For Denise McGough, the Evergreen Forum’s “Science in the News” class was a real life-changer. After getting a D in high school chemistry, she says she “was intimidated about studying any science.” But after she retired, she realized that “my only regret was that I didn’t take any more classes in science.” So, when she saw this class in the course list, she decided to take the plunge, figuring “I’ll just be there and be a sponge.”
McGough says, “They create a wonderful atmosphere for you to learn and to feel comfortable. They get excited about the topic and encourage you to ask questions.” And her fellow students, she adds, “ask fantastic questions. I learn just as much from the students as from the instructors.”
“It has made a real difference in my life,” McGough continues. “It encouraged me to subscribe to ‘Science News’ and other magazines.” Also, when her daily life raises questions about science, she now pursues them. “l love going to the shore,” she says, “and I have taken out library books about beach erosion and oceanography.”
She also now looks at the world from a scientific perspective. After a Texas school shooting, she was able to discern from viewing the sun’s location in a news report that the school did not face east as did the one where her brother was a substitute teacher. Her analytic approach saved her from a bout of serious worrying.
Over her five years taking “Science in the News,” McGough says that her “favorite moment was last spring, April 5, 2024, at 10:23 a.m. In the middle of class we had an earthquake, and immediately a panelist got on the US Geological Survey site and found out it was 4.8 on Richter scale.” She also reels off a tantalizing list of other favorite topics, including the physical forces at play in the Baltimore bridge collapse, how Neanderthals and homo sapiens crossed paths in France, and gray hair.
The class, facilitated by Harold Heft and a panel of scientists, was initiated by two of the Forum’s founders, Harry Pinch and David Southgate. It was called “Science Tuesday,” because that’s when the NY Times published its science supplement, but the class met on Fridays. This fall’s class runs Fridays, October 3 through November 2, from 10 a.m. to noon.
For its work in lifelong learning, the Evergreen Forum will receive a leadership award at the Center for Modern Aging Princeton’s Fall Benefit on Thursday, September 11, 5:30 p.m. at 101 Poor Farm Road, Princeton, as the “community impact honoree.” Other awardees will be Albert Stark as “individual honoree” and Penn Medicine Princeton Health as “corporate honoree.” General admission, $275; patron level, $1,250.
Interested in creating a peer-led learning program, the Evergreen Forum’s founders, who also include Judith Pinch and Carolyn Wilson, investigated different possibilities, but they “all wanted to have an organization that would be homegrown and not under the domination of any particular institution,” suggests longtime teacher and volunteer Elaine Jacoby.
After Wilson and Judith Pinch visited Harvard University’s successful lifelong learning program in the late 1990s, the founders had their model. Next came finding space to meet, which was initially provided by the Princeton Senior Resource Center, now Center for Modern Aging Princeton (CMAP). As the Forum quickly grew from its initial four classes and 40 participants in 2001, CMAP became its administrative arm.
The Forum’s growth came out of the desire of many who had audited university classes to actively participate in their own learning or to teach themselves.
“It was a discussion-based experience, where teachers provide the topics and themes, and sometimes the readings. A lot of learning came from everybody contributing their knowledge, perspective, and opinions to create a forum-like experience,” explains Judith Wooldridge, current steering committee chair for the Forum, who retired as senior vice president at Mathematica, heading up the health research group.
Many Forum teachers choose to teach classes based on their professional expertise. Jacoby’s earliest classes on civil and women’s rights, for example, made use of her experience teaching many seminars for her legal clients on the prevention of workplace harassment. She later took over an existing biennial class covering Congressional and presidential elections.
This fall Jacoby will be teaching “Media on the Edge: Journalism, Influencers, and Artificial Intelligence,” Wednesdays, October 8 through November 26. The classes will be hybrid, each beginning with a semi-lecture format, open to student questions, followed by an hour of topical discussion.
Asked about how the Forum has influenced her life, Jacoby mentions a class she took early on that she loved, led each week by a different docent at the Princeton University Art Museum. The class led to an invitation to become a museum docent, which has added an unexpected, very special dimension to her existence.
Lest people think that all Evergreen Forum teachers are experts in what they are teaching (that is, retired professors, scientists, lawyers), Wooldridge is a great example of someone with other valid prerequisites: passion, dedication, and a lifetime of relevant experience.
“My job involved teaching people,” she recalls. “I had run many projects, mentored many people, and figured out what worked.” At the same time, she adds, “I never stopped reading my whole life, and probably two-thirds of what I read is fiction.” So she combined her teaching experience, her love of literature, and her willingness to invest considerable time in preparation to create her first Evergreen class.
