At NMH Perennial College 2025, we believe that education should be a lifelong process. Learning alongside a group of peers can be an empowering experience during significant life transitions, such as a move, a new job, a newly empty nest, retirement, or widowhood or divorce.
During Perennial College 2025, from June 18 to 27, you’ll spend your mornings learning alongside other engaged, motivated adult learners in two courses: Writers of Western Massachusetts, taught by Samantha Harvey, professor of English literature at Boise State University, and Pivot Points: Knowledge That Changed Everything, with Susan Ware, senior lecturer at the Commonwealth Honors College of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In the afternoons and on the weekend, you can take part in optional campus activities and outings in the beautiful Berkshires and Connecticut River Valley, including visits to the Emily Dickinson Museum; Arrowhead, the Berkshires home of Herman Melville; The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home; and Steeletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Trips may include visits to museums, such as the Clark Art Institute, Mass MOCA, the Smith College Museum of Art, and Amherst College Hitchcock Museum, and to arts organizations as the famed Jacob’s Pillow dance center and Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
NMH Perennial College presents an opportunity to recreate some of your most cherished moments from college, from Sunday brunch with friends in the dining hall to walks on campus trails to classes outside under a tree.
Best of all, NMH Perennial College allows you to consider the great questions from the vantage point of maturity — as William Wordsworth described it, “in years that bring the philosophic mind” — in a group of like-minded learners eager to bring their life experiences and wisdom into the classroom again.
NMH Perennial College 2025 Program Leaders
Samantha C. Harvey
Boise State University
Professor Harvey has taught 19th-century British and American literature for 20 years, most recently at Boise State University. In 2012, she started a public lecture series called “The Idea of Nature,” which brings three internationally known lecturers to Boise State every spring. She graduated from Harvard College and Cambridge University, England.
Susan Ware
University of Massachusetts Amherst
A scholar of Christianity and Comparative Religion, Professor Ware has taught for 20 years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Commonwealth Honors College in its signature course “Ideas That Change the World.” She has led study tours of India where she established an exchange program in Cochin. She graduated from Harvard College and the University of Chicago.