Few jobs promise a lifetime term: a seat on the Supreme Court, the papal office and membership on the Harvard Corporation.

Only recently, in fact, did tenured professors at Harvard University join that elite group.

Before 1993, all Harvard professors were subject to mandatory retirement, which ensured younger faculty would find chairs open for them.

But now that a federal statute has banned a mandatory retirement age, the University is juggling a new set of challenges--complying with the law, maintaining a healthy faculty turnover rate and keeping older and retired professors content, while keeping the number of appointments constant.

A delicate balancing act indeed; several deans of Harvard's schools say retirement is among the most important tasks they face this year, second only to efforts as part of the ongoing capital campaign.

"It's a huge issue," says Harvey V. Fineberg '67, dean of the School of Public Health. "Huge."

In light of widely varying age distributions among the faculties, President Neil L. Rudenstine has allowed each school to devise a separate plan.

But coming up with the right mix of economic incentives and responsibilities for retired professors is still troubling the University.

"How do you as a whole institution and community make certain on the one hand, the people who choose to stay can continue to be active and productive...and at the same time ensure a flow of younger people into the system?" Rudenstine said. "It's pretty much a zero-sum game in appointments."

Faculty Get Too Comfy?

The University has been struggling with the issue of faculty retirement since the federal Age Discrimination Act ended forced retirement in 1986.

Before that, Harvard's faculties had required different retirement ages. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for example, had mandated retirement at age 70.

Following a massive lobbying effort by then-president Derek C. Bok, the University was granted a seven-year delay to adjust to the end of mandatory retirement.

Eliminating mandatory retirement has not adversely affected most universities, where faculty continue to retire at approximately the same age.

One study conducted by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, found that faculty members who teach in state schools without a mandatory retirement age were still retiring quite readily in their sixties.

But the study also found that professors at elite research institutions like Harvard tend to work past 65 or 70.