“I had a passion for an English writer, Ivy Compton-Burnett,” who was, she says, “deliciously, acerbically ironic.” Knowing that Compton-Burnett had been strongly influenced by Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh” and that she had similarly influenced many younger English writers, she had a structure for that first class.
Becoming an Evergreen teacher in 2016 without actual experience teaching literature meant that Wooldridge had to develop her own process, which she did with aid from Vladimir Nabokov’s two books highlighting his lectures on literature.
“I was so fascinated by the painstaking way he read books,” Wooldridge says. She recalls Nabokov describing a crucial scene in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” where the families of a couple about to be married take a walk in a garden and end up “hot, bothered, and annoyed with one another.” To better understand the action in the scene, Nabokov drew the garden for his students, indicating where each character was and what happened to them.
Before reading Nabokov, Wooldridge says, her approach to reading had been different. “I read books very fast and have an excellent memory, but I really didn’t take books apart. I learned from Nabokov. Now I’ll do drawings and map out timelines. I want to see what is happening under the surface of the book.”
Wooldridge’s first step in preparing a class is making sure she really knows her course material. “Preparing means reading and thinking,” she says. “I would read the books seven times. Every time you read them you find something new.” Sometimes she will leave a month between readings, because “all kinds of ideas will bubble up.”
“I don’t know if people who are professional English teachers would prepare the way I do,” she adds, noting that she does not usually read criticism — although it is easily available online and her students sometimes indulge.
Wooldridge will be teaching a class this fall, Tuesdays, October 7 through November 4, on three Southern writers, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Tim Gautreaux, exploring whether there is a distinctive Southern voice, content, or humor.
For Wooldridge, teaching at the Evergreen Forum has been a learning experience and fun. “You meet new people with new ideas; they see things that you haven’t necessarily seen in a book. And there’s a lot of laughter as well.”
The Forum is propelled by volunteers — both members of the steering committee and its subcommittees, who deal with policy, curriculum, teachers, and outreach, and the teachers in the classrooms and online — as well as CMAP staff, supervised by Krista Hendrickson, director of programs for CMAP. Staff are responsible for the administrative side of the Forum’s operation: marketing, registration, and the coordination of all the technology, including tech volunteers and course managers on staff who support teachers.
Teachers often find themselves also on the governance side of the Forum. Jacoby, for example, made what she sees as an important contribution to the sustainability of the Forum. In 2008-2009 when she first joined the steering committee, she says, she found it to be “a little disorganized … with no formal structure.” She was able to help remedy this when, a couple years later, the chair asked her to work on a project “to create a structure that would enable the organization to move ahead, a strategic plan.”
Soon after Wooldridge became steering committee chair in 2020, she devoted a committee session to brainstorming what became a mission statement: “The Evergreen Forum’s mission is to provide accessible, lifelong learning opportunities through stimulating, daytime lecture and discussion courses of interest to a diverse, engaged community of participants and volunteer course leaders.”
The COVID pandemic brought other changes in CMAP. When it hit at the beginning of the 2020 spring semester, course leaders had to go virtual to continue teaching, and most were willing. Both instructors and participants had to be trained to handle the tech side of Zoom, and volunteer virtual technical assistants were brought on to help manage the Zoom classes, explains Hendrickson.
In 2022, as the Forum contemplated in-person classes again, they decided to offer a mix of possibilities: in-person, virtual only, and hybrid classes that combine in-person and virtual. They maintained virtual classes, Hendrickson explains, not just because a subset of people did not feel safe coming back into the classroom, but because they gave aging teachers an opportunity to extend their work at the Forum post-pandemic.
“We have quite a number of instructors who love teaching but couldn’t drive anymore or commute too far or who were home recovering from surgeries but were comfortable and able to teach on Zoom,” Hendrickson says.
Virtual classes also allowed the Forum to continue serving students from across the country who joined during the pandemic.
Over time, the leadership also realized that six- to eight-week classes did not work for all students and teachers, so today class lengths range from three to eight weeks. “The name of our game is variety,” Hendrickson says. “We want to program to everybody as much as we can.”
Wooldridge grew up in Bookham, a village in Surrey 25 miles south of London. Her mother was an occasional telephone operator and her father a telephone engineer. She especially remembers Bookham’s small branch library. “We went to the library all the time. I had read all the children’s books by the time I was 10,” she says.
She chose Keele University, in the north Midlands, because it had a four-year program, including an initial “foundation” year, where she “studied everything from the beginning of the universe to current-day politics. I never wanted to be too narrowly defined.” Her “principals” were politics, philosophy, and economics and her “subsidiary” was biology. She earned a master’s degree in contemporary European economics at Reading University.
