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Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published three times a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.

Oregon Humanities Summer 2008

Against the Odds

OCH's Humanity in Perspective course tries to help low-income adults use the humanities to improve their lives

By Joseph Gallivan

Tina Velasquez is half Klamath-Modoc, half Mexican. She looks a little fierce until she smiles. Some people around Portland might know her from her heavy drinking days or from when she was selling and using smack, just as they knew her mother, who was also a drinker. But today, at the Starbucks in Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, Tina's mellow, "clean and sober four years." At one point a younger woman with colored contact lenses shows up, having located Tina by cell phone, to get some information about job training in Microsoft Word and Excel. Tina wrings a promise out of the younger woman that she will look into the training and check back in with her.

This Starbucks is one of the busiest in Portland and sees all sorts of traffic: construction workers, office workers, high school students, gutter punks, the underemployed, and those who bill by the word or by the quarter-hour. It's got an unusually rough-and-ready feel for a corporate third space, part pit stop, part fishbowl.

After a while Bob Morris arrives. With his weathered beard and worn look he bears the watermark of someone who was once homeless. In fact, for six years he slept in Washington Park. He knows the best spots to pitch a tent, but adds, "I can't tell [you where they are]. It's like a fishing hole: I might need it, and you'd be there. You never know where life's going to take you." To Morris, the trapdoor into poverty could open at any time.

Morris and Velasquez were classmates in Humanity in Perspective (HIP), a free college course in the humanities that the Oregon Council for the Humanities has offered to low-income adults in Portland since 2001. (OCH has also offered a HIP course to the inmates at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton since 2005.) It's hard work: Over two semesters, the students read, discuss, and write about new works almost every week. The program's first semester looks at classical Greek texts such as Plato's Apology, Symposium, and Republic, and Euripides' Bacchae, while the second deals with American history and literature, from the U.S. Constitution and the Transcendentalists to twentieth-century authors such as W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and Toni Morrison.

"I read more classic novels and biographies," Morris tells Velasquez. "And I'm still reading the first book we got, that Thucydides."

"I go back and read the Nicomachean Ethics [by Aristotle] and go over my notes," says Velasquez. "And who was it who wrote that great...? Sojourner Truth."

"She was a great writer, well, a great speaker," says Morris.

He brings Velasquez up-to-date on HIP2, a monthly book club for graduates of HIP who want to stay in touch while continuing to study great works.

"I couldn't do Of Mice and Men because I had to go to the halfway house," says Velasquez, referring to what she calls her dream job at SE Works, helping female ex-convicts with "reentry" by assisting them with housing, work, child care, and transportation. An ex-convict herself, Velasquez started as a client then got a job as a receptionist, and, hungry to learn, worked her way up to employment specialist. She lost her kids, now eight and nine, for two years when they were preschoolers and jokes that she's done life "on the installment plan."

"The latest book is Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment," Morris informs her. "I'm on book one right now. It rolls!"

HIP students receive a lot of help to get them through the course--free textbooks, notebooks, bus tickets, and child care. In addition, program director Jennifer Allen attends class once a week and serves as a liaison between students and faculty. She teaches the students how to write papers that include critical thinking, reasoned arguments, and source citations, but she also checks in on them regularly and gives them pep talks; she says HIP is the most rewarding part of her job as OCH program director. There's no doubt that, even with the additional support, completing the course is a great achievement for each student. Not only is the work challenging--a typical cohort reads forty works and writes eight papers in a seven-month period--but students also have to be available two nights a week for classes, which are taught by Reed College professors, and they often meet on a third night to compare notes.

A program like HIP tries to pave the path to education for low-income individuals. Going to college is an obvious route to the American dream of financial security: according to a study by the Department of Commerce's U.S. Census Bureau, in 2005, an American age eighteen and older with a bachelor's degree earned an average of $51,554, while one with a high school diploma earned $28,645. But the cost of higher education deters many low-income students.

In addition to finances, other barriers can be difficult to surmount. For example, a person who grows up delighting her parents by taking tests and writing essays will generally be less anxious about writing a paper than a middle-aged or self-educated person returning to the classroom. For these people, suddenly being exposed to a world where people debate civilly and read closely can be disconcerting. For HIP students, when it comes to amassing cultural capital, being exposed to complex, classic texts is like scoring a job on Wall Street. The question is, how far can underprivileged students, like those in HIP, go?

For both Morris and Velasquez, the path to education has never been straight and easy. A product of foster homes, Morris started using heroin at age ten. He says he was always smart, but not bookish. The spouse of one of his GED teachers helped him apply to college. "I was offered a scholarship to Rutgers when I was fifteen, but I turned it down because I was more interested in taking heroin than reading books," he says.

