OLLI, she says, gives older adult learners a university-sponsored public arena in which they can create “a community of engagement and collaboration,” while providing Berkeley faculty, postdocs, grad students and visiting scholars the opportunity “to teach what they love” to classrooms of highly educated, highly motivated older students. Susan Hoffman, director, views the program’s current incarnation as a two-way connection between the campus and its neighbors. In addition to classes, OLLI presents lectures year-round, facilitates member-organized discussion and activity groups known as “interest circles” and, for the vacation-minded knowledge-seeker, offers travel programs like this month’s weeklong trek to the Tahéima Wellness Resort and Spa in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico. What distinguishes OLLI from its sister institutes is that it offers something uniquely valuable: access both to Berkeley faculty (including luminaries like energy professor Dan Kammen, currently leading an online class) and to such local lights as Larry Bensky, a former literary editor best remembered as a political journalist on KPFA - returning this session with a class on Marcel Proust - and San Francisco Chronicle theater critic Robert Hurwitt. Where UC Extension focuses mainly on professional development and certificate programs, OLLI is about learning “for the joy of it” - the title of a video on its website - without tests or grades in what OLLI terms “an ongoing learning community.” On the strength of four successful years, it could soon reap a second $1 million endowment from the Bernard Osher Foundation, which has seeded OLLIs in every state, including 30 in California alone. Today, by contrast, not only is the campus among the 120 Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI, for short) worldwide, but it counts a growing constituency of nearly 1,000 Bay Area residents - most between the ages of 50 and 75 - as members. It took Berkeley two tries to get it right.Ī first effort never achieved liftoff. Even for the world’s premier public university, launching a world-class “center for lifelong learning” can be a tricky proposition.
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