University to honor student, 90

CLEVELAND (AP) — Even during the lowest depths of the Great Depression, when her father was without work for three years and her family lost their home in Cleveland’s Buckeye neighborhood to foreclosure, Jean Elsner’s parents always said “when” not “if” in describing her college plans.

Elsner, who turned 90 on Dec. 4, graduated from Cleveland’s John Adams High and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Ohio University in 1941, buoyed by the emphasis her parents placed on education.

The small income her father was eventually able to pull in selling butter and eggs couldn’t stretch to pay tuition, so scholarships covered some of Elsner’s college costs.

The rest of her education was covered by loans from a foundation that Elsner would pay back $10 a month until she settled the debt.

That quest for learning never left Elsner, of South Euclid, who in 1982 joined a friend in taking classes at Cleveland State University.

The state’s Project 60 allows senior citizens to sit in on college classes at public universities for free if space allows after degree-seeking students have signed up.

Almost 28 years later, Elsner is still taking two or three classes a semester at CSU. She will be awarded the president’s medal at Cleveland State’s fall commencement ceremonies today.

The medal recognizes her decades of attendance at the university and the fact that the 100-plus classes she has taken is more classes than anyone has taken in the history of the school.

“I have a number of friends who are my age, and we meet once a month for lunch, and they talk about their aches, their pains, their pills,” she said. “And I go to school, and it’s different.”

A typical academic day for Elsner involves a half-mile walk to a bus stop (she doesn’t drive) before 8 a.m. because the bus route she rides doesn’t have service to the university later in the mornings.

Once she gets to campus, Elsner works on the New York Times crossword puzzle in the library until her 10 a.m. class starts.

She nearly always chooses something in the afternoon, but nothing late at night, especially in the winter.

Her aversion to night classes in the winter comes not necessarily because she’s worried about crime, but because she has to walk in the street when the snow piles up on the sidewalk.

None of this is an inconvenience to Elsner, who said she has always walked where she needs to go.

Her mind is just as active, according to Peter Dunham, a CSU anthropology professor whose Anthropology 275: Ancient Mysteries class Elsner took this semester.

Not only was Elsner an active participant, she attended a field trip to a American Indian burial site in Newark, Ohio.

“When she has something to say, it’s always good,” Dunham said.

“And it benefits from a lifetime of experience. And that’s the whole point of Project 60. It brings into the classroom this incredible richness that these folks have enjoyed in their lives. And she’s just the prime example of it.”

Elsner worked for the Social Security administration briefly after graduation and was a substitute teacher in Cleveland Heights after the youngest of her three sons went to middle school.

Dunham is Elsner’s favorite professor, and she has plans to take another of his classes next semester.

With degrees in English and sociology from Ohio University, Elsner continues to gravitate toward the social sciences and more right-brained classes at Cleveland State.

She takes art-history classes again and again, she said, because each new professor has a different focus. She has taken French and Russian. There have been classes she didn’t like, but when that happens, she finds a replacement class to take rather than going without.

Receiving the presidential medal is by no means the coda to Elsner’s academic career. Her three sons started a letter-writing campaign to university leaders to honor her achievements. The sons will join about 50 other relatives and friends at a party in her honor after graduation. In attendance will be Elsner’s granddaughter, a student at Brown University.