UCLA's retirement challenge

By Ajay Singh

As the Baby Boomer generation of faculty retires, UCLA is facing a major challenge: How to recruit — and retain — faculty at a time of fierce competition for new talent to conduct ever-greater interdisciplinary research for which state financial support is steadily shrinking.

Over the past decade, 378 UCLA faculty have retired, and about 30% of faculty are currently more than 60 years old. Although federal legislation in 1994 outlawed mandatory retirement at age 70, some 200 to 300 more Bruin scholars are likely to retire over the next five years, officials estimate.

The university must plan ahead of the retirement curve, said Tony Chan, the former dean of physical sciences, currently on loan to the National Science Foundation as its assistant director of mathematics and physical sciences.

Chan recommends hiring two or three faculty every year instead of, say, 40 at once. "As the Sputnik generation of professors retires, there's just not that much talent to fill the gap created by their retirement," he explained.

The problem isn't confined to the sciences. Competing with the best institutions for world-class faculty is an issue that Judy Olian, dean of the Anderson School of Management, also struggles with on a daily basis.

"We have a couple of barriers working against us," she said, referring to the prohibitively expensive housing situation on the Westside and the fact that the enormous growth of business schools in China and Russia has not just created a shortage of faculty, but jacked up the price of hiring them.

Olian confronts those twin challenges by telling prospective faculty that not only will they be joining a great university, but also an unparalleled "community of minds" devoted to top-notch research.

"When we talk about research, we talk about research with an impact because we're so porous to the outside world," Olian said, adding: "It's all about lead-thinking versus lag-thinking."

Indeed, the need to recruit more creatively offers the university an opportunity to restructure the research and teaching enterprise itself.

"There is a macro trend to which UCLA is not immune," explained Owen Witte, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research. "Interdisciplinary science not based on traditional department structures is the most important new wave of science, as well as science funding."

Coping with retirement is affecting other parts of the university as well. The UCLA Library, for example, expects retirements to peak to unprecedented numbers from 2010 to 2015. (From 1999 to 2007, 35 librarians retired, and another 40 left the university.)

"It's a profession that is aging quickly, mirroring the graying of the faculty," said Pat Hawthorne, director of UCLA Library Human Resources. "We're going to lose a lot of expertise as people retire."

Moreover, many graduates of library schools these days have such strong information-management skills that they're attracted to professions other than librarianship.

"It's kind of an exciting time, but also a little bit scary," said Hawthorne, adding: "How are we going to meet the needs of faculty and students?"