Intellectual Property
Henry Koffler was still a young microbiology professor when he started observing the academic retirement ritual. Even then he didn’t like what he saw: faculty members being nudged out the door, regardless of abilities, just because they had turned 65.
Later in his career, as a college administrator, he came to understand the need for young blood to keep any organization energized, but he still worried about the retirement process. Where did these people go?
“It turned out that in most organizations, when you retire, you are basically through,” he said. “You are ‘put on the shelf,’ or ‘put out to pasture.’ It seemed to me that we were losing the most experienced and hopefully the wisest segment of our population.”
Koffler, 74, was sitting in the conference room of an office suite cluttered with blueprints, scale models and marketing brochures--the tools for his new career. Koffler, president emeritus of the University of Arizona, is developing an ambitious retirement community based not only on age but on brainpower.
“We’re calling it ‘de-retirement,’ ” said Lloyd Lewis, 69, president of US Retirement Communities Inc. in Philadelphia. A veteran in this field, he has been working with Koffler for two years on their ideal retirement community, one designed to attract scholars, scientists, artists, executives and others. “With downsizing,” Koffler remarked, “people these days often retire as early as 55. Who can play golf for 30 years?”
His solution is the Arizona Senior Academy and its associated Academy Village, a retirement community for people who aren’t ready to retire. Groundbreaking is set for this winter on a scenic swath of rolling desert 20 miles southeast of Tucson. The $65-million project will include 250 residences plus the health center, social center and lifetime medical care facilities of a full-service continuing care retirement community.
This mix is set apart by Koffler’s brainchild, the Arizona Senior Academy. Nestling within the village will be a complex of seminar and computer rooms, studios, an auditorium / performance hall, practice studios, private office space with secretarial support and faculty lounge. An affiliation with the University of Arizona is expected to provide access to laboratories and libraries.
And the program will include a strong focus on volunteer work. It’s a new approach. The average age today in so-called CCRCs is about 80, but Koffler expects to attract a younger crowd. “We won’t have an old-age home,” he declared, “because we will facilitate people doing creative activity.”
With baby boomers moving toward retirement, not only is the older population going to be much larger, it is going to be much louder. Already they are rebelling. “Things are going to have to change,” proclaimed Russ Thibeault, 50, in a commentary for Public Radio International’s Marketplace. “Those little nursing home parlors with unused pianos in the corner just won’t cut it for Led Zeppelin’s 50th reunion tour!”
In fact, StairMasters and sweatsuits are already replacing gray cardigans and rocking chairs as standard retirement equipment. Koffler’s Academy Village is the most radical refinement to date on a continuing care tradition that goes back a century to church-sponsored “homes for the aged.”
Today, wrote Jack Rosenthal in a recent New York Times Magazine issue devoted to aging, Americans are discovering the emergence of a new stage of life. “Older adults are not only living longer, generally speaking, they are living better.” Looking at a doubling of the over-65 population by 2030, like other commentators, he predicts a dramatic dismantling of misconceptions about later life.
*
The project has taken Koffler’s full attention since 1991 when he stepped down after nine years as president of the University of Arizona.
Although it started as an intellectual venture, he said, he soon realized it would be silly to pursue without adding a health support system. “That’s when I became aware of continuing care,” he said, “and got involved with Lloyd.” Lewis had developed seven communities including three in college towns (Ithaca, N.Y.; Oberlin, Ohio; and Hanover, N.H.).
The two men have been recruiting since 1995. Koffler has wide contacts: His academic resume includes outstanding research in microbiology and science education. He developed Purdue’s Department of Biological Sciences and served as vice president for academic affairs at the University of Minnesota and chancellor of the University of Massachusetts before returning to his alma mater as president in 1982.
“The man never stops--he’s in at 7:30 or 8 and still here when I leave,” says his administrative secretary, Kathleen Brewer. A scientist who loves the arts, the Austrian-born Koffler has been breaking the mold since age 17 when he left Vienna and came to Prescott, Ariz., instead of the traditional New York City because “I wanted to become a true citizen of this country and the West seemed like adventure.”
Although he chose to create the retirement village because it seemed both fruitful and doable, Koffler acknowledges now that it’s a big job. “Lloyd kept reminding me that creating a CCRC is a very complicated business, and I’d say, ‘I know, I know, after all I have been running a university.’ But the brutal truth of the matter is that it is very complicated.”