Wooldridge began her career as a research associate at the University of Birmingham’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies, focusing on new and expanding towns and on housing. When she moved to Princeton, she started as a research assistant at Mathematica, working mostly in the health area on insurance coverage, Medicaid, and Medicare.
Wooldridge retired from Mathematica in 2011 but did not join the Evergreen Forum’s steering committee until 2020, after finishing a stint as president of the board of Passage Theater.
Jacoby earned a master’s degree in English literature at Ohio State University, then taught for several years at universities and colleges. In 1975 she graduated from Rutgers Law School and spent five years in a large law firm. She then spent six years managing litigation for Beneficial Finance System, then practiced in local offices of New York law firm Epstein Becker Green and the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris. She retired in 2006.
McGough was born in Brooklyn, but her father’s observations of children playing happily in the fields while he was a soldier in Italy during World War II led to a decision to raise his children in the country. In an “absolutely gorgeous” setting in West Milford, New Jersey, six miles from the New York border, she and her six younger siblings developed an appreciation of nature.
McGough graduated with a degree in education from Rider University and taught English as a Second Language in a storefront school in downtown New Brunswick, sponsored by Middlesex County College, where she also taught a basic adult education class. She then worked for many years as a secretary in the office of the academic dean at Princeton Theology Seminary. She appreciated the professors, her colleagues, and the students, and tended especially to the needs of the adjunct professors. “I felt useful, wanted, and loved,” she says.
She is grateful to both of her parents. Her father was an elementary school principal who always told her, “Never stop learning.” From her mother, who raised seven children, she learned how to take care of other people.
Hendrickson spent most of her childhood in Linwood, New Jersey, and her teens in Summit. As an undergraduate at Rowan University, she focused on communication studies and writing arts. Her master’s from the University of South Florida is in student affairs. She worked initially in higher education, programming for college freshmen, but says of her three years at the Evergreen Forum, “I now do programming with people who want to be in the room with me, which is great.”
Hendrickson’s favorite days of the year are registration days. “If you’re ever here on registration day, you can feel the energy of people vibrating, and my energy skyrockets with that feeling of happiness and connection.” This year fall registration opened on August 26 at 9:30 a.m. Usually, she says, by 10:30 about 200 people have registered for class, and by the end of day 1 about 300. Today the Forum typically averages about 550 students each semester, with 22 to 26 classes offered in the spring and in the fall.
But it is not only the classes that draw people to the forum — it is also being part of the Forum community. Wooldridge explains: “As we get older, we start losing long-term friends, and we have to make new friends. We can’t just wither down to nobody; we are social beings,” she observes, noting that in class people meet others “they can talk to” and after class “often go off to have coffee.”
Looking back over the last quarter century, Wooldridge says, “I am very proud of this program: it’s intellectually extremely good, stimulating, and offers daytime classes for older people. Princeton Adult School classes were always in the evening, but older people like to go to bed early and get up early.”
“Maintaining the program over 25 years,” she continues, “means constantly bringing in new people who are going to absorb the precepts and take part in running the program into the future. It’s not going to stay exactly the same.”
Register for Fall 2025
Registration for the Fall 2025 Evergreen Forum is now open. This semester marks 25 years of fostering curiosity, conversation, and community for older adults. This milestone season offers a rich variety of in-person, virtual, and hybrid courses that invite participants to engage their minds, share perspectives, and discover new ideas.
Participants are able to select up to two courses. Telephone and mail applications will not be accepted. To register, visit cmaprinceton.org.
This fall’s offerings include topics in literature, history, science, culture, politics, and personal well-being. Featured courses include:
Ammonites and Cleopatra: Two by Penelope Lively — Explore the humor, energy, and insight of Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively through her memoir Dancing Fish and Ammonites and the novel Cleopatra’s Sister. Led by veteran educator Lynne Cullinane, this six-week virtual course invites readers to immerse themselves in vivid storytelling and thought-provoking themes.
The Rule of Law: Historical Case Studies — Examine the foundations and evolution of the rule of law through pivotal historical moments, from 17th-century England to the modern-day United States. Retired Princeton University history professor Stanley N. Katz and retired New Jersey judge Philip Carchman guide participants through constitutional struggles, revolutions, and contemporary challenges to this essential democratic principle.
Applying Precepts of Buddhist Thought for Well-Being — Learn how principles of patience, curiosity, and generosity from Buddhist philosophy can enhance your daily life and sense of belonging. Dr. Robin Shapiro, author of The Buddha Lives in New Jersey, brings decades of study and teaching to this engaging and practical course.
Course fees: $95 for three- to four-week courses and $125 for five- to eight-week courses. Scholarships are available for those for whom the fee is a hardship. Visit cmaprinceton.org/evergreen-forum for more information.
