computer science. However, Nichelson said that program is unlikely to be expanded, because it too is unpopular among faculty who are not in those favored subjects.

Aside from the higher salaries in competitive disciplines, which are subsidized by the CSU system, the cost of providing incentives generally comes out of departmental budgets, digging deeply into recruitment and research support and forcing tenured faculty to carry a heavier load.

“It’s potentially a real problem,” said Bader, the history department chairman. “I’m sympathetic to the new professor coming in, they have to develop all new lesson plans, but I’m also sympathetic to the professor who’s been here awhile, who says, ‘Why should I teach more than they do?’ ”

However, to hire Fernandez, the specialist in the history of American women, Bader went all out. She is a promising young academic with a doctorate from UC Irvine and a completed book manuscript--the caliber of candidate CSUN is hard-pressed to attract these days, he said.

The department agreed to schedule her classes midweek for the first year, so she will not have to come to campus every day. She also will teach only three classes this semester and she received a generous two full years of credit toward tenure for previous temporary and part-time teaching jobs.

All of those factors contributed to her decision to come to CSUN, Fernandez said. Her husband, Raul, teaches ethnic studies at UC Irvine and the couple owns a house in Mission Viejo, which would have made a daily commute exhausting. They intend to look for something more convenient to the two campuses this year, she said.

As Valley real estate prices have inflated, CSUN faculty have been forced to live farther and farther afield, as far as the Antelope Valley, to be able to afford houses. This trend, administrators said, puts a strain on the academic community by hindering communication among faculty members, fueling faculty resistance to volunteer for administrative tasks and lessening faculty-student contact.

“There’s a tendency to jump in their cars and get home before the freeway gets crowded,” said Donald J. Cameron, executive assistant to the vice president of academic affairs.

Brian Malec, 47, who is the new chairman of the health science department, said housing costs nearly scared him away from the CSUN job. Now that he is here--with his suburban Chicago house on the market for $55,000--he finds that his plans to rent for six months, then buy, were unrealistic. He said he probably will extend his lease in a Warner Center apartment when it expires in February.

“What I’ve been told is either I continue to live in an apartment or I purchase something where I have to commute an hour and a half,” Malec said. “I just really don’t want to do that.”

Some CSUN administrators believe the situation will get even worse as a result of early retirements and growing competition with more prestigious institutions that face the same problems. Longtime faculty, whose houses have skyrocketed in value, could also add to the shortage if substantial numbers decide to flee with their equity.

“When we came in the ‘60s, we purchased homes within three, four miles of the campus. Now we have property that’s worth a great deal of money,” Cameron said of himself and his contemporaries. “You’re always tempted to move to another university where you could buy the best house in town.”

In exit interviews with the 11 CSUN faculty members who resigned last year, at least six mentioned dissatisfaction with Los Angeles--its housing costs, traffic and general congestion, Cameron said.

Kenneth Modesitt is a nationally known expert in artificial intelligence who left CSUN year before last to become chairman of the computer science department at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. In some ways it just didn’t figure. Modesitt was only 47 at the time, in line for the department chairmanship at CSUN and comfortable in his large Chatsworth house.

But some common as well as shocking experiences caused the Los Angeles lifestyle to lose its allure for Modesitt.

“The pace got to be pretty heavy-duty after a time,” he said. “This is the third time I lived in California in my life, and I just kept seeing the rape of the land and that really disturbed me and my wife.”

But Modesitt also had witnessed a full dose of the urban nightmare: In rapid succession, his pampered sports car was stolen in broad daylight and a month later his best friend was gunned down at the college by a graduate student.

“We began to think maybe life’s too short, maybe other things are more important,” he said. “We felt we needed to maximize our time.”

In the end, the Modesitts were able to buy a Kentucky house twice the size of their Valley house for about two-thirds the price: $140,000 for 5,000 square feet on two hilly acres. Their Chatsworth house sold for $230,000.

ONE WHO CAME

Brian Malec, 47, new chairman of the health science department, said housing costs nearly scared him away from CSUN. With his suburban Chicago house on the market for $55,000, he finds that his plan to rent for six months, then buy, was unrealistic. He said he probably will extend his lease in this cramped Warner Center apartment when it expires in February. “What I’ve been told is either I continue to live in an apartment or I purchase something where I have to commute an hour and a half,” Malec said. “I just really don’t want to do that.”

ONE WHO LEFT

Kenneth Modesitt, a nationally known expert in artificial intelligence, was 47 when he left CSUN in 1988 to become chairman of the computer science department at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. Modesitt, who said “the pace got to be pretty heavy-duty after a time,” left behind some personal urban nightmares when he bought this Kentucky house, which is twice the size of his Chatsworth house for about two-thirds the price.

ONE WHO DIDN’T COME

David Finston, a 36-year-old mathematician with tenure at Virginia Commonwealth University, wanted to come to CSUN this fall, but after months of negotiations, he took an associate professorship at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces instead. “It’s just very disappointing to discover that with the salary they offer, you can’t afford any kind of house really. . . . With more time spent teaching, more time spent commuting, it’s very difficult. I didn’t want those extra time factors to come out of my research and my family life.”