On mentorship, resources, and excellence
“Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” — Mariame Kaba
Years ago when I was so depressed and burnt-out from teaching that I wanted to die, hiking the Tennessee Valley Trail in Marin County with my dear friend and mentor Jody Lewen helped save my life.
Jody is the President of Mt. Tamalpais College (MTC) at San Quentin State Prison. For almost 25 years, she has been building a model for higher education in prison — one that fundamentally disrupts the prison system itself and that President Obama awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2016.
One day when we were out hiking, she shared a critique that she had recently (and frequently enough) received from a partner in the reform/abolition world. Why doesn’t MTC expand into some of the other prisons in California?
Because even her venting is brilliant, Jody was like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I’m so tired of people criticizing us for not scaling up. We’re not yet operating the way we want to be at this site. Why would we stretch our already overwhelmed staff to produce more, less adequate educational experiences to people who have been offered mostly shitty educational experiences their whole lives — which is, by the way, partly how we got ourselves into this mess [the human rights catastrophe that is the prison industrial complex]?”
