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The founder of Mount Tamalpais College — an accredited school that provides classes to incarcerated people at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center — received a prestigious national award last week for her work in the prison.

Jody Lewen was one of three recipients of the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, given by the McGraw Family Foundation and University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Lewen and the other two winners will each receive an award of $50,000 and an awards sculpture and will be celebrated at a ceremony in November.

Lewen received the Higher Education Prize for her work in prisons over the past two decades, starting as a volunteer at San Quentin in 1999 and eventually taking a leadership role with its college program. She founded the Prison University Project in the early 2000s and for years it operated at San Quentin as an extension site of Oakland-based Patten University.

In 2020, the program changed its name to Mount Tamalpais College and in 2022 was granted accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, making it the first independent liberal arts school dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students, with nearly 4,000 students at San Quentin having taken at least one course.

Lewen, whose work has received many awards including the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2016, said she was pleased with the latest honor and recognition of the school, which does not charge tuition and is entirely privately funded.

“What’s particularly special is that it’s for higher education specifically. It expresses a true recognition of the field of higher education in prison as fully a part of higher education,” she said.

San Quentin, the oldest prison in California, is undergoing changes, including the shuttering of its death row, the recent renaming from San Quentin State Prison to San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and the demolition last month of a former warehouse to build a new education facility.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for the overhaul of San Quentin to serve as an example of what his office calls a new “California model” of overseeing state prisons.

In a press release about the demolition of the former warehouse, Newsom’s office said the California model “improves public safety by breaking cycles of crime for the incarcerated population while improving workplace conditions for institution staff through rehabilitation, education, and restorative justice.”

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“Our hope is that going forward the state will invest equally significant resources in staff training, technology, information management systems, and improving critically failing infrastructure across the whole prison.“

–Jody Lewen, founder of Mount Tamalpais College

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Lewen said “we’re hopeful but we’re waiting” about the changes at San Quentin.

“I would say that the jury is still out,” she said. “So far the state has only invested massive resources in the demolition and construction of a new building. They haven’t invested yet in the infrastructure that will be required to support high-functioning programs and a healthy living and working environment for everyone there.”

She said, “At this time, it’s really only the incarcerated people and individual prison staff and administrators who are trying to implement significant changes on the ground. Our hope is that going forward the state will invest equally significant resources in staff training, technology, information management systems, and improving critically failing infrastructure across the whole prison.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Local News Matters, Bay Area on September 23.

Photo courtesy Bonaru Richardson.

This college in San Quentin State Prison helps incarcerated individuals redefine themselves – and it could show us how to build a better education system for everyone.

North of Stanford and west of Berkeley is Mt. Tamalpais College, one of the most innovative colleges in the United States. The only eligibility requirements: students must have a high school diploma or GED, and they must be incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison. 

That’s right. The entire Mt. Tamalpais campus is housed inside San Quentin State Prison—one of the most challenging educational environments imaginable.

“San Quentin is a medium security prison, so our students have been convicted of all sorts of crimes, many very serious crimes,” says Mt. Tamalpais College President Jody Lewen. “But one of the guiding principles underlying our work is that every individual human being has the right to develop their own unique gifts.” 

Turns out, it’s also a highly effective solution for strengthening public safety as well.
 

Mt. Tamalpais College, named after a mountain students can see from the prison yard, is the only accredited independent college in the U.S. whose main campus is inside a prison. Formerly known as the Prison University Project, the college allows students to earn an associate degree that is transferable to four-year institutions. 

“It’s really hard to explain why people who are incarcerated should have access to quality education,” Lewen says, “but when you see it happening, you have your answer. They’re human beings. They’re alive.”

People who commit a crime should be held accountable. But to improve public safety, rehabilitation must be part of the equation, not just punishment. In the United States, 70% of people who leave prison will return within five years. 

But for graduates of Mt. Tamalpais, only 5% will return to prison. 

Unlike traditional colleges on the outside, Lewen’s college is entirely focused on education that’s individualized to each student’s unique needs. It’s transformative. As Odell, a student in the program explains, “I finally have a skillset that I can use that’s positive and constructive. It’s a feeling of empowerment.”

Education is individualized at Mt. Tamalpais College

When the program was founded 25 years ago, it only had a few volunteers, no full-time staff, and no budget. Lewen came on as one of those volunteers. 

