My Learning Vacation at Cornell's Adult University Has Been Like Returning To Those Joyous Years As An Undergrad

For four days now, I have been a Cornellian -- a one-week student at Cornell's Adult University in Ithaca, New York. And although I'm simply on a one-week learning vacation, and not really enrolled at any college, the experience has been so exhilarating that I've been hearing, in my mind, those unforgettable lyrics about the time that most of us spent at a place of study: "Bright College years, with pleasure rife, the shortest, gladdest years of life ..."

For four days, I've been strolling an immense campus, past all sorts of shrines to a better world: a quad of liberal arts, a giant library, a science building, the music school, the art museum, the medical school, the law school, the school of architecture, theaters, auditoriums, laboratories and other research facilities. I've studied my assigned readings while sitting against a two hundred year old tree on a grassy expanse. I've seen groups of high school seniors, their faces alive with expectation, as they went about their guided campus tours.

I've eaten in student cafeterias where nearly half the undergrads seem vegetarians from the contents of their trays; I've been surrounded by stern admonitions to respect the environment, to use only bio-degradable materials for my containers and bags. I've witnessed the unusually high percentage of Asian students, and students from other countries, that today make up part of the student bodies of leading U.S. universities. In the student union, and other lounges, I've engaged in active and enlivening conversations with people willing to accommodate new ideas, ready to ponder provocative theories and beliefs, unwilling to close their minds.

And best of all, I've been invited to stretch my mind in courses where the level of discourse is infinitely higher than most of us experience in our normal lives, or in the publications we routinely read.

At the best of U.S. universities, people are searching for knowledge and answers, they are ready to jettison the irrational phobias and conventions that most of us encounter in non-academic life. I have found that to be the case in my earlier learning vacations, and it has been wonderfully refreshing to return to that same student openness this past week.
 
I have two more days of classes, and then a closing, Friday evening farewell banquet, at which we'll express our thanks to the teachers who have taken time in summer to conduct classes for an adult audience. Cornell's Adult University, like the Summer Classics at St. John's College in Santa Fe, takes place for four consecutive weeks ending around August 6. You can sign up for one to four weeks in 2012, and expect to pay around $1,500 for tuition, room and board, coffee breaks, open bar (in the CAU lounge), parking, and much more, per week. The full details are found at www.sce.cornell.edu/cau .