“I was tired, but I delivered,” said Weigand, the longest running repeat speaker at the annual gathering of continuing education devotees. He hasn’t missed the summer event yet since its beginning in 1972.

Weigand said that he doesn’t give exactly the same speech every year. His 31st version of “Is Your Behavior Showing?” as usual, will be a revised version of basic ideas related to communication and humor. “I change lots of stuff and add some new things,” he explained.

Widely known for his sense of humor and love of a good joke, Weigand, the former dean of the IU School of Continuing Studies, recalled playing a trick on one of the repeat Mini University students he has come to know.

“Ruth Young, who lives at Meadowood (a retirement community in Bloomington), once told me that she had heard my lecture 16 times and could repeat it from memory,” he said. “So one year, I faked an illness and told the class that she could carry on for me and walked out of the room. She panicked.”

He returned, of course. There is that teaching streak to consider.

Mini University is close to Weigand’s heart since he was present at the week-long school’s birth.

“I was working in the president’s office when some of us got together to discuss the concept,” said Weigand. “The group was made up of Jim Hertling and the late Bob Richey, both from continuing studies, Frank Jones of the IU Alumni Association and the late Ed Kuntz, who taught business administration.”

Thirty “students” turned up the first year, and Mini University was off and running—and running and running.

IU’s Mini University is one of the longest running ventures of its kind and one of the most successful. It recently was recognized in Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine as one of the nine best campus learning vacations in the nation.

Weigand, who continues to work with IU as special assistant to IU Foundation President Curt Simic, said that he believes the success of Mini University is as much due to the loyalty of faculty as to the participants who come back year after year. The faculty aren’t paid, which would indicate they teach because they love it. Enough, in fact, to protest an occasional summer sabbatical.

“One year some time back,” said Weigand, “the staff decided to give some of the faculty who had taught for three or four years a rest and get some different ones. The ones who were dropped called the office to ask, ‘Didn’t you like me?’”

For more information on Mini University:
http://www.indiana.edu/~alumni/learn/miniuni.html