Instructor Profile - Jim Wright
Jim Wright
Meet Jim Wright - by Jim Wright and Ursula Nebiker December 2016
When he was in his senior year at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, Jim was required to read a book of essays by various authors about the meaning and purpose of our lives. His ponderings on these matters led directly into a vocation and, in retirement, to convening classes in philosophy at OLLI.
Jim Wright’s youth was spent in the protective bubble of the Lawrenceville School’s leafy campus where his father taught English for 44 years and was, for some of those years, a house master. The school grounds at the then boys-only boarding school were beautiful, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 19th century. Jim remembers his teachers as distinct characters all of whom had nicknames which suited them. The combination of this individuality and commitment to community made a lasting impression on Jim and led directly to his choice of teaching as a vocation.
After finishing secondary school at Lawrenceville, he went against the family tradition of attending Union College in Schenectady, NY and enrolled at Wesleyan in Middletown, CT instead. There he majored in English; his plan was to teach in an independent secondary boarding school after graduation. When his Lawrenceville chaplain suggested that he pursue theological studies instead of teaching and nominated him for a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, he chose to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
“The mandate of the fellowship was to figure out whether the parish ministry was a suitable vocation for me. During that time, my field work included an inner-city parish in New York City, a suburban church in Englewood, NJ, and a rural parish in the middle of Pennsylvania near State College.” After his second year at Union, Jim was offered the opportunity to run a program called A Christian Ministry in the National Parks in Grand Teton National Park, WY. Theministry held services for tourists and park employees outdoors and in hotels and lodges. He also worked as a desk clerk at Jackson Lake Lodge. He supervised eight other seminary and college students who carried out ministries in the park’s many venues.
After the summer in the Tetons, Jim transferred to Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, PA, where he assisted David Noel Freedman, the professor of Old Testament who was editor of the Anchor Bible and the Journal of Biblical Literature. He and Freedman had met as summer neighbors on Nantucket during his college years.
In May, 1959, he earned an M. Div. degree from that seminary, married Sarah Shaw whom he met through Freedman, and returned to Nantucket as minister of Union Chapel in Siasconset where he preached for the following three summers. Chaplaincies in secondary boarding schools followed which included teaching religion classes. The first was at Darrow School in New Lebanon, NY, whose site and buildings had been the home of a principal Shaker community in the 18th and 19th centuries, and sparked in Jim a continuing fascination with Shaker life which he fosters in some of his music choices, reading choices, and in annual visits to the only remaining Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, ME.
At Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, MA where he was the first Chaplain, he set up an interfaith council of students to help run the chapel program, and supervised a student work camp in Puerto Rico during spring vacation. At Chatham College in Pittsburgh, PA he taught a popular course in Religion and Contemporary Literature and hosted programs which brought prominent theologians to the campus, including, for a week each year for the last two years of his life, the theologian Paul Tillich. While at Chatham, Jim was involved in many of the civil rights’ struggles of the 1960s, and helped found an international, intercultural, interdenominational, interracial ministry along with Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, his friend and summer neighbor on Nantucket.
But Jim maintained an abiding focus on helping kids grow. His courses were always vehicles for provoking thought, bringing students to question assumptions, and developing willingness not simply to acquire information but to dig into meaning and purpose in their own lives and, for him, the secondary level where he had begun his own searches, was more appropriate. The role of chaplain no longer suited his goals, and he and his family wanted to live in a neighborhood unconfined by a school or college campus for a change.
The family, now with three daughters, moved to Akron, OH, where Jim became the curriculum director, Head of Upper School, Assistant Headmaster, and English teacher at Old Trail School. There, as elsewhere, he helped create a college preparatory curriculum which had a core along with sufficient elective flexibility to address the variety of student interests and abilities.
In wanting to expand his ability to impact the lives of students, Jim explored opportunities to become a Head of School only to discover that small independent boarding schools needed identities and much fund raising. That was far from what he wanted to do, so he and Sarah switched roles with her working for Akron’s United Way and Jim becoming a house husband, and then director of the northeast Ohio office of the American Friends Service Committee where he ran a book store and hosted a talk show on peace issues at WKSU, an NPR affiliate in Kent, OH.
A group of interviews Jim did for that show were with students and faculty at a Quaker boarding school in Ohio, and these again triggered in him the desire for his true calling which was to be in school with kids. So, he returned to independent boarding schools, one of which was a school for juvenile offenders, and to positions that included Director of Admissions, Academic Dean, and, of course, teaching.
