I have been on the adjunct treadmill for many years, running as fast as I can to grab up teaching sections before my money runs out. In the spring of 2008 I moved to southern Virginia, desperate for courses to teach but without many contacts. I found a job posting for an introduction to philosophy course at Southside Virginia Community College. I applied, got the section, and was happy. Days later, I received an e-mail message from the hiring manager, requesting that I attend an orientation session —"at Lunenberg Correctional Center.” Gulp!
Upon further inquiry, I learned that the job I had accepted was not at a traditional community college campus, but rather at a medium-security penitentiary for men. I have lived through some tough times, struggling through graduate-school poverty and piecing together a living on the adjunct market. But I never thought I would go to prison for philosophy.
I arrived at my orientation session just after dark on a cold Tuesday night. I waited for Ana, the woman in charge of educational programs “behind the wire,” while perusing walls full of inspirational stories and “Safety First” and “Guard of the Month” plaques. After a few minutes, Ana buzzed through the door and introduced herself. She assured me that Lunenburg is “the jewel of the Virginia correctional system,” and that “you won’t find better clients” —she actually used the word “clients” —"anywhere in the correctional system.” I almost felt proud.
At a guard station, I emptied my pockets of unallowable items, including one unapproved book and my cellphone. A very pleasant guard patted me down, something that has never before happened to me on entering a college campus. We were buzzed through the door.
We emerged, blinking, into an unnaturally bright, brutally cold open area facing the gate into the prison. Intense spotlights dazzled off a 20-foot-high wall of mirror-bright loops of razor wire, like some sort of demonic tire shop. We were buzzed through one automatic gate, then another, past a gym with the high-pitched “skitch, skitch, skitch” sounds of men playing basketball, toward the library/classroom door.
A few guys in blue denim gave Ana desperately lewd lookings-over, but most were remarkably deferential to us. Outside the library was a long line of men waiting to get frisked, which seemed to be a condition of entry to the library. I unthinkingly stepped to the back of the queue, but Ana waved me through them all and past the guard who was doing the patting.
The building was prefab, the classrooms small and functionalist. The walls were bright with tacky, grade-school cartoons representing the rules of grammar and arithmetic. There were motivational minibiographies of racial heroes, mostly African-American, American Indian, and Latino.
Most of the campus’s policies were fairly standard, but announced with much more gravity than I was used to. Failing to take attendance, for instance, is not only a violation of policy but also a felony breach of security. Some of the rules were standard, but laughably inapplicable: No romantic relationships with students —to be conducted where, and with whom, in my all-male class? When I had finished reading the instructor’s handbook, I was required to sign and return it. I’ve taught at many institutions, but had never before seen a top-secret instructor’s handbook.
When the class started, I found myself singularly unprepared. Although I’ve taught Intro a dozen times or more, my experience did me a disservice as my well-worn examples clunked pathetically in the prison setting:
“It’s 6 a.m. and your alarm clock rings. You know you should get up and go to work, but you’d really like to sleep in. What ethical principles might go through your mind to help you decide what to do?” Clunk!
“You’re having a fight with your girlfriend. …" Clunk!
“You’re deciding how to vote. …" Clunk!
At the same time, anything I could have done to pretend to understand their context would have been much worse (“Suppose you’re having a fight with your cellmate. …").
My students, too, were singularly unprepared for a class on abstract thought. Many of them had never heard of philosophy and few even knew what the word meant. They were in my class because a federal grant paid their tuition, and a class on just about any topic represented an element of novelty. They were predominantly African-American and in their early 20s, and had mixed educational backgrounds. Yet, as one of my students —who is serving a life term —said on the first night of class, “We’ve got nothing to do but think.”
Class discussions were often rambling but always fascinating. I assigned only very brief reading assignments summarizing philosophical theories —perhaps four pages per class. All of utilitarianism, for example, got only a couple of pages, written in the simplest possible terms. The students struggled with the philosophical terminology, but most of them made it through. Their books, issued by the state with stern warnings against damaging them, were always open, always dog-eared, and usually marked up. For the first time in my teaching career, several students asked me for extra readings and extra assignments. It was professor catnip!
At the same time, they were an amazingly manipulative bunch, and they played my policies like poker hands. When a nasty flu outbreak sickened half of the prison’s inmates, I let two clearly sick students leave class. Next class, after more than half of my students quietly disappeared before an hour had passed, I stood in the doorway to stop the attrition.
Three of my students cribbed their answers to the take-home final straight from our text —a form of cheating so naïve I can only attribute it to lack of college experience. I gave them the F that I had repeatedly warned them about, but I felt bad about it.
Whatever their flaws, I thought my inmate-students were in a unique position to benefit from a class on philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline that ought to help students shape their lives and values —and at Lunenburg, my students desperately needed to rethink their lives. At their best, they understood that. Many of them proved it in their intense devotion to the class.
What I didn’t tell my students is that the semester changed their professor perhaps more than it affected any of them. For that brief, two-month semester, I felt again the fire that brought me into college teaching in the first place.
One of the great joys of teaching philosophy is the after-class conversation. In other institutions, students could follow me back to my office or my car, pursuing new thoughts and ideas and questions that didn’t get answered during class. At Lunenburg, my students were required to leave the building (getting patted down on their way out) and go directly to their “dormitories.” Often, my students and I took advantage of indulgent guards and stood in the quad discussing ideas for half an hour or more after class. Inmates were not supposed to be outside without permission, but they stayed anyway, and the guards let them. Some nights, we stood shivering in the cold Virginia winter while guards clicked past us two or three times.
If you ever long for students who will appreciate your efforts on their behalf, you cannot do better than to teach students like the inmates I taught at Lunenburg.