EXTRA EDUCATION

• By PAM BORDELON
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Sep 14, 2009

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

When LSU’s Lagniappe Studies, now the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, cranks up for the fall on Sept. 25, one of its most popular instructors will once again be teaching. Seventy-five-year-old LSU history Professor James Hardy has been involved with Lagniappe Studies almost from the program’s beginning.

“A friend (Joyce Miceli) got me involved more than a decade ago,” said Hardy. “She was taking a class, and in those days it was strictly a volunteer effort. It was like elder hostel without the hostel.

“I got started and just kept on after a year or two. At this point, I’ve got to have a reason to quit,” he added with a chuckle. “I can’t say I don’t like it anymore; that’s not living up to my obligation to give back to the community. I’ve enjoyed it and the people, so I’ve kept on.”

As Hardy explained, Lagniappe Studies originally began as a way for LSU faculty to continue learning, “to harness the resources of the community to provide a lifelong learning framework — it didn’t require you to live in a dorm and there were only one or two courses to choose from. Its main purpose is to get everybody up and out, and socializing.”

Last summer he teamed up with LSU English Professor Ann Martin to teach a course on Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.”  Last fall, his topic was the election; this fall it’s the Great Depression. “It seems timely,” he added with a sly smile.

It also begs the question, are we repeating history?

“No, I don’t think we’ll see a Great Depression like we did in the 1930s,” began Hardy. “I think we’ve stopped the bleeding, that we’ve stopped it in its tracks.

“But I don’t know the worst to be over,” he continued. “I don’t know how you decide what the worst is. It’ll take employment longer to come back, as it always does because companies will invest in technology as opposed to people first.”

Hardy joined the faculty at LSU in 1965 and “in theory” he teaches European history but what he mainly teaches is Western Civilization. He said he prefers teaching lower-level courses because he’s got the experience to put history in perspective for the students. “I can look at the big picture where a graduate student just doesn’t have that perspective yet.”

You don’t get to be a professor without scholarly writings in your field, but that’s not what Hardy writes about these days. No, these days he’s all about literature and baseball.

“I’ve written three books on baseball and I’m working on a third.”

“When I was a young man I was a New York Giants fan,” he said. “We were living in New York City but we didn’t live in Brooklyn, so we couldn’t pull for the Dodgers. My mother was from Atlanta, so we couldn’t pull for the Yankees. That left the Giants.”

It also helped that there were two Southern players on the team’s roster — Mel Ott, a native of Gretna, and “Memphis Bill” Terry.