“When I first walked into the prison, I literally felt like I was throwing myself off a cliff,” she says. “But when I got into the classroom, in most ways, it was the opposite of the way I’d imagined the environment. Students were all excited and walked up to greet us and shake our hands.”

Lewen tells of a student in those early days who told her, “You know, being in college while you’re in prison is the difference between being alive and not being alive.”

Students attending college in prison are not typical college students. That’s why Lewen has created an atypical college. “We are the opposite of a cookie cutter approach,” she explains. “Our goal is really to be a hybrid of the best of a small liberal arts college and the best of the community college system.” 

Mt. Tamalpais is independently funded, which gives Lewen and her staff the freedom to meet each student’s needs without worrying about government restrictions or diverting public resources away from other priorities in the criminal justice system. 

“We work from the assumption that every student comes along a different educational pathway. They have a different background, different set of experiences, different needs, different goals.” 

She continues, “The way we approach education is to greet and to recognize each student as an individual and then to work with them to make sure that we are meeting them where they are and addressing what their needs are over time.

“The point is to create a college campus that is preparing students—academically, socially, educationally, intellectually—to go wherever they want to go.”

The volunteer faculty at Mt. Tamalpais come from some of the Bay Area’s most prestigious universities. Rita Lucarelli, a professor at nearby  Berkeley, says she sees something different when she steps into the classroom inside San Quentin”In many colleges, there are many talents that are not recognized,” Lucarelli says. “What I see here is that whatever is the talent of one student, it will come out. All my colleagues here, they’re not just talking to the students, they listen to them.”

Students agree with Lucarelli. “The difference between college out there and college in here, it’s one-on-one,” says LaCedric. “They help you, and they really sit down with you.” 

Mt. Tamalpais College helps students look forward

Personalized instruction is the name of the game at Mt. Tamalpais. 

Craig describes what it was like to need extra help. “I started off, and I didn’t have the confidence to write. It would take me four or five days to complete one essay,” he says. “I had a tutor that was specifically for me for an hour in English. Now I can do an essay in one day and pass it with an A or a B.” 

Arthur is hoping to use his education to help others like him. “That first class gave me my voice,” he says. “So my main goal—what I want my education to do for me—is figure out how to end the school to prison pipeline.” 

Students at Mt. Tamalpais are emerging artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and philosophers. The college has had hundreds of graduates so far. But the model that Lewen has built has greater implications for society beyond the walls of San Quentin or even higher education in prison.

“What the success of Mt. Tamalpais College illustrates that when individuals develop and discover their own unique gifts, they become almost forces of nature, in terms of their drive and commitment to repairing the world and supporting other human beings and building a more just society,” Lewen says. 

Another student, Kelvin, describes Mt. Tamalpais as a catalyst. He gets emotional when he says, “I’m grateful, and now that I’ve gotten to a certain point, it’s just more motivation, and I’m hungry.” 

Mount Tamalpais College is supported by Stand Together Trust, which provides funding and strategic capabilities to innovators, scholars, and social entrepreneurs to develop new and better ways to tackle America’s biggest problems.

Learn more about Stand Together’s education efforts.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Stand Together.

Photo and Video courtesy Stand Together.

For Jeff Magnin ’74, who spent nearly two decades as an English professor, teaching was more than just a profession—it was a way for him to use his talents on behalf of others. And last year, he increased this commitment to education and service, becoming a volunteer instructor at Mount Tamalpais College, a small liberal arts college housed within San Quentin Prison on the north shore of San Francisco Bay. 

The only degree-granting college located inside a U.S. prison, Mount Tamalpais offers its students the opportunity to use their time in incarceration to earn an associate’s degree. Former offenders paroled with an associate’s degree are far less likely to return to prison. Yet while Magnin estimates that only 200 of the nearly 3,200 members of the prison population are enrolled in the college, he is glad to help equip these students with the tools for future success. 

“As a society, we always talk about second chances and third chances, but a lot of these students haven’t ever had first chances,” he says. “They had poor educations. They came from unbelievably difficult circumstances. So I feel that this is one way that I can give back.”

