Minnesota college caters to elderly

The Washington Post

NORTHFIELD, Minn. - Spring quarter at the Cannon Valley Elder Collegium began last week. Students made their way to classes rather slowly, but hardly anyone was late. Some came in wheelchairs, others used walkers. Some steadied themselves by leaning on friends, arriving arm-in-arm with a classmate.

Blind in one eye, Julia Savina sat pitched forward in her seat, using a magnifying glass to read the course syllabus she had just been handed. The instructor prints everything in extra large type for the students in his technology class, but Savina still needs a little help seeing.

She is 81.

Last semester, she enrolled in a course on Amish history but had to drop out when she fell and hurt her hip. The retired schoolteacher returned to studies after four weeks of physical therapy.

"My husband died in 1995, and I really need this mental stimulation," Savina said, easing into a chair to talk after class. "I had so much fun last term learning to write poetry, which I never thought I could do."

Gray-haired and frail, she smiles as she leans back into her chair. "You can only play so much bingo, you know."

And so it goes here at perhaps the nation's only institution of higher education designed specifically for the aged. The students' bodies may be weakened, but their spirits are willing. If some are hard of hearing, their minds are hungry.

The Cannon Valley Elder Collegium opened last fall in this cozy little two-college town 40 miles south of Minneapolis. A group of retired professors and academics rounded up roughly $8,000 in government grants and recruited nearly 30 of the former faculty members who live in town to teach college-level courses with titles such as "The Drama of Henrik Ibsen," "Goethe's Faust" and "The Fur Trade in North America."

Enrollment this quarter has jumped to about 50 students, most over age 65 and many in their eighties, although no one knows for sure because "at our age we don't go around asking people how old they are," said Ron Ronning, a retired high school humanities teacher.

Collegium students can receive continuing education credits, but no grades are given, no degrees conferred. No one here is looking for any of that.

04-15-98