About the Clemente program

Literary achievement:
ivory tower meets north end

UNIVERSITY MATTERS

By WIlliam Barker
From the Halifax Chronicle Herald, June 25, 2006

OUR first meeting, just four months ago, was around a battered table in a well-used meeting room in the parish hall of St. George’s Round Church.

Twelve students had signed up for a short series of classes on essay writing. I had been told that my new students had all lived full yet difficult lives, and that their opportunities for university education had been cut off by personal circumstance. They had enrolled in something called Halifax Humanities 101 to have another try.

By the time I met them, they were already well on in a demanding year of study. My little seminar was just a tiny part of this. Twice a week, they had met to read and discuss their way through Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Shakespeare, and Descartes, and more, up to Beckett and George Grant. There were also visits from a few living worthies from our own Nova Scotia – Alex Colville, George Elliott Clarke, Stephen Kimber, and Sylvia Hamilton. This non-credit course was packed with more ideas and personality than most undergraduates get anywhere.

Halifax Humanities 101 is based on what is called the Clemente program. It was begun in 1995 by Earl Shorris, who had studied under University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins helped to found the Great Books program that spread to many liberal arts universities in the United States. His ideas inform some of the background to the King’s Foundation Year Programme, which has since moved in its own unique direction. Hutchins was an elitist, but an elitist who claimed that "The best education for the best is the best education for all."

Shorris took this claim to heart. After hearing from a prison convict that what is missing in the wasted lives of poverty, prison, and neglected neighbourhoods is the possibility of some kind of serious intellectual engagement, he decided to act. Through Bard College, he started up a program of Great Books at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in Manhattan. Today there are hundreds of students enrolled at over a score of Clemente programs in the major cities of the United States and Canada.

Halifax Humanities 101 is our local version, started last fall by a volunteer group from St. George’s Round Church with support from the Halifax universities and the Halifax North Memorial Library, which provided classroom space for the program. Over 30 students came to classes during the year, and the 12 I got to know were the ones who could find that extra time on Saturdays to work on their writing.

The role of this program is, as the organizers say, "to break the cycle of poverty," not by make-work projects or by handouts, but by engaging the participants with ideas as they’re found in some of the greatest books ever written. The program is more than building skills and confidence. It is about engagement with ideas and moral judgment. And it has also been a lot of work.

In my classes, we didn’t just talk about how to write a sentence and a paragraph. We began with the material in front of us, to try to think our way through a complex short text, even one that looks simple when you start. I began with Charles Perrault’s 17th-century version of Little Red Riding Hood. The questions raised by the students, once they had recovered from being handed something normally read by children, were serious. Who is the real victim – Little Red Riding Hood or the wolf? What does the story actually teach us about duty? About care for others? About care for oneself?

Primed by their own discussion, they went off to write. We discussed each response before the group. And then we turned to a one-page story, The Home-coming by the difficult modern writer Franz Kafka. This was another deceptive piece of writing that turned out to have its own contradictions and unsettling truth.

For a while, in this kind of discussion, the teacher can lead the class. But if everyone is engaged and thinking, the students take over, and the teacher becomes a student, too. It is a group effort. We listened to different viewpoints, sometimes in utter opposition to one another. This kind of generous and engaged discussion is basic to intellectual exchange, and lies at the heart of the best university experience.

Halifax Humanities 101 is just one way that universities interact with their community. We provide jobs, facilities for research, and students with money to spend. But we also move out of the ivory tower through public service (such as legal aid or clinics), continuing education, lectures, workshops, commentary on the media, consultation to groups, and other activities. This outreach is an important part of our work as students and teachers.

Does Halifax Humanities 101 work? Will it actually serve to "break the cycle of poverty"? I know the students were remarkably grateful for their experience. But so were the teachers. It’s clear that a conversation of mutual interest has been opened. That’s how significant change begins.

William Barker is president of the University of King’s College.