At the age of 58, now divorced, Jim, still very much interested in human development, enrolled in the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. and two years later graduated with an MSW from their School of Social Service. He had met Peggy at an NEH seminar in Bryn Mawr, PA. two years earlier. The summer after his graduation, they married and resided in a rural North Carolina county where she was teaching mathematics to seventh graders. He took a job just across the state line in Danville, VA working as a clinical social worker for the Southern Virginia Mental Health Institute. Jim retired in 1999. He and Peggy have resided in Durham, NC since 1998. Jim likes the Durham Bulls, the Savoyards, and other cultural and academic amenities of living in a big city. He liked the idea of the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement, now OLLI.
His first teaching at DILR was a class called the Psychology of Aging, on September 11, 2001. “I walked into the class and I said, ‘Do you guys want to do this today?’ and they said yes.” Jim taught classes for a while before he stopped to take classes in philosophy with Bill Gould, a fellow Wesleyan graduate. Gould “…had a great sense of humor,” and the class fellowship was rewarding. Suddenly, Bill died of an aneurysm and Jim was asked, by the class, to take over. Jim has been teaching philosophy classes at DILR, now OLLI, ever since.
Jim finds the course planning process, the preparing for each class, and the meeting of each class to be intellectually stimulating and engaging. He thrives on the conversation between class members, the insights each brings to or discovers in class, and the genuine good feeling and fellowship. Teaching at OLLI is a very important part of Jim’s life and he hopes to keeping doing this for a very long time.
Jim learned to sail as a child. Near retirement he bought a sail boat. In trying to find a suitable put-in on the coast of Maine, he and Peggy discovered Searsport, Maine where they rented for two weeks out of the summer. When they realized that two weeks was not enough time to spend there, they discovered a pretty place by a cat-tailed fen that they now call their second home where they live from the middle of May to the end of October. Searsport is in Midcoast Maine on the Penobscot Bay. While there, Jim works three days a week at the Penobscot Marine Museum, the oldest marine museum in Maine, and presides over a historic house that contains artifacts from the 19th century when Searsport was a major shipbuilding town. Jim likes showing to and relating to visitors an exhibit about the worst naval disaster in American history prior to Pearl Harbor – the Penobscot Bay Expedition that happened during the American Revolution.
Music has been an important part of Jim’s retirement and began choral singing in the Triangle with the Chapel Hill Community Chorus and continues to sing in the Durham Community Chorale. While not good at it, he has played trumpet in the New Horizon’s Band.
In looking forward, Jim sees more teaching and meeting with the interesting people who are OLLI members, more singing, more reading, and more sailing on the Penobscot Bay.
When he was in his senior year at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, Jim was required to read a book of essays by various authors about the meaning and purpose of our lives. His ponderings on these matters led directly into a vocation and, in retirement, to convening classes in philosophy at OLLI.
Jim Wright’s youth was spent in the protective bubble of the Lawrenceville School’s leafy campus where his father taught English for 44 years and was, for some of those years, a house master. The school grounds at the then boys-only boarding school were beautiful, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 19th century. Jim remembers his teachers as distinct characters all of whom had nicknames which suited them. The combination of this individuality and commitment to community made a lasting impression on Jim and led directly to his choice of teaching as a vocation.
After finishing secondary school at Lawrenceville, he went against the family tradition of attending Union College in Schenectady, NY and enrolled at Wesleyan in Middletown, CT instead. There he majored in English; his plan was to teach in an independent secondary boarding school after graduation. When his Lawrenceville chaplain suggested that he pursue theological studies instead of teaching and nominated him for a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, he chose to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
“The mandate of the fellowship was to figure out whether the parish ministry was a suitable vocation for me. During that time, my field work included an inner-city parish in New York City, a suburban church in Englewood, NJ, and a rural parish in the middle of Pennsylvania near State College.” After his second year at Union, Jim was offered the opportunity to run a program called A Christian Ministry in the National Parks in Grand Teton National Park, WY. Theministry held services for tourists and park employees outdoors and in hotels and lodges. He also worked as a desk clerk at Jackson Lake Lodge. He supervised eight other seminary and college students who carried out ministries in the park’s many venues.
After the summer in the Tetons, Jim transferred to Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, PA, where he assisted David Noel Freedman, the professor of Old Testament who was editor of the Anchor Bible and the Journal of Biblical Literature. He and Freedman had met as summer neighbors on Nantucket during his college years.
In May, 1959, he earned an M. Div. degree from that seminary, married Sarah Shaw whom he met through Freedman, and returned to Nantucket as minister of Union Chapel in Siasconset where he preached for the following three summers. Chaplaincies in secondary boarding schools followed which included teaching religion classes. The first was at Darrow School in New Lebanon, NY, whose site and buildings had been the home of a principal Shaker community in the 18th and 19th centuries, and sparked in Jim a continuing fascination with Shaker life which he fosters in some of his music choices, reading choices, and in annual visits to the only remaining Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, ME.
At Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, MA where he was the first Chaplain, he set up an interfaith council of students to help run the chapel program, and supervised a student work camp in Puerto Rico during spring vacation. At Chatham College in Pittsburgh, PA he taught a popular course in Religion and Contemporary Literature and hosted programs which brought prominent theologians to the campus, including, for a week each year for the last two years of his life, the theologian Paul Tillich. While at Chatham, Jim was involved in many of the civil rights’ struggles of the 1960s, and helped found an international, intercultural, interdenominational, interracial ministry along with Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, his friend and summer neighbor on Nantucket.
But Jim maintained an abiding focus on helping kids grow. His courses were always vehicles for provoking thought, bringing students to question assumptions, and developing willingness not simply to acquire information but to dig into meaning and purpose in their own lives and, for him, the secondary level where he had begun his own searches, was more appropriate. The role of chaplain no longer suited his goals, and he and his family wanted to live in a neighborhood unconfined by a school or college campus for a change.
The family, now with three daughters, moved to Akron, OH, where Jim became the curriculum director, Head of Upper School, Assistant Headmaster, and English teacher at Old Trail School. There, as elsewhere, he helped create a college preparatory curriculum which had a core along with sufficient elective flexibility to address the variety of student interests and abilities.
In wanting to expand his ability to impact the lives of students, Jim explored opportunities to become a Head of School only to discover that small independent boarding schools needed identities and much fund raising. That was far from what he wanted to do, so he and Sarah switched roles with her working for Akron’s United Way and Jim becoming a house husband, and then director of the northeast Ohio office of the American Friends Service Committee where he ran a book store and hosted a talk show on peace issues at WKSU, an NPR affiliate in Kent, OH.
A group of interviews Jim did for that show were with students and faculty at a Quaker boarding school in Ohio, and these again triggered in him the desire for his true calling which was to be in school with kids. So, he returned to independent boarding schools, one of which was a school for juvenile offenders, and to positions that included Director of Admissions, Academic Dean, and, of course, teaching.
At the age of 58, now divorced, Jim, still very much interested in human development, enrolled in the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. and two years later graduated with an MSW from their School of Social Service. He had met Peggy at an NEH seminar in Bryn Mawr, PA. two years earlier. The summer after his graduation, they married and resided in a rural North Carolina county where she was teaching mathematics to seventh graders. He took a job just across the state line in Danville, VA working as a clinical social worker for the Southern Virginia Mental Health Institute. Jim retired in 1999. He and Peggy have resided in Durham, NC since 1998. Jim likes the Durham Bulls, the Savoyards, and other cultural and academic amenities of living in a big city. He liked the idea of the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement, now OLLI.
His first teaching at DILR was a class called the Psychology of Aging, on September 11, 2001. “I walked into the class and I said, ‘Do you guys want to do this today?’ and they said yes.” Jim taught classes for a while before he stopped to take classes in philosophy with Bill Gould, a fellow Wesleyan graduate. Gould “…had a great sense of humor,” and the class fellowship was rewarding. Suddenly, Bill died of an aneurysm and Jim was asked, by the class, to take over. Jim has been teaching philosophy classes at DILR, now OLLI, ever since.
Jim finds the course planning process, the preparing for each class, and the meeting of each class to be intellectually stimulating and engaging. He thrives on the conversation between class members, the insights each brings to or discovers in class, and the genuine good feeling and fellowship. Teaching at OLLI is a very important part of Jim’s life and he hopes to keeping doing this for a very long time.
Jim learned to sail as a child. Near retirement he bought a sail boat. In trying to find a suitable put-in on the coast of Maine, he and Peggy discovered Searsport, Maine where they rented for two weeks out of the summer. When they realized that two weeks was not enough time to spend there, they discovered a pretty place by a cat-tailed fen that they now call their second home where they live from the middle of May to the end of October. Searsport is in Midcoast Maine on the Penobscot Bay. While there, Jim works three days a week at the Penobscot Marine Museum, the oldest marine museum in Maine, and presides over a historic house that contains artifacts from the 19th century when Searsport was a major shipbuilding town. Jim likes showing to and relating to visitors an exhibit about the worst naval disaster in American history prior to Pearl Harbor – the Penobscot Bay Expedition that happened during the American Revolution.
Music has been an important part of Jim’s retirement and began choral singing in the Triangle with the Chapel Hill Community Chorus and continues to sing in the Durham Community Chorale. While not good at it, he has played trumpet in the New Horizon’s Band.
In looking forward, Jim sees more teaching and meeting with the interesting people who are OLLI members, more singing, more reading, and more sailing on the Penobscot Bay.
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