Passionate about literature from a young age, Magnin received an MFA in dramatic criticism from Yale before heading to Los Angeles to evaluate scripts for Hollywood production companies. But the work was far from fulfilling. “I would read something on the order of 400 screenplays a year, and of those 400, I could probably expect to find three or four that were promising. It really was a slog,” he explains. So he decided to return to academia, this time as an educator, a role which he says was more consistent with the values instilled in him by both his parents and his time at Taft.

Magnin went on to teach throughout California—including stints at California State University in Northridge, University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley—before landing at the University of California, Davis, where he taught courses on nonfiction writing, 20th-century dramatic literature, and documentary film. This work kept him busy for the next 15 years, over which time he developed an increasing interest in volunteering at Mount Tamalpais. Only with his retirement in September 2021 could he finally apply for the program.

Now Magnin teaches a dozen students ranging in age from mid-20s to early 70s each semester, leading them through the fundamentals of composition and acclimating them to proper academic conventions, such as incorporating outside research into their work and properly citing sources. Much of the class centers on two assignments, each around 1,000 words, and Magnin purposefully chooses prompts that speak to his students’ experiences—for instance, potential improvements to the prison and parole systems.

“These inmates go for years without having someone ask them what they think. They might have been turned away by people or told things about themselves that were denigrating or untrue,” he says, “but by improving their writing, they can begin to express themselves, which will hopefully give them a sense of empowerment.”

Very quickly, Magnin perceived noticeable differences between his students at Mount Tamalpais and those in the university system. “College students these days are so concerned about their GPAs that they sometimes have a real difficult time in class, they freeze up,” he says. “But for my students at San Quentin, it’s all so new and liberating—they just take off! They take part actively in discussions, and the classes are very lively and very interesting.”

But while the students may be different, Magnin says that his teaching hasn’t changed. “I always have the same goals when I put my classes together. I want my students to gain confidence in themselves as writers and to be more equipped to write under diverse circumstances outside of class,” he says. “And that’s even more important for the men at Mount Tamalpais. Even after they’re paroled, they’re not entirely free. They face challenges getting work or finding a place to live. So to be able to teach them skills that are transferrable—that can really help them make their way in the world once they’re released—makes this work especially meaningful.”

BERKELEY, Calif. – A Cal Berkeley graduate from Southeast Asia is committed to inspiring his community to dream big, despite the challenges you may face.

Somdeng “Danny” Thongsy, 45, is an immigrant from Southeast Asia, who spent two decades serving time in prison, but now he is an advocate for others like him.

As Thongsy walked across the stage at UC Berkeley on Monday, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, he thought of the family he shattered when he took someone’s life back in the 1990s. 

“To this day, I’m still living with the guilt and shame and I think part of my academic education is a transformation of that, to ensure other kids don’t make the same mistake I did,” he said. 

Born in a refugee camp in Thailand when his family was escaping the war in Laos, Thongsy immigrated to a low-income neighborhood in Stockton when he was just a little boy.

“A lot of kids ended up in gangs, like myself,” he said, “When I was 17, my brother was murdered by a rival gang, which led me to a deep depression.”

Without help or resources, the depression eventually led him to retaliate, sending him on a journey through the prison system at just 17 years old. He was charged with 2nd-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

25 years later, Thongsy never thought he would be someday graduating from UC Berkeley and pursuing his goals. 

“Wow, this is like a dream come true,” he said.

Thongsy reflected on his journey. He said while serving his time, he began going to church. 

There was a preacher that came to my cell and started telling me about love and forgiveness, saying ‘you got to be able to forgive yourself,’ and I felt the word of love and forgiveness was the word I needed.”

He said that is when his whole trajectory shifted. While in prison, he got his GED, then his Associate’s degree, and was granted parole for good behavior.

He worked as an advocate for the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, a non-profit organization helping members of the AAPI community reenter society.

Despite trying to better himself, Thongsy’s immigration status was at stake as he faced deportation because of his felony.

In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom granted him a pardon after hearing about his advocacy work, freeing him to join a program called Underground Scholars at UC Berkeley.

The program began as a club by a formerly incarcerated student in 2013, Danny Murillo, who wanted to help others like himself.

“One thing I notice about Danny is that he’s using his life experience to inform his research, and the work that he wants to pursue,” said Murillo, who now serves as associate director of Underground Scholars.

Now, it’s expanded to every UC campus and community colleges across the state as a prison-to-university pipeline.

“Every year now we get 4 million dollars from the state budget that gets divided by nine undergraduate UC campuses to serve formerly incarcerated students and system impacted students in university. 

