There is a university where you can teach for one hour, earn $1,000 or more, get paid to travel to some of the most interesting cities in the United States, engage with highly motivated students, and never have to sit through a boring department meeting or argue about budget cuts or grades.
One Day University is an all-day teaching event, held about 30 times a year since 2006, each involving about four professors. The next event will be at the Tanglewood music center in Lenox, Mass., on August 23, and will focus on music and art, featuring a lecture on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 by the Harvard University professor Thomas Kelly, followed by an evening performance of the work by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Then, in addition to regular sessions this fall, the university will ramp up. In October, in New York City, it will offer students a choice of 17 courses instead of the usual three or four. If its students like the expanded course options in New York, the university may change its model to always offer a selection of courses.
The university was conceived by Steven Schragis, who came up with the idea while visiting his daughter during her freshman year at Bard College several years ago. He went to a lecture given by a Bard professor attended by hundreds of parents. “I love it here,” he thought during the class. “I don’t want to go back to the office.” Mr. Schragis, then the director of the Learning Annex, an adult-education company, decided to offer courses to adults from a variety of university professors.
What’s in it for the professors? Money, travel, and personal fulfillment —although the order of those priorities differs from person to person. The compensation isn’t bad. In addition to $1,000 for a one-hour lecture, the professors get paid transportation and a hotel room. For those invited back, the fee increases with each lecture.
Wendy J. Schiller, an associate professor of public policy at Brown University who has taught at One Day, said she often gives presentations around Providence, R.I., as part of her responsibility to represent Brown. She rarely receives much more than a mug or a paperweight for her time.
What she got from One Day made her feel that her work was more valued. “When you work hard at your teaching, and you work to be someone who is engaging and educational and someone is willing to pay you a lot of money for that, it makes you feel better,” says Ms. Schiller. “It feels like a reward for teaching well.”
Daryl J. Bem, a retired Cornell University psychology professor, says he enjoys being able to travel to wherever One Day is being held. “It gives me an excuse to go to New York City or to go to the West Coast and have some fun,” he says. He uses his teaching fee as spending money, he says.
For some, the pay matters less.
Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard University law professor, for instance, says he doesn’t like to travel, and for him the compensation is “relatively small.” Yet he agreed to give a lecture in New York City this October as a favor to a former research aide who is an investor in One Day University, and because he already had plans to be in New York.
“I just love to get my message across,” Mr. Dershowitz says. “Whenever I’m given a chance to talk to a new audience, I tend to do it.”
Popular Professors Wanted
One Day University offers its students a pretty good deal: four or five college lecturers and lunch for less than $300. And unlike college, if you hate your experience, you can get a full refund. Your teachers aren’t just anyone—the company chooses professors who are “wildly popular on their campus,” Mr. Schragis says, from institutions including Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, among others.
As he started to hire his teaching staff, Mr. Schragis searched online to find out which professors were winning awards for their teaching skills. He often goes to campuses, asking students who their favorite professors are and trying to get copies of student evaluations done each semester.
“When you look for professors, you ignore the research awards, you ignore tenure, you don’t care who is head of the department,” says Mr. Schragis. “You look for the people that students are absolutely raving about. This day is supposed to be fun.”
The audience, made up of older working adults and retirees, has added up. Since its inception in 2006, One Day University has enrolled and taught approximately 14,000 students.
The lecturers say there is a clear difference in the content they are able to teach at One Day University compared with the large freshmen introductory courses they may teach at their home institutions. Since the One Day crowd is generally older, it comes with a wider knowledge of recent history and includes people looking for personal fulfillment instead of a degree.
“It’s fun teaching people who want to be there instead of people that have to be there,” says Mr. Bem. “Students haven’t lived their lives yet, so with the adults you get more of a longer-ranged perspective.”
Sol Gittleman, who can teach just about anything he wants as a university professor at Tufts University, says that while he still enjoys working with undergraduates after 40 years, he likes teaching people his own age, too.
