CAMPUS & CAREERS GUIDE : Ranks of Academia Growing Gray : Aging: Early in the next century, more than half of the full-time college professors may be over 60, raising fears that faculty members will stay past their prime.

In the world of academia, salt and pepper is turning to gray.

Walk through most any college campus in the country and one thing is very clear: The professors are growing older. And the prognosis is that many will become senior citizens before the curve begins to turn in a younger direction.

By early next century, as many as half the full-time college professors in the United States will be over the age of 60, according to one estimate.

An example closer to home: The giant Cal State system, with more than 10,000 faculty members, has 1,000 more teachers over 50 today than it had 10 years ago. The numbers would have been even more dramatic were it not for the large number of early retirements over the last five years.

These are the professors who were hired as young men and women in the educational boom decades of the 1950s and ‘60s and are now approaching the end of their careers.

And with the graying of academia, new issues are coming into focus that have long-term ramifications for the nation’s colleges and universities.

“The faculty might look quite different in the new century than it does today,” said Bob Hockstein, assistant to the president of the Carnegie Foundation, which tracks such issues.

What happens within the next decade will determine whether there will be a glut of overly senior--and expensive--professors in the college ranks. And if they leave, how colleges decide to replace them will determine the kind of professors who will be teaching future generations of students.

Because of a 7-year-old federal law that became applicable to academia in 1994, mandatory retirement for college professors is illegal. So the way is clear for college instructors to stay on well past their prime. “Dying with their boots on,” is a frequently heard phrase in academia these days.

Although some studies indicate that the number of people who overstay their welcome is relatively small, experts say there is still cause for concern.

Jack Schuster of the Claremont Graduate School of Education--a national authority on the country’s academic labor force--said serious problems are almost certain to arise when faculty members refuse to admit they are well past their prime. And in some of those cases, they may well be teachers who have been ranked among the best. “There are going to be faculty members who stay longer than they should, who have slowed down, who may still be competent but are not terribly productive as teachers or scholars,” he said. “It’s going to generate situations that are really quite nasty and degenerate into litigation.”

Administrators worry that an entrenched and older faculty will make it more difficult to enlarge staffs in subject areas that have become more popular.

“They present the dilemma of not being able to move into the disciplines that interest students,” said Noel Grogan, the senior director of human resources for the Cal State system. “It makes it harder to move from Sanskrit to computer science.”

There also is an oft-cited fear that as professors grow older, they will not keep up with changes in their fields. That is particularly true in the physical sciences, where the pace of research is brisk.

Theodore Mitchell, the dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Systems, said colleges may have to lure professors out of the classroom by making retirement more palatable, either with perks or by allowing them to teach part time.

That has already happened in the UC system, where nearly 2,000 professors quit their jobs in recent years because of lucrative early retirement packages the university offered in response to budget cuts.

Many of those professors have continued to teach part-time, alleviating a staffing crisis that could have diminished the number and kinds of courses the UC system offered.

One of those who continues to work is highly regarded physicist Leon Knopoff, who retired from UCLA last year at 69 but still teaches and conducts research.

“If anything, I’m working harder at contributing to my field than before I retired,” he said. “I’m vigorous today and taking advantage of the resources I didn’t have 30 years ago.”

To be sure, there are those who contend that an older, or even elderly, professor adds a great deal to the mix of teachers, leading younger colleagues by example. And in some cases--notably in the arts and literature--the best teaching often comes in the later years. “Aging doesn’t necessarily decrease intellect or even teaching powers,” said Sheldon Rothblatt, director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. “I think the notion that aging means they’ve become deadwood is nonsense.”

As America’s faculties age, many contend that this is a good time to rejuvenate the country’s colleges by hiring new and younger teachers. In recent years, teaching opportunities have been few, as faculty members stayed put and college enrollment stayed steady.

But now, there is likely to be an exodus of aged faculty members in the next 20 years, and colleges are facing an explosion in enrollment that will create teaching opportunities for those who might otherwise have been shut out.

“The fact is that very few (professors) have been hired in the last five years,” said Morton Schapiro, dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at USC. “It’s been painful to see how difficult the job market situation has been.”

The glut of older professors has made it difficult for young scholars with less than superstar status to break into many college faculties. “The market is on the whole against people unless they’re No. 1 in their discipline,” said UC Berkeley’s Rothblatt. “Now, you’ve got to be exceptional.”

If, indeed, more faculty are going to be hired, the question becomes: who should get the jobs? The answer will probably boil down to the economics of higher education.

Because of budget considerations, many colleges and universities have turned to part-time faculty members to fill teaching gaps.

Not only are they cheaper, they are also expendable as colleges’ needs dictate. But the trade-off is that they do not have to perform some of the traditional duties of faculty members, such as keeping office hours and advising students. The result: more work for full-time faculty members, or, in some cases, students forced to do without services that have long been deemed an integral part of college life.

There is a debate over how to fill the void created when today’s aged professors depart.

Harold Goldwhite of the Cal State Academic Senate said colleges should give priority to hiring those part-timers who are in the middle of their careers, and until now have been shut out of the possibility of a tenured position.

Replacing the retirees entirely with young candidates, he said, would only re-create an eventual glut of older teachers.