On Prison Education, The Death of the Academic Humanities, and Alternative Arrangements.

“Between Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, which of these novels do you think more accurately resembles our present world?” I ask my students a version of this standard question whenever I teach these two mid-twentieth-century dystopian narratives. And my students—college first-years and sophomores for the most part—usually opt for Huxley’s vision of high- tech hedonism as social control over Orwell’s sadistic kingdom of coercion, following Huxley himself, who wrote, in a Oct. 21, 1949 letter to Orwell that: “I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.”

Huxley’s darkly comic One World State resonates with the 24/7 overmedicated and techno-mediated reality of most college students (and their instructors) today. But it wasn’t until I taught a version of this same course, on utopian and dystopian literature, at a medium-security correctional facility in upstate New York that I realized how this perspective —which I largely shared—is shaped by the readers’ and writers’ social positions. These students—incarcerated black men for the most part—all certainly recognized the direct and sadistic coercion of the party state depicted in Orwell’s Oceania: it is their everyday reality, as one student remarked. This much is no surprise, since 1984 recasts the entirety of advanced industrial society as a sophisticated prison organized along the lines of Bentham’s Panopticon—constant surveillance—although this prison state also engages in the systematic brutality humanitarian reformer Bentham ostensibly sought to eliminate through his enlightened social engineering.

Another student, a few months shy of release, elaborated on this point, describing how incarcerated life was, in many ways, an extension of what poor and working-class people of color experience “out there” at the hands of the police. While many students in my class recognized the more diffuse and hedonic model of social control envisioned by Huxley—in all the familiar ways— this particular class discussion led to the recognition that 1984 and Brave New World exist side by side in the present-day United States. Your dystopian reality in part depends on who, where, and what you are in the social machine.”

I taught this course a few years ago. Strange to recall these discussions now, in light of the Trump administration’s authoritarian crackdown on university campuses, beginning with the ICE kidnapping and detention of green card holder Khalil Mahmoud, the first of many, for the crime of wrongthink: supporting the Palestinian resistance and protesting the continuing Israeli ethnocide.

This recent turn of events comes after several years during which the American right disingenuously posed as a champion of “free speech” against the woke excesses of campus culture. And now Big Brother and his goons—well known to my incarcerated students in the form of the warden and his DoC minions—are coming for the denizens of our own educated and mostly upper- middle-class One World State.

These imprisoned men, so unlike those denizens or the traditional students I usually teach, illuminated a set of canonical utopian and dystopian literary texts for me in ways that I hadn’t encountered in a classroom before, although I had taught most of these books more than a few times by that point.

Bard College’s pioneering Prison Education Initiative first piqued my interest in prisoner education programs several years ago. In a country with the largest population of incarcerated people on the planet—most of them poor people of color suffering from a 40+ years of “war” on “drugs” and (an often victimless) “crime” marked by racial sentencing disparities—I see such educational initiatives as ameliorative at the least, a first step on the road away from our punitive, sadistic, and, yes, Orwellian criminal justice system and toward a more restorative model of justice that does not require prisons.

So, when a friend, who was also the acting director of NYU’s Prison Education Program, first broached the subject of teaching a course at Wallkill Correctional Facility during the summer of 2016, I embraced the opportunity. NYU PEP offers a two-year program of university-level courses, taught mostly by NYU faculty, with the end goal of an A.A. certificate. Those inmates seeking to pursue a four-year college degree upon release can use these credits, while building on their studies, for that end, which explains the recent pledge of support for such initiatives from various centrist politicians. But—rather than the accreditation rationale that educators and administrators are obliged to invoke in defense of any and all educational endeavors these days—PEP’s mission statement reads:

“We view education within prison as part of a broader effort to reduce the social harm of incarceration, and are committed to working in collaboration with people impacted by incarceration to build our society beyond prison.”

Many of my well-intentioned colleagues at both of the prison education programs where I’ve worked are advocates of reparative justice and even prison abolition. Most of these at least cognitively radical people believed in the power of redemption—alongside the determinative power of socioeconomic conditions—whether or not they would admit to it this in these terms. Structure and agency.

My incarcerated students emerged from the kind of war zone-like conditions—e.g., the crack epidemic or drug wars of the 80s and 90s in places like Brownsville, Brooklyn—that would misshape or even permanently deform anyone’s soul.

Yet—while many of the men I taught did terrible things and lived under the weight of those acts—they nonetheless sought to repair themselves, through education, for example, as one fifty-something student, inside since his teens, wrote me in a letter after the conclusion of one class.

These incarcerated students, many without high school degrees, displayed an enthusiasm for canonical texts, difficult reading, and a range of perspectives now almost entirely lacking in traditional college students and humanities academics both (albeit for different, if sometimes, overlapping reasons).

