Angels in Ulster County
The Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities

Published:
AboutTown, Spring 2012

There are 18 of us around a table on the second floor of the Kingston City Public Library. The library, brick with an elaborate Italianate portico, would be at home on any college campus, though I’m aware that the encircling neighborhood is reputed for gang violence, and that a woman was recently caught in the crossfire of a shooting.

But those of us around this table at the Kingston Public Library have made a bet with each other. Namely, that reading and discussing great texts of the Western cannon are endeavors of inherent value. That devoting two nights a week to the study of literature, moral philosophy, American history and art history–and countless hours outside class reading and writing about texts as difficult as any written–is a venture as worthy as time spent learning the basics of accounting or business administration or Excel.

This is the wager that Earl Shorris made with his community when he envisioned and founded the Clemente Course in Humanities, named after the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center on East 13th Street in Manhattan that provided its first home. After its first year in 1995, Shorris turned over administration of the course to Bard, which has parented it ever since, conferring upon its successful participants a certificate of completion and six college credits. Clemente applicants may not be younger than sixteen (although there is no limit on the upper age), have an income of no more than 150% of the Federal poverty level, and have the fluency in English at least to read a local newspaper. The cost of operating a Clemente Course for any given year is approximately $41,000, which the program has raised from private donations, awards and grants from the US Department of Education, the Open Society Institute, and state humanities councils. Clemente students attend class at no cost; child care, books, and transportation are fully subsidized.

Clemente Courses have been offered at many locations in-and out-of-state: Jamaica, Queens, and the Family Partnership Center in Poughkeepsie, for example. The Kingston course was born this October, funded with money raised by Marina, van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard. Van Zulen is also the academic director of all Bard Clemente Course, and co-director of Kingston’s with Bard’s Dean of Studies, David Shein.

This November night we’re wondering whether Prince Hamlet deserves his reputation, as the first modern anti-hero or whether he is simply, as one of us put it, a “hot mess” of a man. I’m there purportedly as a volunteer writing tutor, but these literature and philosophy classes have been so engrossing that I’m starting to feel my role as nothing more than a pretext for reading these books and engaging in conversation. We have already read Sophocles’ Antigone and The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato.

“To be or not to be,” Professor van Zuylen reads out loud, cautioning us to avoid an interpretation of this as simply a monologue on suicide. Maybe, she queries, Hamlet is questioning what it is to be human? In any case, his battle rages internally, as opposed to Antigone’s, whose defiance of King Creon is unquestioning, worthy of our respect, but maybe a little suspect. Is her determination to bury her brother in violation of her uncles edit admirable? Or purposely provocative? Professor Shein observes that while Antigone rashly and wantonly defies her country’s law, Socrates obeys those of his city, at his own mortal peril. Socrates reasons that, since he has benefitted from these laws, he must continue to respect them, even when he finds himself sentenced to death. Shein questions whether Socrates’ position is consistent with Martin Luther King’s argument that by defying an unconscionable law one may demonstrate the highest respect for the law.

How do we come to know whether a law is just or unjust, ask Shein? Is a law that discriminates ever just? Is it all right to make young people pay more for car insurance? Could we apply such a requirement to people with blonde hair? Why not? Is there such a thing as common morality, and if so, how do we know what it is? And what in the world, rejoins van Zuylen, are we to make the poor sap in the parable by Franz Kafka that depicts a man so enthralled by admission to the “law” that he squanders his life gaining entrance to it, supplicating before a fictitious gatekeeper who arbitrarily refuses him entry and to whom he inexplicably submits.

The Clemente Course in the Humanities arose from Earl Shorris’s conviction that what separates the rich from the poor in America are not only the known villains of racism, drugs, and crime but a lack of access to the great works of art, philosophy, and literature that enlighten us as human beings. Engaging with them teaches us to reflect upon and engage with our world, and enables us to become citizens in the truest sense of the word. By studying the humanities, van Zuylen says, we reach the core of our own experience and, at the same time, escape from our “narrow worlds.” Clearly Bard’s President Leon Botstein shares the conviction that studying humanities can break down boundaries and wall, and the College has established liberal arts programs in Smolny College, St. Petersburg, at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and at Al Quds University in Abu Dis, Palestine.

The students in our Kingston Clemente class range in age from 17 to over 70. During an expository writing class taught by the writer Duff Allen, a more senior member of the class passed me a scribbled note: “Have you ever seen such a diverse group have so much fun?” I nodded my head, realizing that in any unprepossessing room in any neighborhood in America one might find genuine human connection through critical reflection and conversation; a connection made even deeper when the teachers are leading this conversation at a high level. Whether or not the Clemente Course achieve the greater social benefit envisioned by Earl Shorris, the achievement in this room, and the possibility of it in other, similar rooms, is nothing short of a miracle in itself.