Stanley C. Gabor's voice takes on an excited tone when he talks about this new idea -- a retirement community built around a university, not a golf course.

The university Gabor has in mind is the Johns Hopkins University, where he has spent the past 17 years as head of the School of Continuing Studies.

He retires at the end of the month, having shepherded the school through a period during which numbers of "nontraditional" -- mainly older -- students have grown by 50 percent nationally. Such students now make up half of the country's college enrollment.

"They have tried this at a couple of schools in the South," Gabor says of the retirement community idea. "People, in many cases alumni, like to spend their retirement around a campus. They can take classes, they can use the recreation facilities, they can meet like-minded people. And the school benefits from their presence.

"This could be the ultimate in lifelong learning," he says.

When Gabor, 65, came to Hopkins in 1982, the division he took over was called the Evening College, a more respectable form of the common vernacular -- night school. Many serious scholars at Hopkins looked at it as a somewhat unseemly enterprise -- making money by selling cut-rate merchandise out the back door -- that was best ignored.

"The Evening College was clearly something that had tremendous potential but wasn't being marketed, promoted or, in fact, administered in a way that did justice to that," says former Hopkins President Steven Muller, who hired Gabor.

"Stanley had been at [New York University] and had an outstanding record there and seemed just the right person to bring the school to a larger life. He did that superbly," Muller said.

Gabor, a native of New York, graduated from NYU and was in law school there when he married and started seeking a job. He found one in 1960 at NYU's continuing studies division. He finished his law degree and later received a master's in American history, but he had found his career.

"I was completely captivated by the excitement and opportunity to think creatively in this arena," he says.

Gabor came up with the idea of conversations with artists -- composers, writers, painters, actors and directors -- and discovered audiences would gladly pay for an evening of chatting with such people.

He gave opera singer Beverly Sills her first nonsinging gig at one such affair. "She wanted to know why anyone would want to hear her talk," he says. "It got such a response, we had to move it to the largest lecture hall on campus."

Many decide to leave New York when they have children and need some space. For Gabor and his wife, Marilyn, it was the opposite.

Glad that their two daughters had experienced the excitement of Greenwich Village while growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, they thought it was time for a change when the girls went away to college. Baltimore is his wife's hometown. The Hopkins job seemed a perfect fit. They moved into the Guilford house where she had grown up and still live there.

Within two years of Gabor's arrival in Baltimore, the Evening College became the School of Continuing Studies. More than a change in name, it was a change in status -- from a division to a separate school -- that means a lot at a place like Hopkins.

"That was Stanley's great coup," says Nancy Norris, director of the master of liberal arts program, one of the school's oldest and most successful. "It meant that, in theory at least, the school was equal to any other school -- medicine, arts and sciences, whatever. From that moment, it was a much more powerful place."

Says Muller: "The way Hopkins operates, as a separate school, it had much more autonomy to govern itself."

Gabor says he was given great latitude. "I'm not saying we have the prestige of the School of Medicine, but I do think people at Hopkins take pride that schools like Harvard and Columbia now look to see what Hopkins in doing in the continuing studies area," he says.

Gabor was also able to persuade more Hopkins faculty that teaching courses to adults was more than a way to pick up extra money.

"I would ask English professors, 'Who would you rather teach "Madame Bovary" to, a 19-year-old just out of high school or a 37-year-old woman going through a divorce?' " he says. "These people bring life experiences to the classroom."

During Gabor's 17 years, the number of students taking courses for credit in continuing studies each year at Hopkins reflected the national trend, growing from 2,500 to more than 4,800, about half of all Hopkins students. Another 2,500 take courses in Odyssey, a program Gabor created offering a variety of noncredit courses.

The school's full-time faculty has grown from nine to 35. Campuses were established in downtown Baltimore, Rockville and Washington, and a small operation in Columbia was greatly expanded.

Gabor says he is proudest of coming up with the Police Executive Leadership Program after reading a 1991 newspaper article on education among police. It offers graduate and undergraduate courses for police and Justice Department and Secret Service officers.

So great is Gabor's empire that it will be broken up when he leaves. The School of Continuing Studies is now the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education. The master of liberal arts program is moving to the School of Arts and Sciences.

Hopkins Provost Steven Knapp says this is in part because all schools of the university now embrace the continuing studies concept that professors once looked down upon. "You find part-time programs in every part of the university now," he says. "We have as many part-time students as full time."

Norris, head of the master of liberal arts program, says another reason exists: "You will never find somebody like Stanley to be the head of three such disparate programs as business, education and the MLA. He's a real renaissance man. They don't make them like that any more."

Gabor says he has contemplated retiring Sept. 1, 1999, since he first saw it on a pension statement in the early 1960s as the date he would become eligible.

"I am looking forward to this next phase of my life with the same enthusiasm I had when I came to Hopkins," he says.

He plans to write a book or develop a course on the importance of an arts and sciences education to success in business. "I think too much of what we call education today is really just training," he says.

Then there's the matter of that university-based retirement community.

"We could put it up somewhere to the west of Homewood and throw a bridge over to campus," he says. "I'm sure any developer would be glad to build it. This could happen."