Agora Foundation's Coronavirus-Era Success with Andy Gilman

The Agora Foundation has been a key part of the intellectual landscape of Ojai for a decade now, bringing in top teachers for bracing and wide-ranging discussions of the Great Books Seminars. Executive director Andy Gilman was a co-founder of Agora as well as of the well-received Ojai Chautauqua panels, which bring together top panelists for even-handed dialogue about knotty issue. While the pandemic shut down the in-person seminars, it opened other opportunities, which Gilman was able to pivot toward. Now weekly, the Agora seminars take place every weekly, and bring in people around the country and beyond. The bracing range of topics include Thucydides, Marcel Proust,  Dostoyevsky, as well as founding documents like the Federalist Papers and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The talks also include Eastern classics like the Bhagavad Gita. The Ojai Chautauqua began in 2014 as an offshoot of the Libbey Bowl Foundation based on the intellectual tent revivals of the 1870s in western New York. Gilman called it the "seminar write large." Gilman has hosted 17 of these public events since then, along with Dan Schnur of USC fame as the moderator, with topics such as "Media in Politics" and "GMOs." Gilman has lived in Ojai for most of his life and has deep roots in the community. We talked about a lot of topics, as you might expect from two people who love Ojai and have known each other for more than a decade. We did not talk about the conquests of Genghis Khan, brook trout fishing in the Adirondacks or Joe DiMaggio. You can learn more about the Agora Foundation and Ojai Chautauqua at www.agorafoundation.com.