Mr. Gittleman was the first professor whom Mr. Schragis, a Tufts alumnus, invited to lecture at One Day University. The scholar is a proponent of adult education.
“Four years is only the beginning,” Mr. Gittleman says, speaking of the average time it takes to receive an undergraduate degree. “The only thing a university is supposed to do is to turn your Bunsen burner on and light your candle and let you go for the rest of your life.”
Ms. Schiller says members of the older audiences that attend her seminars are more likely to be vocal when they disagree with her viewpoints.
“These people are not getting a grade for me, so they can challenge me,” she says. “I learn something from them, as much as they’re learning from me.”
Mr. Dershowitz says he intentionally tries to rile up a crowd by arguing against the general consensus of the audience he is speaking with.
“I always like to tell people what they don’t want to hear—to present the point of view that’s contrarian,” he says. And for those who disagree or don’t understand, Mr. Dershowitz tells them to let him know right away.
“I’m used to arguing in court where the judges interrupt you all the time,” he says, “so I don’t get flustered if someone interrupts with a question.”
Mr. Bem says the age of the crowd isn’t the only thing that entices him about the One Day University audience. When a retirement home in Florida was looking for lecturers, he was recommended by One Day University and invited to speak. “It paid more, but it wasn’t as much fun,” Mr. Bem says. The audience did not have many alternatives for entertainment. “With the One Day audience, they all want to be there.”
‘Entertaining and Accessible’
One Day University seems to have a good retention rate, too, with more than 60 percent of its first-time students signing up for at least another day of courses.
Marion Feigenbaum says she and her husband, Stephen, have attended at least six One Day University events and plan to continue when their schedules permit.
“You’re certainly not bored,” says Ms. Feigenbaum, a retired school administrator from Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. “When you’re listening to [the professors], you’re really listening to them because you want to.”
Mr. Schragis purposefully tries to offer his customers courses that are equally informative and interesting.
“How many times have any of us listened to a boring lecture from a very distinguished person?” he says. “Of course it’s a learning experience, but it’s meant to be entertainment, too.”
The idea made sense to Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale University who has lectured at One Day University more than a dozen times.
“You try to make them entertaining and accessible,” he says. “Otherwise it’s hard to see why somebody would pay money to sit through a lecture on a topic.”
Mr. Bem says his first “audition” at One Day University, a course titled “Unraveling the Science Behind ESP,” didn’t go as smoothly as he would have liked. But after each lecture, Mr. Schragis, who taught courses on intellectual-property law at New York University for two years, gives the professors tips on how to perfect their lessons.
“I’ve played around with the entertainment part of it,” says Mr. Bem, who has used his talents as a magician in lectures debunking paranormal phenomena. In his first few lectures at One Day University, he would bring audience members on stage to open any page in a murder-mystery novel. As they concentrated on a word, he would either write or draw the word they were thinking of, and then show the audience that he had guessed correctly. Mr. Bem always tells his audiences his “mental magic” tricks are not real, but he refuses to divulge how he does them.
Although Ms. Schiller says you need students’ attention for them to learn, she cautions professors against focusing too much on getting students to like them.
“Any professor who tells you that they don’t want to be entertaining at the same time they are educational is not being candid,” she says. “I don’t crack more jokes in [the One Day University] classroom than I do in any other. I don’t want them to feel like it’s some late-night talk show.”
While One Day University tries to make the experience enjoyable for its students, the professors have fun, too.
“Why do we go into higher education?” Mr. Gittleman asks rhetorically. “Not for the money. We go into it because we like the buzz, we’re intellectually curious, and it’s a performance. We’re all performers.”
Mr. Bloom says One Day University is “a fun gig” that he will continue for as long as he can. After his own lecture is over, he often stays to watch his colleagues, who he says seem to enjoy their time as much as he does.
“It’s not hard to get us to stand in front of an audience to talk,” he says. “One Day University is a community of scholars that are difficult to shut up.”