At Berkeley alone, Underground Scholars has 40 graduates this semester. Thongsy is one of them.

On his big day, he offers these words for dreamers like him: “Here I am, it’s not too late. If I could do it, anybody could do it.”

Thongsy said he plans to work full time and will apply for grad schools in the fall, so he can continue working with marginalized communities and supporting formerly incarcerated members of the AAPI community.

Attribution: This article originally appeared on Fox KTVU in May 13, 2024.

Photo courtesy Fox KTVU

Christopher Ying, 2024 University Medalist, plans a legal career advocating for marginalized groups

Growing up in San Francisco’s West Portal neighborhood, Christopher Ying had vague plans to become a lawyer and began prepping by joining the speech, debate and mock trial teams at Lowell High School.

But he credits the University of California, Berkeley, and the opportunities it provided — in particular, to report and edit for the Daily Californian and to tutor incarcerated people at the former San Quentin State Prison — with helping him find his true passion in the legal field: giving a voice to marginalized members of society.

Those only-at-Berkeley experiences — plus a 3.981 grade point average and glowing recommendations from faculty members — have earned Ying the highest honor for a graduating senior, the 2024 University Medal. In addition to receiving the medal and $2,500, he will address the graduating class on Saturday, May 11, at the campuswide spring commencement.

Ying, 23, double-majored in history and mathematics — the former in preparation for a career in law, the latter because of a fascination with math that he’s had since childhood — and completed his coursework last December. He decided to graduate with his friends at spring commencement and used his final semester to study intensely for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT).

To his surprise and delight, both majors blended with his plans to attend law school. Math was a love he inherited from his parents — both software engineers who had emigrated from China — but its foundation in logic reinforced the fact-based argumentation of history.

“Math and law are sort of kindred subjects in that they both try to create order out of nothing, but at the same time they use what you’ve previously created,” he said. “In law, you look at previous rulings to extrapolate principles that you apply to current legal problems. Math is the same way. And the logical reasoning that you do in math is exactly the logical reasoning that they teach you on the LSAT.”

Ying also had considered becoming a doctor, but said he wasn’t fond of high school STEM classes. Instead, he gravitated toward the humanities and extracurricular activities — speech, debate and mock trial — “which were all sort of law-related,” he said. After arriving at UC Berkeley and beginning his volunteer work at San Quentin, where he taught math through Mount Tamalpais College and edited stories for the San Quentin News, he saw up close the need for a reformed criminal justice system.

“Law, up to that point, had been an interest for me; after San Quentin, it became a goal — this is really what I want to do,” said Ying, who is now busy applying to law schools.

Meet the four finalists for the University Medal

Despite personal challenges compounded by the social isolation of the COVID era, each built a community of study and service that was essential to their success at UC Berkeley.

“My dream right now is to somehow leave a lasting mark in criminal law, whether that be as a criminal defense attorney or creating a foundation that advocates for criminal justice reform,” he said. “That foundation would provide affordable legal services, because a lot of the people that I met in prison, they’re there because they couldn’t afford a good attorney.”

Prison reform

Part of Ying’s desire to help marginalized people find their voices came from his home life, which was sometimes difficult and contentious, but because of a taboo in Chinese culture, never discussed, he said. That motivated him to focus on domestic violence issues when interning as a UC Berkeley sophomore for former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a criminal justice reformer who now heads Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center.

Ying’s concern for the underdog crystallized after he joined the Daily Cal that same year and reported on Indigenous protests by East Bay Ohlone tribes to reclaim their ancestral shellmounds in Berkeley. Over three years, he worked his way up from reporter to city editor to managing editor, then devoted his last year to focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the paper as the DEI hiring manager.

It was at the student newspaper that he heard about the San Quentin News Editing Project, a class run by Professor William Drummond at the UC Berkeley journalism school. Undergraduate and graduate students work with incarcerated people to edit, publish and share their news with prisons statewide in the form of a printed newspaper and magazine, a podcast, and radio and TV broadcasts.

Ying admitted it was scary to walk into San Quentin’s prison yard for the first time and hear two metal gates slam shut behind him.

But San Quentin’s newsroom quickly put him at ease.