It took another ten years in a fog of drugs before Morris realized what a mistake that had been. He got a degree in fisheries management from Mount Hood Community College, "but I never worked the job a day, because of political differences." Morris is on disability and calls himself a "retired computer geek," one who made a living doing technical support and network administration from the days of DOS 2.0 to Windows Vista. He says he's a screaming leftist but prefers to read Mark Twain over newspapers. "When I was doing the homeless thing I lived in the library," he says, where he passed the time reading obsessively. He credits Write Around Portland, a Portland-based nonprofit that offers writing workshops to at-risk populations, with helping to center him. Write Around Portland is one of the agencies that refers clients to OCH and the HIP program.

The forty-four-year-old Velasquez is the second youngest of ten. She had an older brother who read widely, and she would pester him to share his books. Referring in a matter-of-fact manner to her family's "alcoholism, abuse, and generational poverty," Velasquez says, "I was a bookworm to escape all that stuff growing up." Her family lived two blocks from Reed College. "Being near Reed was like looking in the window of a big store," she says, "so I really jumped at the chance to be taught by Reed College professors."

HIP students who complete the course receive one Reed College credit (which transfers as six credits to other colleges in the state), but getting students to finish is a challenge. The overall graduation rate for the program's first five years was 40 percent, and ten of the twenty-seven students who started HIP in September 2007 made it to graduation in April 2008. According to Allen, a wave of students generally leaves the course in the first few weeks, then the group bonds and settles down. Health issues are the number one reason people quit. "Poor people tend to move around a lot; there are job changes and there are struggles with addiction. Recovery is always a big factor--people fall off the wagon," says Allen.

These fluctuations can really upset the classroom dynamic, but it's part and parcel of a program like HIP that's geared toward at-risk populations. "They drop out sometimes because it's not a fit, or because life gets in the way," Allen says. "If people don't feel noticed, they will drop out. When you feel you play an important role in a room, you show up."

Other state humanities councils have courses for low-income adults, and they face similar problems with retention. Most are based on or inspired by the Clemente program, which was founded by author and poverty activist Earl Shorris, author of Riches for the Poor: The Clemente Course in the Humanities. The Odyssey Project, based in Illinois, has a retention rate of 60 percent according to program director Amy Thomas Elder, who says that most courses in other states have similar rates.

In fact, these retention rates mirror those among working-class students at four-year colleges and universities. According to a 2005 New York Times article by David Leonhardt, although working-class students can get into college, many have a hard time completing their education. One in three Americans in his or her midtwenties now drops out of college, up from one in five in the late 1960s. In 2004 only 41 percent of low-income students entering a four-year college graduated in five years, compared with 66 percent of high-income students. For working-class students, the pressure from peers who are working rather than attending school can make college seem pointless. And, again, the prospect of huge college debt can scare some off.

But for Peter Sacks, author of Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, dropout rates are a red herring. What's more important is that the deck is stacked against students from low-income households trying to get into good colleges. "I've seen American institutions of higher education take the differences that derive from the family and individual level and make them worse through institutional policies such as admissions and financial aid, which only serve as a boost to the affluent kids," he said by phone from his home in Boise, Idaho.

Sacks says there's a very strong relationship between SAT scores and parental income and education. "A kid whose parents did not have a high school education is likely to score four hundred points less than kids whose parents have graduate degrees," he says, adding that such students might be bright and have good grade point averages, but they don't do as well on SATs as kids who have been prepped for the test all their lives. "The entire higher education edifice is fueled by the wrongheaded notions of academic quality, [as] defined by U.S. News and World Report's rankings, with its insane overemphasis on factors like the SAT and selectivity," he says. "Ranking is a correlate of median SAT scores, and look at the way SAT scores sort: along race lines, and, rather viciously, along class lines."

As examples, Sacks writes about one high school student whose father drew up a spreadsheet of sixty-nine possible colleges and mapped out her four years of high school based on what UCLA preferred. (His wife worked there.) In contrast, Sacks tells the story of a girl, the eldest of six in an uneducated household, whose academic career got a boost when she won a science prize. She was all set to apply for college when she skipped town with her boyfriend.

But getting an education is about more than just book learning: it's about learning to interact with new classes of people. A wealthy kid who takes a blue- collar summer job knows how it is to be a fish out of water, and the same is true for those who enter higher education against the odds and find themselves so uncomfortable that it affects their academic performance. Part of the problem is that students who haven't been brought up with the assumption that they're heading for higher education feel that they don't belong in the classroom.

