By MARTY LEVINE
With a new director since January, more in-person classes and a planned return to travel programs, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute — offering about 100 short noncredit classes six times a year, geared to those 50+ — is pushing back into the sunlight this summer.
“We don’t want to be the best-kept secret at Pitt,” says OLLI director Lisa Sharfstein, whose organization is holding an open house from 10 to 11:30 a.m. July 21 in 1400 Posvar Hall, for prospective students (often retirees) to speak with staff, current members and instructors.
With its half-dozen five-week terms per year, OLLI’s classes range from “Music in the Classic Hollywood Western” and “Early Pittsburgh” to yoga, art, improv and writing. The classes keep rolling with the times. This fall’s list includes “Artificial Intelligence and the Public Sector,” reviewing AI’s opportunities and threats. Courses on Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the latest Supreme Court decisions recently joined the class list.
While summer classes have already begun, this fall OLLI will offer 115 courses from more than 70 instructors, including many Pitt-related and local experts.
Alongside the rest of Pitt, OLLI switched quickly to online classes at the start of the pandemic — even cheese-tasting and Indian cooking went remote — and the result has been both good and bad. OLLI now has out-of-town students and instructors, but has seen a drop in overall students. While some OLLI members now prefer the convenience of Zoom, the organization still aims to increase in-person courses, at least partly because OLLI students have often valued the community it creates within and outside the classroom.
“We want to keep maintaining that connection” among students, Sharfstein says. “Our community is a good way for people to make and maintain connections” after leaving the work world.
“People come to us and say, ‘You’ve saved my retirement. You’ve saved my life,’ ” says Patricia Szczepanski, OLLI program coordinator since it began in 2005. “ ‘Nobody called me anymore. Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say.’ ” OLLI, she says, “has opened up a whole new world” for students.
OLLI also holds many one-time events and lectures, and OLLI membership offers students the chance to audit up to two Pitt undergraduate courses each year. Members also have the use of Pitt libraries, campus wi-fi and transportation.
Sharfstein believes the travel programs’ return will be welcomed in spring 2024 – exemplified by popular past trips to the Chautauqua Institution, to Gettysburg with an historian and to Egypt with a religious scholar — since their pace and content are specially suited to OLLI members.
She is also aiming to draw new members because of OLLI’s recent move to the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs and its association with the Homewood and Hill District Community Engagement Centers and other programs.
Students, instructors praise experience
Linda Newman and her husband joined OLLI in 2016 (where a membership fee allows unlimited classes), and the pair has taken courses on everything from presidential election campaigns and “Lethal Love Triangles” to ethics and music history.
In retirement, OLLI has allowed them to continue “interacting with folks, meeting some people and being challenged,” Newman says. “During COVID it was a lifesaver,” with each of them taking six courses a term. “The teachers have been exceptional.”
Now, with about 40 percent of classes moving to in person, “it’s nice to see faces again and renew some friendships.”
Leslie Holmes, who retired after 35 years as a first-grade teacher with Keystone Oaks School District, joined OLLI the same year as Newman.
“It’s good once in a while to take a class you wouldn’t normally gravitate to,” she says.
“When I joined Osher, I met a whole new group of people with different interests from different neighborhoods and different parts of the country,” she says, recalling she has learned as much from fellow students as from instructors.
One course, in fact, “changed my life,” she says. Given by Rabbi Ron Symons, senior director of Jewish Life at the city’s Jewish Community Center, it focused on “how ‘neighbor’ isn’t a geographic term, it is a moral concept,” Holmes explains. Now she has been working with local refugees, including one family from Syria who “just became family to us,” she says.
The instructors are pleased about the opportunity to lead OLLI classes as well. Local attorney and Pitt law school adjunct instructor Tom Allen retired from the active practice of law at the end of 2021 and began taking OLLI classes himself. Then in the fall, he taught an OLLI course on last year’s Supreme Court decisions. This spring he has just finished teaching “U.S. vs. Robert Bowers, Constitutional Rights & Supreme Court,” about the case against the shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
“It’s been a good experience for me as a recent retiree — working on things I’m interested in doing,” Allen says. “One of the great things about Osher is that all the students wanted to be there. All the students are very enthusiastic about taking the classes. It tends to be a pretty curious group of people. Somebody who is taking a course on current events is probably keeping up with the world.”
He already plans to teach an OLLI course this fall on last month’s contentious Supreme Court rulings.
Diane Markovitz has been teaching wellness courses at OLLI since 2021 — an exercise class she developed called “Better Balance! Steady and Strong” (for which, thanks to Zoom, she has had as many as 200 students at once) and another original class, “Bone Health! Steady and Strong” began in person this summer.
A 30-year licensed physical therapist and a current Pitt PT adjunct faculty member, she figured OLLI “would be a great way to reach people with practical, functional exercise that could make a difference in their lives.
“I find the Osher students to be wonderfully engaged,” she adds. “They are curious, diligent and very warm. Although we meet over Zoom in a large group setting, I feel like I know many of them well.”
“I will continue to teach for Osher throughout the year, as long as they’ll have me.”
One-term ($150) or annual OLLI memberships ($250) become available again to purchase on July 18, with class registration for the fall opening July 25. Membership terms follow the Pitt academic calendar (fall, spring, summer). The two five-week fall sessions begin Aug. 28 and Oct. 16.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.