“They were welcoming. They fist bumped me. They seemed genuinely happy that I was there to help,” he said. “And after the first day, I was hooked. I just had to go back again and get more involved, and then started teaching math there. I’ve taught some of the most interesting people that I’ve ever met at San Quentin.”

Based on conversations with people who are and were detained at San Quentin, Ying wrote his senior thesis about how incarcerated people push for change and resist oppression from within prison, contrary to perceptions that change mostly comes from outside advocates.

“The stories that they told me shifted the perspective of my paper. Oftentimes, they were the ones who started movements to better their conditions for more rehabilitation, to get rid of barriers for reentry into society, to get rid of laws that penalize people unjustly for the things that they have done,” he said.

His thesis earned an A and accolades from his adviser, David Henkin, the Margaret Byrne Professor of History.

In a letter recommending Ying for the University Medal, Henkin wrote, “I was especially impressed by the methodical interviews he conducted, which created from scratch an invaluable archive of inmate perspectives on the institution, but I also commended his eloquent account of the contributions of incarcerated men to the prison reform movement and his ability to frame findings about everyday life in San Quentin within the larger history of resistance to oppressive institutions and regimes.”

Mock trials

Ying displays a theatricality that should serve him well in the courtroom, whether as a criminal defense lawyer or a reform prosecutor, like Boudin, focused on restorative justice. During an interview with Berkeley News, he frequently jumped out of his chair to reenact a memorable teaching moment or courtroom argument. His poise and confidence come, in part, from the five years he participated in mock trial competitions, including every semester at UC Berkeley.

Mock trial is a team sport — there are 700 collegiate teams nationwide — that simulates courtroom trials and features all the theatrics seen in TV courtroom dramas. Each year, teams get full court files for a hypothetical case and at the end of the year must stage a mock trial with prosecution, defense, witnesses, judges and legal maneuverings. Last year, Ying was president of the Cal Mock Trial group and led one of 48 teams that competed in the 2022-23 National Championship Tournament. While UC Berkeley’s team came in fifth in its division, Ying was awarded All-American status, an individual award given to stand-out performers.

According to head coach Arthur Shartsis, a UC Berkeley alumnus who is an attorney in San Francisco, Ying was “at the very top of this exceptional group of students.”

“From the beginning of his time on the team, he stood out for his intelligence and commitment to hard work,” Shartsis wrote in a letter recommending Ying for the University Medal. “He started on our lowest of four teams (D), and relentlessly applied himself to improve until he became the star witness of the A Team for the past three years, and the star lawyer this year. We have not had another student excel like this in both positions in twenty years.”

Mock trial experience instilled in Ying another life skill — working collaboratively.

“Mock trial taught me that chasing a goal for individual achievement at the cost of others is just not healthy. You’re not going to win competitions, and frankly, you’re not going to win the individual award either,” he said. “It’s a teamwork activity. You’re supposed to be helping each other. You’re supposed to be a well-oiled machine.”

Piano and aquascaping

It may seem like Ying has had no down time while at UC Berkeley, but playing the piano — mostly classical music — was his constant refuge, he said. An only child, he learned piano at an early age, pushed primarily by his mother, who never had the same opportunity.

“I would say that my proudest accomplishment in college was actually not related to my coursework here at all,” he said. “During COVID, I had the chance to teach my mom how to play the piano.”

He said playing the piano is not only “an exercise in self-expression,” but also a way to let his mind work through ideas, whether how to solve a math problem — he described bouncing from the piano in the middle of a piece to finish a math proof — or to explore ideas for a history paper.

“When I’m hacking away at a problem, I get too bogged down in the details, and I forget to take a step back,” he said. “Music allows me to take a relaxing time to do that.”

Ying, who has a girlfriend of six years, also took up aquascaping — decorating freshwater aquariums — as a hobby. Two aquariums decorate his home in San Francisco, one with a prominent bonsai-like tree for his Siamese fighting fish, or betta, though snails and algae have tried to take over.

“Aquascaping sort of taught me to be comfortable with imperfection,” he said.

As Ying prepares for Saturday’s commencement ceremony at California Memorial Stadium, he recalls the relief he felt being notified, while on a high school choir trip to Seattle, that he’d been accepted to UC Berkeley. It turned out to be the perfect place for him.

“Berkeley is the best school for the particular combination of majors that I chose,” he said. “It is No. 1 for history, … and Berkeley math is one of the most renowned math institutions in the world.

