Cornell's Summer Learning Vacation Program Holds up Against the Best of Them

It is a common mistake among persons who comment on learning vacations to assume that Cornell's Adult University in Ithaca, New York, is not of the same level of learning, the same profundity, as the summer classes in Britain's Oxford or Cambridge, or America's St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To some extent, that mistake results from the fact that Cornell sprinkles its summer curriculum with some courses of light entertainment, like Wine Cultivation. And Cornell also offers children's courses that enable parents to bring their offspring with them to Ithaca. Children go to their own classrooms at 9am, have lunch with the other children, and are not handed back to parents until late afternoon.

Apart from these light touches, Cornell's Adult University, in summer, is as intellectually respectable as anything at Oxford, Cambridge, and St. John. And I say that as someone who has now taken summer courses at all four. Roberta and I are in the midst of a great adventure, to which we're being introduced by Professor Glenn Altschuler of Cornell's history department (he is also a Vice President of the University) and Professor Faust Rossi of the Cornell Law School.

Professors Altschuler and Rossi are conducting the class on "Political Trials" which we will now be pursuing for five consecutive days, from 9am to 3:30pm. It has been a great adventure. We have heard remarkable lectures by these two eminent scholars and then participated with them in a free-wheeling, no-holds-barred discussion of the issues raised by the trials of Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart, of Tokyo Rose and the "Hollywood Ten," of the Haymarket Labor Martyrs and the Suffragette Alice Paul.

Evenings, we've gone to lectures by other eminent Cornell professors (on a variety of scholarly topics), seen a foreign art film screened in a university auditorium, and tomorrow we'll be taking a tour of the architectural highlights of the huge Cornell campus. We've talked with fellow participants (adults from all over the nation, aged 30 through 80) in a Cornell lounge stocked with free wine and beer, visited the University's renowned Museum of Art, taken our meals in a student dining room where several different stations offer every conceivable kind of food.

Going back to college, which we're now doing, is an immensely refreshing, eye-opening experience, about which I'll have more to report tomorrow. In a four-week session of adult classes, Cornell is now in its fourth and last week of the summer. Your own opportunity to attend must wait until the summer of 2012. You might want to start planning now, by seeking out the various websites of Cornell's Adult University.