In the 10 years since the federal law eliminating mandatory retirement took effect, universities have faced a conundrum: namely, how to encourage senior professors to step aside to make room for younger instructors.

At institutions like Yale University, where senior faculty enjoy status and economic success unmatched by most of their academic peers, it can be particularly difficult to make emeriti out of perfectly happy, if graying, instructors. So Yale has begun to approach this delicate issue from a new perspective, encouraging professors to retire, but stick around.

Last year, the university opened the Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty, which serves as a base for Yale's 300 retired professors and administrators - 100 of whom still live in or around New Haven. 

According to Dr. Bernard Lytton, an emeritus professor of surgery at Yale and director of the center, "The purpose of this place is to bring emeriti back into the mainstream life of the university."

Added Charles Long, the deputy provost at Yale: "What we've had to do is make retirement as inviting as possible. For us, that's one of the needs the Koerner Center has filled."

The center's participants, who range in age from 65 to 85, are just beginning to hatch ideas about how best to stay involved with the campus, but the early programs signal an effort consistent with the two academic mainstays of intellectual and social events, both with and without students.

Retired professors, who sometimes maintain a part-time teaching schedule at Yale, can apply to use one of the center's 12 offices for two years. There, they may write, meet with students or, if the class enrollment is small enough, conduct classes. 

The center also assists emeriti in arranging part-time teaching assignments and spots as guest lecturers at the university. Support for continuation of scholarly writing and research is available, as well as computer assistance.

Dr. Lytton is also overseeing a small but growing roster of emeritus-only events, including a lecture series called Intellectual Trajectories, in which retired professors discuss their scholarship paths. 

The building itself is a nod to Yale's past. The three-story structure is the oldest house in New Haven, built in 1767 by a grandson of the Rev. James Pierpont, a founder of Yale. It was a private residence until deeded to the university in 1920; since then the site has served as the Yale Faculty Club, the university's undergraduate admissions office and a visitor's center. It sits on the edge of the New Haven Green, a short walk from the main undergraduate campus.

In 1999, Joseph Koerner, a 1980 Yale graduate, and Lisbet Rausing gave Yale $10 million to establish a program that would give emeriti a base from which to ensure their involvement in campus life. (Professor Koerner, an art history professor at Harvard University and the son of the artist Henry Koerner, declined interview requests, as did Ms. Rausing.)

The gift from Professor Koerner and Ms. Rausing resulted in a major renovation of the Pierpont house, which now features restored offices and an expansive living room that serves as a central meeting place and a library.
It is here that every afternoon sherry is served, because, as David Apter, an emeritus professor of sociology and political science at Yale, put it, "Intellectual life depends on some degree of liquid refreshment."

Of course, it also depends on a degree of serious scholarship. On an afternoon in early March, Jerome Pollitt, emeritus professor of classical archaeology and art history, sat in his third-floor office, where he reviewed notes for a series of lectures he was commissioned to give on a cruise ship in Italy next month. Professor Pollitt, who retired from Yale in 1999 - 37 years after arriving - said the center had helped pull him back onto campus more frequently than in the years immediately after retirement.

"Whenever you come back as an emeritus, you get the feeling you're hanging over the young people's shoulders," Professor Pollitt said. "I'd resolved I wouldn't hang around here like a ghost after retirement."

So Professor Pollitt, who lives nearby in Woodbridge, Conn., drove into New Haven primarily to use Yale's library for research and to take in occasional lectures and exhibitions. "This is nice to have," he said of the center, "because it gives you a place to connect with the university, as opposed to the department you worked in."

Dr. Lytton said few, if any, universities can boast similar programs. The University of Southern California, Emory University and Columbia University have programs for emeritus professors, but, said Dr. Lytton, "none of them have a facility like ours, or the resources we have."

The Koerner Center adds to an already substantial list of benefits for Yale's emeritus professors, including health insurance, free lunches and annual salaries averaging $80,000, which can be modestly augmented with a part-time teaching schedule. According to Patricia Dallai, the Koerner's executive director, it is still too early to tell how many potential retirees the center will attract.

"Retirements that are happening now probably were decided at least a couple of years ago," Ms. Dallai said. "But my goal is that we'll be seen as that connection to the university in the future."

That connection is a welcome attraction for many emeriti. According to Professor Apter: "In the past when you retired, from the university's point of view, you were dead. You'd get a party, and off you went."

As Professor Apter sat in his office at the center overlooking a courtyard recounting a career in which he witnessed political upheavals in several nations - experiences perhaps rivaled in other offices in the building - it became evident that the Koerner Center has collected perhaps an extraordinary combination of smarts and wisdom.

Professor Apter thinks that the current generation of retired professors, in particular, possesses qualities that other generations lack, because many of his colleagues came to academia after surviving the Depression and World War II. His was also the generation of faculty members that brought greater ethnic diversity to a teaching staff that, Professor Apter said, had been "classically Ivy League." The fact that so many of his colleagues took part in what he characterized as "the enormous transition of the university" perhaps makes it more likely that they will gravitate toward each other in a place like the Koerner Center.

"The center will anchor the senior faculty in the university," he said. "That's very different than the way it was before."