In 1962, a group of 152 New York City retired schoolteachers founded a scholarly home for themselves in Greenwich Village where they organized a learning community at The New School. This fall, the Institute for Retired Professionals (IRP) celebrates 50 years of growth as the world’s pioneering program in adult peer-learning, in which members of an educational community work together equally to learn from and teach each other.
The Institute for Retired Professionals started its activities under the leadership of retired schoolteacher and attorney Hy Hirsch, who responded enthusiastically to the teachers’ reaction to the paternalistic nature of other programs for retirees. The original IRP students developed a unique community of peer-learners in which all shared responsibility for the scholarly adventure. They were simultaneously curriculum creators, teachers and students. Allen Austill, the New School dean who coordinated with the group, spent many years at the University of Chicago and was familiar both with Saul Alinsky’s thinking on community-based organizations and Paulo Freire’s work on involving people in the management of their own destinies.
The group’s chosen meeting place was no accident. Since its founding in 1919, The New School had stood for advanced adult learning—in the words of its founders, “educating the educated.” Further, The New School’s reputation as a magnet for progressive thinkers made the university an attractive institutional home. At the time of its founding, the IRP was part of an early wave of empowerment movements among formerly overlooked groups. The IRP came into being shortly after the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but before either the March on Washington, the Stonewall Uprising or the publication of The Feminine Mystique. Like student organizations that advocated for sexual, racial and economic equality, the IRP aimed (and still aims) to challenge a formerly ignored group on campuses and to involve them in developing and directing their own academic program.
Today, IRP students, who range in age from 52 to 98, develop and participate in challenging study groups such as a year-long consideration of Joyce’s Ulysses or Marcel Proust, as well as a study group called The Intersection of Science and Philosophy. Other study groups include 19th Century French Novel, Consciousness, Vietnam War, the Italian Post-War Film, Mathematics and the Arts, The Experience of Place in Contemporary Memoirs, Darwinism and Post-Darwinism, and a history of Censorship.
While the IRP continues its affiliation with The New School, the peer-learning model the group developed has extended far beyond Greenwich Village. Among other things, it resulted in welcoming to college campuses people who had formerly been excluded and, at the same time, contributed to a dialogue addressing the changing paradigm of aging and retirement. With the passing of time, the IRP grew into a broad movement of more than 400 campus-based organizations known as the ILR (Institute for Learning in Retirement) movement. Presently, 400 campus-based programs follow this model. Many of them are affiliated with the Elderhostel Institute Network, founded in 1989, which acts as a clearing house for existing ILRs and assists in forming new groups.
The IRP invites all members of the Greenwich Village community to join us for a series of events celebrating our 50th anniversary, including a series of discussions on current affairs, as well as the world premiere of “Fanfare for the IRP,” a new composition. For 50th Anniversary event information and schedules, please contact 212.2295682, write irp@newschool.edu. For more information about the IRP—including the application process—visit www.newschool.edu/irp.