“If it weren’t for Berkeley, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I did through San Quentin News, to teach math, or to compete in mock trial at the level that I did. If I could go back in time, I’d tell my younger self, ‘Berkeley is your top choice. Don’t even question it. Just go.'”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Berkeley News on May 7, 2024.

Photo courtesy of Berkeley News

In condemning Republican assaults on higher ed, we should ask too what Democrats are doing to defend it, Paul Hansen writes.

Last April, California Governor Gavin Newsom flew to Sarasota to visit with students from New College of Florida. Newsom was in Florida to condemn Governor Ron DeSantis’s conservative overhaul of the progressive public college, including the elimination of the office of diversity, equity and inclusion. While I empathize with the situation New College students and faculty members find themselves in, when a spokesperson for DeSantis called Newsom’s visit a “stunt,” I had to agree.

DeSantis’s hijacking of the leadership of New College drew predictable condemnation from both mainstream and education journalists, but little has been mentioned over the past year about how unusual New College was in the first place. The Florida government’s interference in the operation of the college is particularly egregious because of the value of what was lost.

A very brief history: The densest concentration of small liberal arts colleges is in the Northeast, because that is where there were enough students to support the creation of colleges like Williams and Bowdoin in the 1790s. Most of those then-new colleges were small, religious, male and private. As the population shifted toward the Southwest in the twentieth century, large public universities became the norm, culminating in 1960 with Clark Kerr’s “Master Plan” for higher education in California. This evolution of American higher education left little room for small public colleges, and therefore relatively few of those exist. Florida has one. California arguably does not.

There are a handful of small public liberal arts colleges scattered around the country from Maryland to Washington State. Several of them, including New College, were created in the 1960s in response to both social change and huge numbers of Baby Boomers entering higher education (the motto of Evergreen State College, founded in 1967, is still “Let it all hang out”). The closest thing California has to a small public college is Sonoma State University, which was founded in 1961 along the same lines as Evergreen and which now enrolls roughly 6,000 students. Evergreen still has only about 2,000. Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts has about 1,000, and New College has approximately 700.

Unfortunately, it was not simply the case that California experienced massive growth in the second half of the twentieth century and its small colleges became medium-sized. In 1966, California elected Ronald Reagan as governor, and he quickly went to war against “big education” by ending free tuition, limiting free speech, calling for annual budget cuts, and firing Kerr, whose plan had created the world-famous system of University of California and California State University campuses. When Newsom told students in Florida “I can’t believe what you’re dealing with. It’s just an unbelievable assault,” he was forgetting the history of his own state. Reagan’s argument that California “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity” makes DeSantis’s assault on academic freedom entirely believable. One question we should all be asking is, “How far are today’s Republican politicians willing to go in their war against education?” And also, “Will Democrats do anything to defend education?”

Gavin Newsom was not even two years old when Reagan sent the National Guard to teargas students at Berkeley whom he called “cowardly fascists,” but that assault was filmed, and the footage is on YouTube. As Reagan famously said regarding the quelling of student protestors, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” About a month after he said that, the National Guard murdered four students at Kent State.

Reagan’s behavior helped sweep him into the White House ten years later, but damaged California’s system of higher education for generations. Instead of just describing DeSantis as “unbelievable” when his behavior so far suggests a watered-down version of Reagan’s, what if Newsom modeled a positive alternative?

Today’s college students look different than their Boomer forebears, and public higher education should meet the needs of today’s students, not the students of fifty years ago. Small colleges are a good fit for many students, including first-generation students who benefit from smaller class sizes, closer relationships with faculty, a focus on teaching over research, and interdisciplinary, flexible curricula. There are more of these students today than when Reagan was governor fifty years ago. Why do Reagan’s ideas about austerity still hold sway even in blue states, rebranded as “tolerable suboptimization” at University of California, Merced? Why not reverse course and create, instead of destroying?

Small liberal arts colleges are also good for creatives and entrepreneurs, and the California economy relies on those. Robert Noyce, nicknamed “the mayor of Silicon Valley” after inventing the microchip and founding Intel, graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa, which has 1,700 students. The list of Hollywood writers, actors and directors who graduated from small colleges is too long to include here.

