173 at UCI Accept ‘Golden Handshake’ : Budget: The campus hopes to make up half of a projected $8-million shortfall through early retirements.

IRVINE —  An early-retirement offer has been accepted by more than half the eligible employees at UC Irvine, which devised the program to reduce a projected $8-million budget shortfall.

Among the faculty members who will accept a “golden handshake” July 1 are Grover C. Stephens, a former dean of biological sciences, and Donald Heiney, a founder of UCI’s graduate writing program.

Administrators hope the program will save the campus as much as $4 million, according to university spokeswoman Karen Young.

“It was a windfall, like winning the lottery,” said Barbara Brown, who retired as benefits manager on April 1 after working for the university for 20 years. The offer provided non-teaching staff members with up to six months’ salary and increased their pensions by as much as 12%. Almost all of the 144 non-teachers who accepted the offer left April 1.

Of the eligible employees, 111 were faculty members and 189 were administrative staff. Only 29 faculty members opted for the offer.

Retiring faculty members will receive three months’ salary and five years’ additional service credit. The credit will boost the retirees’ pensions by 5% to 12%, depending on their age, said Karen Mansfield, a benefits and retirement consultant for the university.

Mansfield said the annual salaries of the 173 retiring employees total $7 million. But not all that money will be pocketed by UCI. “A very rough guess” is that up to 50% of the staff members will have to be replaced, according to Lon Orey, assistant vice chancellor for human relations.

Roy Dormaier, the assistant executive vice chancellor, said that overall, the administration did not expect the absence of the retiring faculty to affect class size next school year. “Our highest priority is to maintain the academic program and the number of classes,” he said. There are more than 900 faculty members at the campus.

Retiring former dean Stephens noted that both he and Peter S. Dixon, another ecology professor who is retiring, teach classes with large enrollments. “I think (the retirements) will cause some difficulty for the department,” he said.

However, he said, the department probably would move to replace him and Dixon as soon as possible with younger professors who would be paid less.

“The departure of a number of the staff is probably more important to the university,” Stephens said. “The librarians, the senior secretaries . . . they’re the ones who make the university run.”

Leon Schwartz, vice chancellor for administration and business services, said staff members taking the retirement offer ranged from groundskeepers to a vice chancellor--himself. “I had no intention of leaving, but I felt that (the offer) gave me the opportunity to do something else,” said Schwartz, who has been at UCI for 12 years.

Orey said that a hiring freeze, which ends today, has been in place since February “to give managers a chance to step back and strategize a little, rather than instinctively refilling positions. . . . We hope ultimately to see a leaner organization.”

Schwartz said that even after the freeze is lifted, some hiring restrictions still will be in place. Managers will be encouraged to eliminate or combine jobs, and outside recruiting will be permitted only if there is no one within the university who can fill the position, he said.

“There are four jobs being advertised at the university right now--three vice chancellors and an embalmer” for a campus laboratory, Schwartz said. “Some people are joking, ‘Couldn’t one of the vice chancellors also do the embalming?’ ”

For many, the offer came at just the right moment. “I had been thinking of retiring within a year or two in any case,” Stephens said. “It was an attractive offer that fit my personal situation perfectly.”

Stephens, a professor of ecological and evolutionary biology, came to UCI in 1964, the year before the campus opened, to organize what was then know as the Organismic Biology Department. From 1982 to 1986 he was dean of biological sciences, the field with the largest number of students at UCI.

He said his motivation to retire was “partly selfish” and partly a result of his belief that faculty members “past a certain age” should make way for “fresh blood, fresh ideas.” He added that he would continue to do research and might teach part time.

In addition to Dixon, Heiney and Stephens, retiring faculty members include Dwain G. Metzger, an anthropology professor, and Mary R. Key, a linguistics professor, according to Schonfeld.