Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Quick Links

The OLLI Community
home >> courses

Fall 2008 Courses

Think of it... no tests and no grades, just learning for the joy of it, among friends! Join now or renew your membership for 2008/2009 and register online for popular Fall 2008 courses.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Join us as we explore the treasures in the Spurlock Museum and learn how they are exhibited to the public. (We will even have a chance to create our own exhibit!) The University is fortunate to have a museum of this quality on campus. From an exhibit on Mesopotamia to exhibits featuring the indigenous cultures of Oceania, the Americas, and more, OLLI members will have an opportunity to experience and celebrate the wonderfully diverse cultures, both ancient and modern, highlighted in the permanent galleries. In this six-week class, Spurlock’s professional staff will lead us on an adventure across time and the globe.

Coordinators: Kim Sheahan, Assistant Director of Education, Spurlock Museum and Lynn Chaney, Associate Director, Strategic Initiatives and Special Projects, Alumni Association.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Fridays, 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Duration: 6 weeks, beginning October 10
Location: Spurlock Museum, 600 South Gregory, Urbana, just to the east of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
Course Fee: $25

Early Illinois, 1778-1835: The End of the Middle Ground

In this multi-media class, we will examine the final era in which Illinois was shared between Indians and whites. Before the American Revolution, the Illinois Country had been part of a "Middle Ground"—a time and place in which the French, the British, and Indian tribes like the Illiniwek struggled to understand and to coexist with each other. The fur trade made that possible, but when the new United States took over, that age came to an end.

Pioneer settlers with their family farms represented a way of life that could not share the land with its previous inhabitants. The sixty-year period from George Rogers Clark’s "conquest" of Illinois to the Black Hawk War and the Indian removal of the 1830s provides the framework for this class. We will learn about the periods of violence that brought the Middle Ground to an end: the Revolutionary War, President Washington’s Indian War of the 1790s, the War of 1812, and the Black Hawk War of 1832. We will also explore the growth of the new society: the pioneer days for English-speaking Americans, the statehood movement for Illinois, and the beginning of changes that would end the frontier era forever—canals, railroads, steamships, and the first stages of the remarkable growth of Chicago.

Instructor: Recently retired from the UI Records Office, Fred Christensen has 36 years of teaching experience—history at the University of Kentucky, military science at the University of Illinois, the Command and General Staff Course for the US Army, and noncredit classes in history and related fields for Parkland College and the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Mondays 10:00 am -11:30 am
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 15
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

Gender and Power on Stage

Drama necessarily involves conflict, and the conflict between men and women over power is one of its recurring subjects. This course will sample theatrical representations of the tension between male privilege and women’s drive for independence from the Greeks to the twentieth century. Plays to be discussed include Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Discussion will focus on such issues as the playwrights’ assumptions about men’s and women’s natures, changing views of women’s roles in marriage and society, and the playwrights’ attitudes toward their independent heroines.

Instructor: W. David Kay is professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The author of Ben Jonson: A Literary Life and of essays on Erasmus, Jonson, and Shakespeare, he has taught at the graduate and undergraduate level, with courses in British and world drama, Renaissance literature and culture, and the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Wednesdays, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 17.
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25
Detailed course schedule

Global Warming: An Introduction, Potential Impacts and Possible Solutions

It’s in the news, but many Americans remain unclear about what is happening to our climate, the “expected” weather and its variability, and the American public is still too unaware of the potential impacts of these changes on their lives and on future generations. In fact, global warming may be one of the biggest issues facing humanity in the 21st century. The available evidence strongly indicates that human activities are playing a significant role in bringing about climate change, especially in the last few decades of the 20th Century and the first seven years of the 21st Century. Significant changes in climate as a result of these human activities are projected for the rest of the 21st Century and beyond. Analyses of the climate system also indicate that, without major policy or technology changes, the climate will continue to grow warmer over most of our planet. This course begins with a discussion of the current understanding of the concerns about climate change and the role being played by human activities, then examines the potential resulting impacts on humanity and our planet, and finishes with a discussion of our possible responses to this all too real issue.

