Life Begins at 65

Is a college professor really used up at 65, when most are put out to pasture? Professor Laurens H. Seelye, of Robert College in Istanbul, discovered that one western U.S. university lists 60 living professors emeritus.* Some must still have their wits about them, he thought; must their talents go to waste?

In the current Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, Seelye argues for an employment agency for retired professors willing and able to continue teaching. Smaller colleges, Seelye suggests, could use these academic castoffs at less than full salary on light teaching or research schedules.

At least one school--the University of California's Hastings College of Law at San Francisco -- has already anticipated Seelye's scheme. For the past two years, the school has hired only emeriti.

Hastings already has such legal luminaries as Oliver L. McCaskill, 70 (30 years at Cornell and the University of Illinois), and Arthur M. Cathcart, 75 (34 years at Stanford). Last week it named two more: Max Radin, 68, University of California philosopher and law historian, and Ernest G. Lorenzen, 72, a veteran of 27 years at the Yale School of Law. Coming next year: Harvard's famed constitutional lawyer Thomas Reed Powell.

How do students feel about Hastings' old men? When the new term opens next month, Hastings' enrollment will be 700 students (most of them married G.I.s earning their own way), making Hastings not only the oldest law school west of the Mississippi, but also the largest.

* In 1899 President Charles Eliot, then 65, announced that Harvard's retirement age would be 66. One overage professor asked caustically: "Will this rule apply to the president?" Snapped Eliot: "When the time comes for me to retire, Mrs. Eliot will tell me so."

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