These imprisoned men’s enthusiasm for learning renewed my own long-faltering faith in humanities education and its future prospects, political commitments aside. After several years teaching literature in a variety of contingent and visiting positions at various educational institutions, ranging from the US Military Academy at West Point to a small liberal arts college in Maine, I began to notice a palpable exhaustion among students and instructors in university-level courses several years before the COVID disruption.

The now widespread degradation of higher education, and the humanities in particular, has been a long time coming. An entire generation of students, misshaped by a digital technosphere in the form of the addictive-by-design smartphone and its social media apps, have been evacuated of their attentional and intellectual capacities—their ability to read and write and think—by our moron-making machines.

ChatGPT, the narrow “AI” text generator behind so much college student writing these days—to the horror and dismay of an already demoralized and adjunctified professoriate—isn’t so much a radical break with the status quo as the latest stage in the digital obsolescing of human intelligence. We should also include among these weapons of mass distraction and destruction—keeping the expansive idea of technology as complex socio-technical system promulgated by critics like Langdon Winner and Ivan Illich in mind—a concerted campaign against “useless” liberal arts courses on the part of politicians and those university administrators hell-bent on reconfiguring higher education as a vocational school for the professional-managerial class. Which is why these same invertebrate administrators’ craven behavior over the last several months should come as no surprise.

Speaking of a dystopian brave new world: you don’t know you are living in a dark new age on a dark new planet—replete with gee-whiz gadgets out of The Jetsons—until long after the change has come.

One terrible irony is that, despite the near total control of inmate life and behavior in a correctional facility, my incarcerated students’ enforced seclusion from the world, which significantly includes the absence of internet access, enabled their quasi-monastic dedication to reading, writing, and thinking. A dedication that included open-mindedness and enthusiasm.

Their open-mindedness in this particular case encompassed the defamiliarized social realities and alternatives we examined for the remainder of my course on utopia and dystopia . Whereas the utopias of More, Morris, and Le Guin often provoke the most resistance from even self-consciously left-wing college students, who typically respond to these narratives with ideological common sense about human nature and the like, the students at Wallkill were open to completely reimagining the world in ways that made me look at this literature with new eyes. Several of the same students who called my attention to the class and race-specific dimensions of Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias also noted how criminal justice arrangements occupy a central role in these utopian romances and their respective critiques of existing society.

From Raphael Hythloday’s polemic against the execution of displaced-peasants-turned-thieves in More’s Utopia to William Morris’s extended polemics against capital punishment and imprisonment in News From Nowhere and beyond, the utopian tradition proffers an analysis of crime and punishment rooted in private property and its inequities, as several of my students noted in our class discussions, drawing on their own experience in offering incisive and fine-grained readings of these texts’ immodest proposals.

My Wallkill students couldn’t get enough reading. One such student, upon hearing that Orwell’s novel was inspired by Zamyatin’s We, managed to get his hand on the book, which he read on top of the mandatory readings between one class meeting and the next. I was reminded of a New York Times article, by Gina Bellafante, from a few years ago, in which she describes how an encounter between several prisoners enrolled in a prison education program and a group of John Jay students “undermined” their “stereotypes,” especially when those students faced “the broad-mindedness of the prisoners, the erudition they exhibited speaking in class, the striking references they made. Many of the visitors had come from city high schools where all of that was lacking, and in college they found few who shared that same spirit of inquiry.”

In fact, during the 14 weeks when I visited the Wallkill Correctional Facility on a weekly basis, the only people who acted anything like their stereotypical depictions were the prison guards.

Amid widespread proclamations of the death of the humanities, my experience at Wallkill offered me a utopian moment in what is one of the most dystopian institutional environments in the United States of Dystopia. If the humanities can flourish there, it can flourish in any number of spaces and places.

But does this mean that a rigorous humanities education, and intellectual life in general, now requires imprisonment or coercion? I don’t think so. But such an education certainly demands discipline—chosen voluntarily—and, I’d argue, a neo-Luddite space free of the machines that have degraded and colonized our intellectual and imaginative abilities.

Rather than the prison, or the school in its modern guise, we might look to the monastery, reconfigured in secular post-enlightenment terms, as one model for building alternative educational institutions today: another sort of Benedict option.

And, judging by the relative popularity of alternative education programs, such as the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research, we see that more than a few people crave the necessarily ascetic work of close reading, critical writing, and focused discussion. Such a path offers them and us a way out of our twittering algorithmic brave new world. As the customer service university, almost wholly captured by what is deemed useful or marketable, capitulates to a new, Trumpist, iteration of McCarthyism imposed by the federal government after a decade of a much milder, but still intellectually stifling, brand of woke, pseudo-radical, intellectual conformity, we must build the life of the mind elsewhere.

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