Handshake not 'Golden'

Faculty members traditionally greet the announcement of a fellow professor's retirement with congratulations and thanks for years of dedication to the world of academia. Traditionally.

But as was evident during Cal State Long Beach's four-year experience with the Golden Handshake retirement incentive, a string of bad budgets can change many things.

Often, word that a professor had signed up to take the lucrative retirement offer stirred uncertainty among the remaining faculty. "Sometimes, department heads admit, younger faculty even tried to convince potential retirees not to accept the Golden Handshake.

"It happened all the time," said Patricia Clark, art department chairwoman, referring to the occasional pressure from fellow faculty members not to take the offer. "If you had a small department and it meant the demise of your department ... you certainly didn't want to see that professor go."

Demise? What seems so dangerous about a retirement incentive?

"When (professors) took the Golden Handshake, we got no replacement. It killed the department," said Craig Smith, chairman of the speech communication department.

He added that five tenured professors from his department took the offer, leaving 14. So far, no faculty positions have been returned, although one replacement has been hired for this school year.

"It means (speech students) can't get classes," Smith said. "We should be compensated back in the department for the people who took (the offer) and we're not being compensated."

While departmental downsizing may be its most tangible legacy, the Golden Handshake was designed for - and largely achieved - a more immediate effect: sparing the jobs of non-tenured faculty.

First used in the 1988-89 school year, the Golden Handshake became the California State University system's prime defense against repeated threats of widespread faculty layoffs in the face of shrinking budgets. It was offered three times as state funding at CSULB fell 16 percent from $117 million in the 1990-91 school year to $98 million last year.

State legislators figured that if campuses could coax senior professors over 50 to retire with a two-year service credit, administrators could save money by either rehiring teachers at a lower rate or leaving the positions vacant.

The bait was not cheap: a cross the CSU, the incentive cost universities about $20,000 per retiree. And in the 1992-93 school year, Gov. Pete Wilson signed a more attractive offer with a four-year service credit to offset an especially grim budget. That one-time offer cost campuses about $50,000 per retiree.

Since 1988, 160 CSULB professors have taken the offer. The last chance for professors to accept the incentive was Aug. 13 and there are no plans to renew the offer.

Campus administrators said they are unable to calculate how much money - and how many faculty jobs - the offer has actually saved the university. This is because it is too difficult to keep track of how many retirees were replaced and how many were not, they said.

Nevertheless, administrators agree that one crucial dividend has definitely come of the Golden Handshake: payroll flexibility.

In this case, flexibility simply refers to the option of college deans or central administrators to replace the retiree's position or not. Sometimes, instead of reinvesting in the retiree's former department, the savings were used to hire faculty in a different department.

"Flexibility would be a value to the CSU even if (the Golden Handshake) didn't save a penny in the process," said Charles Austin, former associate vice president for Academic Affairs and Academic Personnel. Austin took the Golden Handshake during the summer.

Before the Golden Handshake, some departments had many tenured faculty, and consequently a strong defense against faculty layoffs. But at the same time, student demand for classes within some of those departments was waning, Austin explained.

When faculty members within such departments would take the offer, administrators were sometimes able to divert the savings to hire tenure-track faculty in other departments where more students were in need of classes, Austin said.

"I suppose you could say that the faculty (member) who retired was helping students in a broad sense while at the same time having an adverse effect on the narrow interests of his own department," Austin said.

When this trend became widespread, some department heads who had lost tenured positions within their departments were upset. They recalled Austin's assertion that taking the offer could spare the jobs of their department's junior faculty members, who are the first to go in times of layoffs.

Austin acknowledged the statement, but added that there was "never a quid pro quo" guarantee involved.

"That's a touchy issue," Austin said. "Senior faculty were fully aware that if they vacated a position, it may be taken away from their department."

"Certainly, the university would like to see all Golden Handshake retirements replaced," said Dorothy Abrahamse, dean of the College of Liberal Arts. The only obstacle, she said: California's economy.

"We haven't been able to replace those people in a lot of cases because of the continued budget decline," Abrahamse said. In the meantime, flexibility afforded by the Golden Handshake has had to follow student demand for classes, she said.

"We try to meet the demands of as many majors as we can knowing that everybody's hard hit."

Through this tough situation, the only inexcusable action is to ask senior faculty not to take the Golden Handshake when it may actually be a retiree's best option, Abrahamse said.

Clorinda Donato, chairwoman of Romance, German, Russian languages and literatures, denies that ever happened in the three former foreign language departments.

Since 1989, at least ten professors retired in those departments - Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian and German and Russian - with most of the retirees taking the Golden Handshake. The departments were then merged into one, Donato said, because few professors remained.

As a result of the reduced number of faculty, some classes, particularly beginning language classes, can no longer be offered, Donato said.

"I don't think there have been any winners in this thing," she said. "I think there have been a lot of losers, especially the students, who've been the biggest losers of all."