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Age of Enlightenment
 Eighty-six-year-olds attend
Elderhostel classes, but how many of them teach those classes? Norman Palmer
'30 does--and travels the world, too.
Palmer, who taught history and political science at Colby from 1933 to 1947 and
later chaired both the political science and international relations
departments at the University of Pennsylvania, has written two dozen books on
international subjects, including three since he retired in 1982. He has taught
at more than a dozen institutions around the world, and his travels to more
than 50 countries include 14 trips to India and 12 years in Africa. He has
logged three one-semester stints at Kyung Hee, a school of international
relations in Seoul, Korea, the last as recently as last year.
"I enjoy the foreign experience," Palmer said with graceful understatement.
When not on the road he lives "out of the rat race" in the San Juan Islands in
Washington state, teaching Elderhostel courses on the Pacific Rim, contemporary
India, U.S. policy toward China and India and the impact of major global
changes.
"I think the world is changing so much--and it's not just post-Cold War,"
Palmer said. "There's a great deal of interest in alliance systems and
relations with other parts of the world."
Palmer says Elderhostel students have been around, are opinionated and
outspoken and have no problem getting a discussion going. "Besides," he said,
"a lot of them are retired, and we can be completely irresponsible. If we were
in the position [of the current White House administration] we'd be as bad as
we think they are in two weeks."
A Hinckley, Maine, native, Palmer traces his interest in international
relations to relatives in the China trade, the New England transcendentalists
and Colby professors, especially William Wilkinson and Paul
Fullam--"extraordinary people," he said, "who opened up a lot of horizons for
me." The honorary doctor of humane letters Colby awarded Palmer in 1955
commended him for his "position of influence in American foreign affairs, of
which your college is proud."
Palmer thinks he could live almost anywhere today--except in China-suppressed
Tibet, where the 16,000-foot altitude "does things to the system"--but after he
and his wife, Gurina, returned from a recent trip to Spain, Portugal and
Morocco, he says he is "still recovering." He wonders for a moment if he should
teach and journey only vicariously through books.
But no, Palmer says, he'll keep going "as long as the health holds." He says he
and his wife are talking about a February trip to Southeast Asia by ship "with
a leave-the-driving-to-us group. I'd be interested," he said, "now that Vietnam
has opened up."
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