One celebrated HIP graduate went on to Reed College after completing the course, but dropped out after eighteen months. Pancho Savery, a Reed College English professor who's taught in the HIP program since its inception in 2001, says the student had difficulties, in part because he was older. "He found that there was hostility toward him from some Reed students, and that was a function of age and class." In retrospect Savery thinks Portland State University would have been a better match because of its student body's class and age range.

Jean Cheney, the director of the Utah Humanities Council's Venture Course, says that helping low-income adults feel more comfortable in a classroom setting can be a challenge. "We want to help them graduate into college work, but for some it's too much," she says. "It's a very foreign world. Their mind-set tends to be hierarchical--'Tell me what the answer is'--and they call us 'Mister' and 'Doctor.' We tell them, 'Please use our first names,' and that there's no one right answer. There's no authority in the classroom other than the need for respect for each other."

Because most HIP students are referred by social service agencies, such as Cascade AIDS Project, Recovery Association Project, and Better People (a recidivism reduction program), they've usually just come through a greater set of trials than the average low-income adult. (That the classic texts they study are mostly products of great struggle seems to help them relate.) Allen describes one class in which a female student felt aghast that she was the only one who believed that Blanche had been raped by her brother-in-law in A Streetcar Named Desire. "Of that classroom, four of the women told me they had been raped," Allen says. "It becomes difficult to navigate--it becomes quickly like a support group, and you wonder, how do you keep the class on track?"

But despite the often-troubled histories of students in HIP and programs like it, there are more than a few success stories. Illinois' Thomas Elder says that one year, the father of a student, who was from a family of addicts, was murdered in Detroit and left in a van, which was torched. "I thought, 'I'll never see [the student] again,' but the student came back and went on to college," she says. "A lot of them are the most stable person in their family, so they're the ones to whom everyone turns. Say someone's sister goes to jail--they wind up with the sister's kids."

Sometimes this kind of chaos can be a motivator of last resort. "A lot of students have had so many opportunities that didn't work out that they feel this is one they're not going to let slip away. The women especially are very strongly motivated that this is something they can do for their children," says Thomas Elder.

And interestingly enough, these kinds of life experiences have value in a college setting. To the Reed professors who teach in the HIP program, these experiences translate into both challenges and advantages. The fact that HIP students are usually older than most college students, and have consequently lived a little, stimulates Savery. "Reed College students are trained to look at texts primarily in the context of other texts, whereas HIP students are more likely to look for how texts resonate in their lives," he says. "You're much more likely to have a conversation about current events [in HIP] than in a Reed class."

According to Martha Balshem, professor of sociology and special assistant to the president for diversity at Portland State University, Americans should "try to avoid thinking of working-class status in itself as being what needs to be fixed. At Portland State, we have students with a wide variety of social class backgrounds, and that diversity brings vibrancy and creativity into our classrooms. What we need to fix as a society are the social-class inequities in school resources and in our society's wage structure. Along with this, we have to examine the biases toward middle-class and white ways of thinking and being that are built into our educational systems."

Sometimes life experiences can overcome even a stoutly middle-class upbringing. Take thirty-two-year-old Angela Cruikshank, a HIP dropout, for example. As a child, she grew up shuttling between her father in Olympia, Washington, and her mother in Pendleton, Oregon. Her father managed a Chevrolet dealership. In high school, he had been a 4.0 student and valedictorian of his class, but, motivated by money, was selling cars at fifteen. "He used to give me $100 for every A grade but nothing for a B," Cruikshank says. "He encouraged me to go to college, but there wasn't a lot he did to contribute." Her mother attended the private St. Mary's Academy in Portland but was a free spirit and spurned higher education, even though her three siblings are all college-educated.

Cruikshank says she was twelve years old the first time her mom picked her up from the police station, where she'd been taken for underage drinking. She had a baby at sixteen. She recalls all of her friends graduating from college while she worked waitressing jobs, a contrast that affected her self-esteem. She eventually moved to San Francisco and became an exotic dancer and a heroin user, making enough money to afford drugs and return to Pendleton to her mother and child every few months.

Coping with a divorce and the needs of her three children, she fell behind in the first semester of HIP. With a new relationship, she fell behind again in the second. "I've failed at so many things," she says, "it's almost in my nature to be self-defeating." She is hoping for a third chance this fall. "I'm smart. I read and write really well. I just don't like school, the social aspect of it," she says. Cruikshank loved the learning-for-learning's-sake aspect of HIP, but adds, "The thing about HIP that was difficult for me was I didn't have any study skills. I have great comprehension, but it's really hard for me to sit and read for two hours a night."