Such projects differ from other retirement options by providing a continuum of housing, services and health care. The written agreement between resident and organization is intended to last the remainder of a resident’s lifetime, which may start with independent living and end with nursing care.
Although continuing care communities took a big leap in the 1980s, the numbers are still small--perhaps 1,100 in the country, said Kathryn Brod, director of continuing care for the American Assn. of Homes and Services for the Aging in Washington. Almost half are in five states (Pennsylvania, California, Florida, Illinois and Ohio).
“People talk about the ‘academic community,’ but there really isn’t one,” Koffler said. “How many professors at UCLA can afford to live in Westwood?” He envisions a true community, one where people live together, work together, enjoy themselves together and support each other.
A large architectural map on the office wall depicts a village of Southwest-flavored stucco and red-tiled buildings nestled in a ring of mountains (the combined work of architectural firms Ewing Cole Cherry & Brott in Philadelphia and Merry Carnell & Schlecht in Tucson). Incorporating features of the so-called New Urbanism, the detached houses are arranged in clusters of four with a common lawn and garages out of sight. An indoor-outdoor cafe and community centers are encircled by streets that encourage walking and electric cars in a setting of paloverde trees, mesquite and saguaro cactus at the base of the Rincon Mountains.
House prices range from $195,000 for a two-bedroom to $310,000 for a large three-bedroom. Less expensive townhouses have not yet been priced. The co-op prices include a share of ownership in the common property and open spaces. The facility will be Medicare approved and residents will be advised either to bring long-term care insurance or buy it. Monthly fees, covering a wide range of meals, health care and services, range from $1,640 to $2,455.
And yes, there will be a golf course available, Koffler said, “but it’s not our own. We’ll have a swimming pool and tennis courts and a big emphasis on preventive medicine. Golf is at the bottom.”
For almost a year now, marketing director Donna Jacobs and her staff have been taking visitors from around the country for tours of the site, equipping them with water bottles and billed caps, and explaining that yes, the summers are hot but it’s a dry heat and no, they will not be planting grass lawns.
“Most Easterners are surprised to see how green the desert is,” Jacobs said. “They were amazed at the springtime flowers blooming. We have a lot of depositors from California and they want to know about earthquakes and floods and fires.”
Although it has already been dubbed “Einstein Acres” by a writer for the Boston Globe, she emphasized that it’s not limited to academics. “We’ve got a lot of business people coming and would like to see an even bigger mix.” What they won’t have, she added, is an activities director who announces, “Tomorrow is bingo.”
*
Al Siepert, 82, of Tucson signed up early. After a federal service career that involved him in the early days of both the National Institutes of Health and NASA, he likes the idea of being part of visionary schemes.
Siepert tried one retirement community but got tired of hearing about health problems and grandchildren. “I love my grandchildren,” he said, “but I don’t expect everybody else to. That’s why Henry Koffler’s idea catches fire with me. If you can get people who really feel they have something to contribute, it will be an exciting community.”
Richard Lyon, who retired two years ago as engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, opened his own office, but he sees a number of his colleagues still involved at MIT because “they don’t want to give up their intellectual life.”
“They shouldn’t have to, but without mandatory retirement, the schools are going to have all their slots filled with aging faculty,” he said. “I think this is a marvelous concept and I hope many other institutions will end up doing it.”
Right now, Jacobs said, about 3,300 households have shown interest and more than 200 people have paid deposits. Koffler and Lewis have made two speaking circuits around the country and expect to make more. “Right now,” Lewis said, “we are at the evangelizing stage and we haven’t gotten everybody to come down front yet.”
Continuing care communities are not so much for the wealthy as for the careful planners, he said. “We get professors, social workers, librarians--people who are looking ahead.”
And although everyone says they like the idea of the Academy Village, it isn’t easy to start a new trend, Lewis added. He sees several reasons for the paradoxical response: The major lifestyle change at a time when many people want to stay put and, on a deeper level, the demand that people face up to the reality of mortality.
Anne D. Kilmer, Berkeley professor of ancient near-Eastern civilizations, is one of the hundreds of interested recruits who’s been over to visit the area. She likes the concept.
“It’s one I’ll definitely consider when I get ready to retire,” she said. “I think the idea of an intellectually active group of people continuing all sorts of projects--not just playing golf--is wonderful and the health care is important. My own mother is in a nursing home, so you begin to see the necessities of the future.”
