Daily w Trojan
Volume LXXIII, Number 23
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
Monday, March 13, 1978
c A GOLD WATCH & A VINK^LIP
University studies impact of legislation ending forced retirement
By Carole Long
The Legislature of the State of California finds and declares that the use of chronological age as an indicator of ability to perform on the job and the practice of mandatory retirement from employment are obsolete arid cruel practices. . .It is (therefore) an unlawful employment practice for an employer to refuse to hire or employ, or to discharge, dismiss, reduce, suspend or demote, any individual over the age of 40 on the ground of age...
—Assembly Bill 586
Employees can no longer be forced to retire because of age. On Jan. 1, 1978. a law banning mandatory re-
Carole Long. Daily Trojan staff writer, is a freshman in journalism.
tirement went into effect in California. The impact of the law on the university is being studied by many university officials, most of whom foresee a potentially large impact.
The law (Assembly Bill 586). initially authored by Assemblyman Richard Alatorre (D-Los Angeles), was introduced to eliminate discrimination against older workers. Gov. Jerry Brown, according to the Los Angeles Times, said he signed the Alatorre bill because. "Older people have been stereotyped and relegated to the backwaters of society. I believe in extending the opportunities of everyone and not contracting them fdr anyone.”
At the university, the normal retirement age has been 65 The new state law will now prevent the university from forcibly retiring any faculty or staff member when he reaches 65 years old Age can no longer be a deciding factor for retirement.
The retirement age of 65 can no longer apply to present workingcon-ditions.said James McBath. president of the faculty Senate.
"The 65 mandatory retirement age limit is an historical anachronism, arbitrarily chosen, and is utterly meaningless today,” he said.
Although the purpose of the new law was simply to eliminate discrimination against the older worker, the law creates many difficulties at the university level, officials here said.
James Birren, director of the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center
here, said, “The state legislation moved in very quickly. There was a lot of enthusiasm to protect the rights of the older worker but they had a very different person in mind than a professor or a researcher. They were thinking of a man or woman who is maybe in his upper 60s and is doing a
Francis Feldman, a former president of the Faculty Senate, said, “The principle of making it possible for a person to continue to work if he is able and if the employer can use him is well-founded but within the Alatorre bill there are several complex and controversial areas.”
routine job that doesn’t push him to his mental or physical limits. This is very different from the professor in a university who is generating new ideas. A professor's job is not a routine. He is supposed to be advancing knowledge.”
Several university officials feel the law will have to be interpreted by the courts. They said the courts will have to determine the guidelines for its implementation.
Birren said the law is also controversial because it excludes public in-
stitutions from its impact.
“The University of California system has a fixed retirement age, 67, but the law says they’re exempt. Now why should we, as a private institution, have our fixed retirement age eliminated if the UC system does not. It isn’t conceivable to me to have a law that applies to Stanford, USC and Pomona and doesn’t apply to UCLA. We’re all academic institutions.”
Steve McConnell, project director at the gerontology center, said it is unclear whether the law’s enforcement will be immediate or if employers will have up to two years to prepare for changes.
“The effective date of the biH is initially stated to be Jan. 1, 1978, but there is a section in the bill that says that any employee covered by a bona fide pension plan is not affected by
the law during the life of the contract or for two years after the effective date, whichever comes first,” McConnell said.
Authorities within and without the university are split in their interpretation of the effective date.
Marilyn Baker, assistant to Paul E. Hadley, academic vice-president, said the university is hoping for a two-year moratorium so it can determine the law’s impact and design an appropriate retirement policy.
The university has organized a committee to interpret the law and determine its impact here. Birren, as head of the committee, said the major questions the group is dealing with are:
•	How will the university retire faculty to maintain a competent and productive faculty?
•	How many faculty will choose to stay on past 65?
•	Will the federal bills now pending in Congress supercede the state law?
As defined in the Faculty Handbook, tenure is “the right of a regular faculty member to hold his or her position, until the age of retirement.”
(continued on page 2)
Retiring journalism prof leaves advice: ‘Fight like a tiger’
By Robin Oto
“Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down” is the motto Fred Coonradt has adopted from a humorous newsletter for journalists and it fits him to a tee.
Coonradt will be 65 in April and is retiring at the end of this semester after teaching at the university since 1948. He is a professor of journalism and teaches a class in communication law.
His trademark is the bow ties he wears daily. He picked up an issue of Time magazine and saw a picture of Groucho Marx, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann all wearing bow ties.
“Hell’s fire, if they can wear them, I can wear them. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me,” he said.
“I don’t own a long tie and you can’t spill gravy on a bow tie,” he added. He has been wearing bow ties since 1936.
Coonradt is from Oregon and grew up as an active “outdoors kid.”
He wandered about the country and graduated from high school in New York. When his father moved to California, Coonradt attended Stanford University where he received a degree in English in 1934, after changing his major from engineering to English in his junior year.
“I got so bored with engineering. It was so easy, my father being an engineer. I grew up in that milieu,” he said.
Coonradt began searching for another major, one which would cause him the least trouble to switch. Oddly enough, he had quite a few English literature courses so he chose English for his major.
He even had enough credits to take a few courses outside of his new major, including some journalism classes and his favorite, a landscape arts class.
“We went to the class once a week and we’d go out and draw different landscapes. I got a solid C- because I showed up every time but my work was terrible,” Coonradt said.
He worked for the campus newspaper and magazine and was influenced by a journalism professor to go into that-field.
Coonradt meticulously planned out the places where he would go and ask for a job. He chose five newspapers and wire services and persisted in visiting each once a week, until he finally got a shortlived job with the Los Angeles Examiner.
“They said, ‘OK kid,’ but ose days, they were looking for stars. I was no instant star. I was kind of dumb. I hadn’t learned how to do it yet,” he said.
(continued on page 8)