Instructor: Donald J. Wuebbles, coordinator of the class, is Director of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment at the University of Illinois and Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Professor Wuebbles is an expert in the physics and chemistry affecting global warming. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Mondays, 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 15.
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

Schedule:
Week one: A Primer on the Earth’s Climate System
Week two: The Evidence for a Human Effect on Climate
Week three: The Future Climate
Week four: Potential Societal Impacts of Global Warming
Week five: Potential Ecological Impacts of Global Warming
Week six: A focus on Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Chicago area
Week seven: Resolution, Solutions, and Sustainability (part 1)
Week eight: Resolution, Solutions, and Sustainability (part 2)

God in Politics: Eight Perspectives on Religion and Democracy

In a pluralistic democracy, should public policy be guided by moral principles that are derived from religious premises? Or should a democracy justify its policies solely on the basis of consensually-shared, secular arguments? Should religion be a solely private matter, playing no role in the public square?

Questions like these have been hotly disputed in recent years. Theologians and philosophers who comprise “the new traditionalism” suggest that modern democratic societies lack a common unifying framework and are morally and spiritually empty.  More secular, liberal philosophers argue that political deliberation should take place independent of any reliance on religious tradition. This course will explore the debate between these two positions, as well as a third possibility, that democracy is itself a tradition, encouraging certain attitudes, a love for certain virtues, and a disposition to respond to certain types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity or horror.  

The course begins as the presidential campaign has reached its height and concludes with its aftermath, affording us an opportunity to observe numerous “real life” examples of some of the contrasting positions and the abstract principles of democracy, tradition, justice, liberty, self-interest and “right” and “good” that we will be discussing. 

Instructor: Robert Alun Jones, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, History, and Sociology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Professor Jones, a popular fall 2007 OLLI instructor, is a member of the Campus Honors faculty and also has appointments in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His major research interests include Durkheim and his intellectual context, the methodology of the history of ideas, and the scholarly use of electronic documents and networked information systems. He teaches courses on the history of religious thought and social theory. 

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Wednesdays, 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 17.
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

Matter, Energy and the Universe: University of Illinois Physics Department Program

Scholars in the University of Illinois Physics Department are world-renowned for their contributions to understanding matter and energy in many forms, and at all scales. In this course, faculty members will help us to understand our fascinating world. They will discuss what the new most powerful accelerator, about to start operations in Switzerland, may soon reveal about the smallest building blocks of the universe and why that matters. We will see how liquid crystals work – they are everywhere! We will learn about nanoparticles, which can be stronger than metals; how strangely things behave near the temperature of absolute zero (and why we should care); and what physicists are learning about the amazing ways in which biological molecules move. We will learn about strange objects in the sky – can we see light from black holes? - and we will explore the fate of the Universe.

Coordinator: Inga Karliner, coordinator of the class, is a physicist who has worked in elementary particle theory and experiment, and observational cosmology. She has initiated and coordinated the Physics Outreach program at the University of Illinois Physics Department that includes the Saturday Physics Honors Program.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Tuesdays, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 16. (Note: There is no class on November 4; the last class will be on November 11.)
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

Schedule details:

More than three states of matter: Liquid crystals are neither liquid nor crystals.
Paul M. Goldbart, Professor of Physics
Quantum World.
Paul G. Kwiat, John Bardeen Professor of Physics, and of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The world of the Absolute Zero.
Brian L. deMarco, Assistant Professor of Physics
Elementary particles: quarks, bosons and what we still don't know (but may soon learn at the Large Hadron Collider).
Tony M. Liss, Professor of Physics
The strange objects in the sky.
Charles F. Gammie, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar
Matter alive – or what can a physicist see in biology.
Paul R. Selvin, Professor of Physics and Biophysics, and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar
The Nanoworld – or over the Moon with carbon nanotubes!
Nadya Mason, Assistant Professor of Physics
Fire or Ice? The Fate of the Universe
Jon J. Thaler, Professor of Physics.

