![]() It stimulates me to act like a 55-year-old kid.” Wendell Musser, 86, who is teaching the Woodrow Wilson course this fall, says “OLLI to me is a way of life. The most recent catalog lists more than 150 courses, from “A Guide to Local Jazz” to “Woodrow Wilson.”ĭr. That model seemed to work very well.”Īn advocate of empowering members to use existing talents or to develop new ones, Craven turned over the work of recruiting teachers and developing classes to a volunteer curriculum committee that today includes more than 50 members. “We had one course last fall with Orrin Pilkey and Alex Glass on how to read a beach – held at the beach. “We’ve done night courses and now we’re starting to look at courses away from campus,” he says. OLLI Director Garry Crites says the space crunch has even led OLLI to experiment with new ways of doing courses. Now numbering more than 2,200 and a $2.1 million endowment, OLLI members have fueled an expansion of classroom venues - mostly concentrated at The Bishop’s House on East Campus and Judea Reform Congregation – but also including some classes at Westminster Presbyterian Church and Carolina Arbors retirement community in the Briar Creek area. Young people are so concerned about how they will make it in the world, she says, and retirees can serve as “role models for how to live life.” O’Barr hopes the university “will recognize the added value that OLLI brings to the local community and provide the program with the physical space and development support they need to flourish as a core part of the campus.” She believes having more facilities - especially commons - would prompt more interactions between OLLI members and Duke students. DILR became the vehicle through which they could achieve their goals.” I think that was because to a person they had made good decisions about where to retire and what they wanted out of retirement. “The skills and enthusiasm of the original members exceeded anything I had experienced with adults in classes before. “I think we had no idea how popular or important DILR would become,” says O’Barr, who is a longtime OLLI member. “Gradually, non-members were asked to teach and the program took on new life,” she wrote in a DILR history.ĭILR was one of seven established lifelong learning networks invited to join the OLLI network in 2004, gaining the first of three grants and the Osher endowments, in addition to a new name, OLLI at Duke. Members taught each other for the first several years, but eventually they tired of teaching every term, says former director Sara Craven. When it was founded in 1977 as a joint venture of continuing education and the aging center, DILR followed a model of the New School for Social Research. ![]() With a grant in hand from the foundation, O’Barr contacted a number of continuing education students and asked if they would like to be founding members of the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement (DILR). He connected O’Barr with The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which was supporting learning-in-retirement programs. She approached Duke sociology professor George Maddox, who had founded Duke’s Center for Aging and Human Development. 40 percent of OLLI’s members have some organic relationship with Duke (alumni, current or former faculty/staff, family of someone affiliated with Duke, or a combination).OLLI at Duke offers more than 375 peer-led courses annually in two 10-week terms (fall and winter) and one six-week term (spring), taught in a collegial and comfortable learning environment by an average of 200 unique instructors per year.OLLI at Duke is one of about 400 lifelong learning institutes for older adults affiliated with colleges and one of more than 120 campus-based chapters of the OLLI network, which has a National Resource Center at the University of Southern Maine.We want classes that continue all the time! Why do you think we retired?’” ![]() “To a person they scolded: ‘We don’t want a break. ![]() “I am looking forward to the break, as I am sure you are, I chirped,” O’Barr recalls in notes written for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke’s 40 th anniversary program later this month. The group included two women from NCCU, a newly arrived couple from New York, an Irish theater buff and a couple who had moved from Southern Pines looking for more opportunities to learn. Prior to a holiday break in the early 1970s, O’Barr encountered a small group of retirees coming out of Bivins Building on East Campus. Jean O’Barr, a former director of Duke Continuing Studies, says a chance encounter with a crowd of retirees enrolled in a continuing education short course convinced her that a lifelong learning institute could be successful. ![]()
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