PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

President’s Corner for February 12, 2016

            We survived the Super Bowl…Payton Manning can retire with distinction…and “Hail Caesar” was a delight. So what’s on our calendar this week?

Human life—indeed all life—is poetry. It’s we who live it, unconsciously, day by day, like scenes in a play, yet in its inviolable wholeness it lives us, it composes us. This is something far different from the old cliché “Turn your life into a work of art”; we are works of art—but we are not the artist. [Writer/Psychoanalyst Lou Adreas-Salome]

            Angela’s final day with OLLI will be February 19…next week. I would urge each of you to let her know what she has meant to you and to our efforts to make our OLLI at WVU a success, and it is a very good success in our community. Her three and a half years here has been a time of growth, consolidation, creativity and excitement.  I wager Angela’s favorite word would be “exciting,” which she often uses to describe classes, a whole term’s worth of offerings, the initiative to create a branch OLLI in Charleston, the 100K Club, and all of our special events. As I write this, Angela is hard at work finishing the mock-up of the spring term catalog, so it can receive its final editing and corrections by the curriculum committee. She is cleaning her computer files and sorting through paper files to insure that the new director will have a clean slate to begin a new administration. She will definitely be leaving us in much better shape than when she arrived.

            The director’s position has been posted with WVU Human Resources, and we’ll hope to have some interviews soon.  The Board has appointed a small committee to interview candidates and make recommendations to the School of Public Health consisting of Ann Davidson, Connie McCluskey, Bob Craig, Tom Rogers and myself. We’ll keep you as up-to-date as possible during the process.

            Before my retirement in 2013, I had served OLLI only in the capacity of teaching a couple of classes each year, so I did not have an intimate knowledge of its history going back to Appalachian Lifelong Learners (ALL). I hear the occasional comment that some wish we still had that old ALL spirit where everyone volunteered and managed the whole thing. I’ve also heard the stories about Irv Goodman, then president, who took us down the road of joining the Osher world. For me and others, this begs the question: are we better off under the Osher banner. As an old, retired administrator that believes in good governance, my answer would be one of those no-brainers…yes, we are better off.  We have a million dollar endowment, enormous support from the School of Public Health and the WVU President’s office, a professional director and small staff, and we do still have a significant volunteer presence, a prime requirement of the Osher Fdn. Administrators should all be trained at birth to think globally, to see beyond the tiny, tribal concerns of any small group, and work for the good of the whole, which is what we all wish our national government would do. Yes, we still have the challenge to maintain at least 500 members and to volunteer as the spirit or duty moves us, but let’s all regard this transition to a new director as a golden opportunity to take the next step and insure our OLLI’s future for the good of our community and state.

            Please join me in wishing Angela great success in her next steps and in thanking her for her exciting service to this organization…send a card, write an email, drop by, but briefly—she’ll be busy until 5 PM on February 19!

Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away. [Abraham Lincoln, Wisconsin, 1859]

            Onward and upward, Angela!

Jim Held, President