Presidential Elections: Process and Politics

Join Professor Robert Rich, popular instructor for OLLI's course on Health Care Policy in fall 2007, as he takes us behind the scenes for a fascinating look at the 2008 presidential elections. This course is not designed to present one point of view, one candidate or one party over another. The purpose is to deepen our understanding of the political process. Our examination will include the changing role of primaries, the role of campaign finances, a look at past and present presidential debates, the major issues debated in the campaign, the influence of the media and political polls, and the issues facing voters in this election. Our course will end with a discussion after the election: how did it all turn out?

Instructor: Robert F. Rich, Director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs; Professor of Law, Political Science, Medicine, and Public Health, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1986, he served on the faculties of the University of Michigan, Princeton University, and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Mondays, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 22. (One week later than other Monday classes so that the last class is after the election.)
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

Speaking Through the Arts

Imagine that someone has an idea, perhaps, or a feeling. Now imagine that person is an architect or a musician, a painter or a poet. What that person has to say — and how that person says it — will be inextricably linked. The process, and the inherent pleasure we all take in making may seem mysterious, but we can come to know a lot about both.

Join us as we roll up our shirtsleeves and examine works of art from a variety of genres including literature and poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture, music, photography, cinema and drama. What can we learn about the heart and mind of the creator by looking and listening attentively? What can we learn about ourselves in the process?

Instructor: John Lansingh Bennett teaches humanities and arts appreciation courses at Lake Land College and works as a freelance writer and editor. He is the former Associate Editor of Highlights for Children and Senior Editor for publications at the National Council of Teachers of English. He has a passion for sharing all forms of art, and was a popular presenter in OLLI’s Exploring the Arts course in the fall of 2007.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Tuesdays, 10:00 am – 11:30 am
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 16.
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

Download course schedule (PDF)

Taiji (Tai Chi): To Your Health!

The Chinese believe that the ancient wellness exercises of Taiji and Qigong produce the elixir of longevity. Two recent U of I research studies have proven their health benefits for older adults. Qigong (chee-kung) and Taiji - or Tai Chi, as it is more commonly known in the U.S. - combine simple, graceful movements and meditation. Qigong is a series of integrated exercises believed to have positive, relaxing effects on a person's mind, body and spirit. Taiji is a holistic form of exercise, and a type of Qigong that melds Chinese philosophy with martial and healing arts.

In a report released in 2006, the U of I research studies found that healthy seniors who practiced a combination of Qigong and Taiji three times a week for six months experienced significant physical benefits after only two months. In addition, many participants gained noticeable improvements in tests of balance and lower body strength, as well as enhanced sleep quality, concentration, memory, self-esteem, and overall energy levels. These results mirror those found in numerous other studies, including research commissioned by the National Council on Aging and the American Society on Aging. Now students of Professor Yang Yang, the lead researcher in the UI studies, will lead this class in exercises.

Instructors: Michael Reed began studying Taiji with Master Yang at Center for Taiji Studies in 1999. He began working as an assistant teacher in 2001 and currently leads a class at the Center. He was directly involved in Master Yang's research with seniors at the University of Illinois. He has participated in a leadership role at numerous conferences and workshops.

David Skadden has studied Taiji from Master Yang through the Center for Taiji Studies since 2001. He has lead several research classes and currently teaches a class at the Center. He has presented at a variety Taiji workshops and conferences over the years through his affiliation with the Center.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Tuesdays, 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Duration: September 16 through November 4
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

The Western: The Making of an American Myth

Westerns are arguably the defining genre of the American film industry, a nostalgic eulogy to the early days of the United States, offering a vision of an expansive, untamed frontier, mythic tales of national origin, and compelling depictions of the tough, terse men and strong, dedicated women who populated these dangerous, harsh spaces.