Cruikshank now tends bar three nights a week at a strip club in Portland and is raising her three children in a new three-bedroom townhouse, which has "ridiculously cheap rent." One of her daughters goes to St. Mary's Academy (thanks to assistance from Cruikshank's mother), and the others go to a charter school. She uses her spare time to help them in their education. "For me, it's my duty and obligation. I know about the follow-through, the social side, all of it. The most important thing I'll ever do is teach them everything they need to know to go out into the world."

Like a lot of HIP students, Cruikshank has vague plans to take classes at Portland Community College. Though it's difficult to keep tabs on HIP graduates because they are highly mobile, Allen says that of the program's twenty-nine semester-only graduates, she is aware of four who enrolled in other college courses following HIP. Of the program's seventy-four full-year graduates, she knows of twenty-five who enrolled in other college courses. At least three have graduated with bachelor's degrees, and a fourth got her bachelor's and was recently accepted into the Master's of Social Work program at Portland State University. Illinois' Thomas Elder is not clear on the exact number, but based on requests for college transcripts, she believes almost half of the Odyssey Project's participants do go on to college. "I have noticed it takes them an extra long time to apply, and to finish," she adds.

Allen understands that the HIP study mode is hard to sustain once the course is over but hopes that the students can at least build confidence in the realm of learning. "If they can get this done, maybe they can go on to something after, whether it's another class or to advocate for themselves, or argue their point in a group dynamic."

These intangible, hard-to-measure outcomes have value, something more institutions of higher learning are figuring out. Sacks praises Oregon State University for trying to assess students in a way that is a better indicator of college academic performance. OSU's Insight Resume lets applicants write one- hundred-word essays about their experiences in leadership and group contributions, knowledge in a field, creativity, dealing with adversity, community service, handling systemic challenges, and goals and task commitment. They are read and scored holistically.

Sacks says the elite public schools such as the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin are competing in the marketplace for prestige and are becoming "public in name only." By contrast, the University of Texas at Austin has the "Ten percent plan: automatic admission for Texas high school students who finish in the top 10 percent regardless of SAT score."

Sacks points out that countries such as Korea and Finland are leapfrogging the United States in terms of the proportion of graduates they produce. "For colleges to pay more attention to diversity along class lines will change what it means to be a democratic society. A more educated society is a more cost-effective way to run a society."

Most HIP students, whether they completed the course or not, say they are glad for their experience. Education may not blossom into high-paying jobs and a step up the class ladder, but it does seem to grant some sense of peace to restless minds and wayward souls.

By the time James Boyd graduated from HIP, his outlook had changed. A soft-spoken twenty-six-year-old, Boyd described his social class growing up with his grandmother in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as "poor white trailer trash." He says, "I hung out with the kids who blew things up and set things on fire, although I was an outcast. In Cheyenne, if they thought I was gay they would have taken me behind the truck and given me a beating." An attempt to join the Army Rangers failed when they discovered he had epilepsy. He received a general discharge from the Army and came to Portland for culinary school. While recovering from methamphetamine addiction, he started bringing cakes once a month to ladies who met at the Sewing Room in Beaverton.

As one of this year's student speakers at HIP graduation, Boyd, who is HIV positive, talked about the primacy of "acceptance, patience, and love" in his new life. He volunteers at the Cascade AIDS Project and describes himself as an ex-racist. His grandmother has moved to Portland, and he will be her caretaker and chef. His ambitions are modest. He has never voted, and HIP didn't politicize him. "I don't think my one little vote makes any difference," he says with a shrug. "As Tocqueville said, our government is a self-defeating machine." Boyd does, however, intend to be more active in his community when it comes to educating people about HIV/AIDS.

For Bob Morris, HIP provided direction in his personal studies. "500 BC to 390 BC is now my period," he says. He'll tell anyone that one thing he learned from studying Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars is that "politicians today are still blowing off the same stuff--the rhetoric hasn't changed: 'We're so much better than they are, and they need our help.' With Alcibiades and Pericles there's a definite comparison to what's going on here--endless wars. Athens voted for war many, many times. The leader's son takes over and everything goes to hell."

But perhaps the main speaker from this year's HIP graduation ceremony put it most eloquently. Julie Hommes was selected by her peers because of her maternal fortitude (she has five young children). "I'm under new management," she said to her classmates, friends, and teachers. "HIP has opened my eyes and made me aware of my heart; it's taught me how to listen and to speak."

Joseph Gallivan is a freelance writer living in Portland. He was a feature writer for the Portland Tribune for six years and is the author of the novels Oi, Ref! and England All Over.

Published in the Summer 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities