back
|
 |
In retirement, many return to campus life
By Mary Deibel, KnoxNews
October 29, 2003
Larry and Amber Henninger earned their degrees from Stanford University a half century ago. Now that retirement is approaching, the two business consultants plan to grow old together on the same campus where they met when young.
"We're avid Stanford Cardinals fans and active in Stanford's Hoover Institution think tank," says Amber Henninger, 69 and Stanford class of 1955. "We want to maintain an active lifestyle, but we want to be active even if we can't drive. With our new home we can."
Larry Henninger, 70 and Stanford class of 1954, learned what it is to be inactive after he broke his back skiing. Now that he's back on the slopes, he anticipates moving to the 388-apartment continuing-care community Classic Residences that Hyatt is building on Stanford property in Palo Alto, Calif. "It's within walking distance or a free shuttle bus ride of everything," he says.
The Henningers are in the forefront of a trend. The back-to-campus movement has caught fire with seniors, although few are as upscale as Stanford's with its entry fees of $600,000 to $4 million.
There are four dozen on-campus retirement communities in place or in the works from Notre Dame and Penn State to Ithaca College and the University of Florida. Another 50 are studying the idea, says Leon Pastalan, head of the National Center on Housing and Living Arrangements for Older Americans at the University of Michigan.
"Traditional retirement communities provide lots for the body but not for the soul, but people today are no longer satisfied with a condominium on the fifth green," he says.
Pastalan believes retirees want mental stimulation - taking courses, going to concerts, plays and museums, rooting for a favorite team and other sweeteners - besides being physically active. The icing often is top-flight health care at university medical centers.
However, Pastalan is quick to add that more than one model of lifelong learning communities has developed: "There's not one cookie-cutter answer or one-size-fits-all approach. Each college, community and retiree decides what's best," he says.
The back-to-campus drive got going in 1962. That year:
- The New School University in New York City opened the Learning Institute for Retired Professionals.
It was the first of what would grow to be more than 500 learning centers serving close to 200,000 seniors in North America, according to Nancy Merz Nordstrom, head of the Elderhostel Institute Network in Boston, an umbrella group for 319 learning-in-retirement institutes. These "health clubs for the brain" offer everything from art history, literature and the humanities to ballroom dancing and personal finance management for seniors who may have a Ph.D. or who never went to college, says Nordstrom.
Indiana University President Herman Wells proposed on-campus living for retired faculty and staff. His idea led to construction of Meadowood on 35 acres of woodlands leased from the university.
No sooner had ground been broken than cost overruns and construction delays sent Meadowood into receivership. Wells pledged $1 million of his own money to turn Meadowood around, says Indiana history professor and Wells biographer James Capshew.
Eventually sold for $13 million to a private manager, today Meadowood is not only solvent, it has a waiting list of 145 for its 230 units, according to development spokeswoman Kimber McElhinney.
It's not just residents who benefit from the back-to-campus movement; campuses benefit too, says Robben Fleming, onetime University of Wisconsin chancellor and former University of Michigan president.
Fleming, now 86, has lived on one campus or another since he and his wife Sally were college sweethearts at Beloit College in Wisconsin. The couple decided to retire to Ann Arbor and Michigan's 92-unit University Commons.
"It's natural for people like us who spent so much of our lives in academia to retire to a place like this," Fleming says. "We're surrounded by people we know in our 'no-retire' retirement, what with ongoing education and the audience we provide for students. It's a healthy way to live."
Duke University's Institute for Learning in Retirement started with a few non-credit courses for non-residential seniors 25 years ago and has grown to more than 60 classes for 1,200 students from North Carolina's Research Triangle region of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.
Membership is $25 a year, plus $75 for one course and $135 for two to five courses - a bargain compared to the $3,500-a-course Duke charges for-credit students for a one-semester course, Institute executive director Sara Craven says.
Dan Pollitt, 82, says he "leaped at the chance to teach again" at the Duke Institute after retiring as a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina. He loves the fact "it's no grades, no exams; just people who want to be there and learn. Of course, they can always go off on a Caribbean cruise when they want."
This fall he is teaching "free speech" to 25 students and next semester a class on the Supreme Court. "After we discuss a case, we vote on it," he says. "I must say we're a lot more liberal than the current Supreme Court crew."
In Charlottesville, Va., the Jefferson Institute for Lifelong Learning meets mostly off-campus because on-campus parking is scarce. Current and retired University of Virginia professors are faculty, but so are former ambassadors, military brass and corporate chieftains who retired to the Blue Ridge foothills.
"Charlottesville makes everyone's best-places-to-retire list, enough so that people who've retired here wish it would stop being listed," says Jim McGrath, 71, UVA class of 1957. McGrath co-founded the Jefferson Institute two years ago after the communications executive decided to move back to Charlottesville from North Carolina.
Now, Jefferson Institute has 538 students in 40 courses and fields requests for 3,500 catalogs a year from current and would-be Charlottesville retirees.
Also making best-places lists is Gainesville, Fla., where the University of Florida Foundation is building Oak Hammock, a 256-unit community slated to open in March.
"The goal is to create something new with our $125 million facility, which has its own 'dean of residents' to help people who move here to stay mentally and physically fit," says foundation vice president Leslie Bram.
Oak Hammock is already 60 percent presold - one-third to University of Florida alumni - and each resident has the run of the area including swimming pool, tennis courts, health club, walking trails and activity rooms. And residents get the same "Gator One" card as students and faculty that can be used at the university library, Gator games and other campus activities including course audits that Florida law provides free to people 65 and older.
Author David Savageau, who is finishing the sixth edition of his "Retirement Places Rated" (John Wiley & Sons), reports that Florida is one of 41 states to waive or cut tuition sharply for retirees auditing courses at state colleges and universities.
Fort Collins-Loveland, Colo., topped his fifth edition, thanks in part to the presence of Colorado State University. While Savageau won't tip his hand on the list he is massaging from new Census Bureau data, he agrees college towns have an edge because of the amenities, services, job prospects and quality-of-life that count in his ratings.
Like others, Savageau expects the back-to-campus trend to accelerate once 76 million baby boomers start collecting Social Security checks less than five years from now, as does generational trends expert William Strauss.
"College towns are the closest thing boomers have to the beaches of Normandy as a unifying force," Strauss says. "Where the GI generation moved to Sun City, boomers will move to Sedona, Ariz., and other places that offer mental and physical stimulation. Boomers have grazed on every phase of life so far and are poised to reinvent elder hood."
Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
Terms of Use | Privacy
Policy | Contact Us
|