The western generally relies on the conventional conflicts of good vs. bad or criminal and virtue vs. malevolence or corruption, and these conflicts are manifested through oppositions such as new arrivals/settlers vs. Native Americans (often portrayed as savage Indians), civilization vs. wilderness or lawlessness, the rugged individualist vs. the community, and the urbane, industrial East vs. the uncouth, rural West, polarities that with a bit of tweaking were convincingly reversed in later films.

The principled, physically adept and coolly confident protagonist helps to establish or restore an order of which he frequently cannot be a part. His resolute independence and patent restlessness in confined spaces make him eager (after he has fought valiantly and violently for the claims of civilization) to light out for the territory.

In this course, we will examine the narrative premises, social constructions, and visual strategies of westerns, assessing their historical significance as well as the versions of gender and race that have often been thought accurate and, not coincidentally, that reflect and corroborate traditional American values.

Course Films

  • Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
  • My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
  • High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
  • Shane (George Stevens, 1953)
  • The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
  • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford,1962)
  • The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah,1969)
  • Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

Instructor: Pat Gill, Associate Professor, Department of Speech Communication and the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Professor Gill studies gender and film, popular culture, and interpretive and psychoanalytic theories. She has taught numerous courses in and written extensively on media, film and cultural studies, and comes back to OLLI by popular demand, after the success of the “Film Noir” and “Hitchcock” courses.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Wednesdays, 5:15 to 8:30pm
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning on September 17
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

Visual Culture: From Art to Persuasion

How do we interpret (and misinterpret) images? When two people look at the same image do they see that image differently because of their background and emotions? In this course we learn how to recognize, analyze, and understand the meaning of a wide range of visual images generated in our multicultural world.

  Visual presentations and discussions will focus on using historical, cultural, technical, ethical, and critical perspectives as well as semiotics (the study of signs), in interpreting works of art, design, film, and other visual forms.  

Topics include the principles of visual perception and basics of visual composition, the process of visual persuasion in advertising and politics, the drama of visual time and space, visual humor, the art of information design, and body language.

Instructor: Tom Kovacs taught at the University of Minnesota Duluth and is Professor Emeritus of Art and Design at the University of Illinois and a member of the Campus Honors faculty. He is a practicing professional artist and designer of books, posters and magazines. While at Illinois, Professor Kovacs was recipient of a UIUC Undergraduate Instructional Award for course development; appointed to the UIUC Center for Advanced Study for research in computer imaging, and received the UIUC Campus Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Thursdays, 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 18.
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25

The World of Beethoven: Music and the Rise of the Middle Class

Ask most people to name a classical composer, and Beethoven will inevitably be the most frequent response. It is fair to say that no subsequent composer in the western tradition has been unaffected by his influence. This multi-media class will help us understand and enjoy the music of Beethoven and examine the social and historical context in which he created his music.

Beethoven’s life coincided with the rise of a middle class in Europe, which shifted the locus of musical activity from an exclusively court setting, and created the modern concept of a public concert. This social development is mirrored in the growth of the orchestra from what we would call a chamber ensemble to the larger orchestra of the 19th century. It required works of longer duration to justify the larger forces, and it fostered the role of virtuosic performance for large audiences. All of this is mirrored in Beethoven’s music. At the same time, Beethoven became more reclusive and personally isolated as time went on, particularly from around 1812. His music correspondingly became more personal and inward-looking. We will return several times in this class to the dynamics of the world of the large and the world of the small.

Instructor: Peter Michalove holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition from the University of Illinois, and has composed extensively for orchestra and chamber and vocal ensembles. He is particularly interested in music of the classical period (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), and the 20th century. He has given numerous lectures on various aspects of music

Semester: Fall 2008
Day and Time: Thursdays 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Duration: 8 weeks, beginning September 18.
Location: OLLI at the Research Park, 2021 South First Street, Champaign
Course Fee: $25
Download detailed schedule

Back to top

Printer-friendly version

Past Semesters