Irvine's immaculately landscaped French Country and Spanish Colonial homes could tempt almost any college professor to trade in the textbooks for a briefcase and the lucrative corporate life.
But what serious academic could afford to live in such Orange County neighborhoods, where even a modest single-family home can run half a million dollars?
Actually, most any UC Irvine professor.
UC Irvine's answer to runaway housing prices is University Hills, the handsome, faculty-only master-planned community of homes that rivals even the swankiest developments in town--and at half the price.
Ever since famed Yale deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller surprised the academic world by bolting to UC Irvine 15 years ago--lured in part by an affordable custom-built house in University Hills--the college's faculty housing program has provided a huge edge in recruiting. Few, if any, other universities can offer the majority of their professors luxury homeownership at a deep discount.
The latest batch of talent the upscale residential neighborhood helped bring to UC Irvine includes an endowed department chairman from New York University and a distinguished professor in the sciences from UCLA. UC Irvine's dean of humanities also reports negotiations with at least one Harvard professor and said a number of junior faculty members have passed up offers from the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and other top schools largely so they can keep living in University Hills.
"We have it all here," said Michael Szalay, an associate professor of English who has turned down several higher-ranking schools.
Szalay's fiancee just left a tenured teaching post in Ann Arbor for a faculty job at UC Irvine, and last week the two bought a four-bedroom Craftsman-style home in University Hills for $334,000.
"We get to be academics at a great institution, but we also get to live the lifestyle most of America dreams about," he said. "We've escaped the garrets that academics in major urban areas are so often forced to live in, and we get to have it all."
"Garret" life has become reality for more academics as housing prices in metropolitan areas soar. Big-city colleges and universities report that recruits are turning down even the most lucrative job offers because housing is so expensive.
At Stanford University in upscale Palo Alto, a report from the Provost's Committee on Faculty Housing in 2000 concludes that the housing crunch was so dire that "Stanford's future is in jeopardy.