The political right’s response to the idea of starting a new college will, of course, be that “we can’t afford it.” California has the fifth largest economy in the world, so it does have money to spend on the things the state considers priorities. For example, Newsom’s most recent proposed budget calls for more than $18 billion for prisons; the state spends more than $132K per prisoner per year. If California prioritized education as much as incarceration, Governor Newsom could celebrate his state’s accomplishments, rather than just condemning his Floridian counterpart.

In fact, California does have something wonderful to celebrate, because it is home to a small liberal arts college that, while independent, operates inside a public building. Mount Tamalpais College is tuition free, fully accredited, and enrolls only about 300 in-state students. Textbooks and school supplies are free, and the college even comes with free room and board, because Mount Tam is located within San Quentin Prison. A small number of incarcerated students have access to a kind of education not available to the general population of California.

What would a new New College look like in California? Is Newsom willing to guarantee freedom from political interference? Could the campus be an adaptive reuse of a closed military property? Could it occupy a vacant office tower? Most importantly, is the world’s fifth-largest economy radical enough to offer free tuition, as it did 60 years ago?

Colleges are interesting from a public planning standpoint because, unlike tech startups (to use a relevant example), they are more than one thing. While their primary mission is education, colleges are also employers, provide housing, operate sports programs and run public transportation systems. Because colleges are so multifaceted, they can help solve many problems at once. What other challenges is California facing that a college might help alleviate? Affordable housing? Colleges can provide housing for both students and employees. Traffic? Colleges are famously walkable communities. Migration of Californians to other states? Colleges are magnets for attracting and retaining talented people (see: Boston). Immigration from other countries? What better mechanism for helping recent immigrants acclimate and succeed than education?

Newsom attacking DeSantis for his interference with New College is perfectly justified, but wouldn’t it be great if Newsom’s base could point toward what California is doing well, and not simply condemn what Florida is doing poorly?

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed on April 18, 2024.

Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada

Doing research on JSTOR is a routine part of many students’ college experience. Now that opportunity is available to hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people.

Stacy Burnett has been incarcerated three times. The third time, she was sent to a New York state prison that offered higher education opportunities—and access to JSTOR, an expansive digital library of academic articles and books frequently used by students and scholars.

Burnett was taking courses through the Bard Prison Initiative, academic programs for incarcerated students offered by Bard College, and she said access to the vast trove of academic papers available through JSTOR set her on a path that ultimately changed the course of her life. Although her coursework was focused on public health, she developed a “fascination” with Oscar Wilde and spent hours reading academic materials on the author.

“I lost myself in those archives,” Burnett said. “I didn’t feel like I was in prison when I had JSTOR available to me.”

JSTOR is now accessible in 1,054 prisons, all but 17 of them in the U.S. That milestone, announced this month, was reached with the help of Burnett, who now leads the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative as a senior project manager at ITHAKA, the parent organization of JSTOR and the higher ed consulting group Ithaka S+R.

The initiative began in 2007 and accelerated in 2021 when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave ITHAKA $1.5 million to further its work on behalf of incarcerated students. The service is currently free for prisons because of subsidies from ITHAKA, Mellon and Ascendium Education Group, a philanthropic organization focused on postsecondary education.

JSTOR’s expanded reach means its digital library of millions of academic articles and tens of thousands of books is now available to at least 550,000 incarcerated people, a population that often lacks easy access to technology and library resources.

JSTOR is now accessible in 1,054 prisons, all but 17 of them in the U.S. That milestone, announced this month, was reached with the help of Burnett, who now leads the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative as a senior project manager at ITHAKA, the parent organization of JSTOR and the higher ed consulting group Ithaka S+R.

The initiative began in 2007 and accelerated in 2021 when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave ITHAKA $1.5 million to further its work on behalf of incarcerated students. The service is currently free for prisons because of subsidies from ITHAKA, Mellon and Ascendium Education Group, a philanthropic organization focused on postsecondary education.

JSTOR’s expanded reach means its digital library of millions of academic articles and tens of thousands of books is now available to at least 550,000 incarcerated people, a population that often lacks easy access to technology and library resources.

Overcoming Barriers

Amy Jamgochian, chief academic officer at Mount Tamalpais College, which is based at San Quentin State Prison in California, finds that incarcerated students face all kinds of obstacles to accessing research materials.

Prisons often have restrictions on the kinds of books and articles students can access, including content related to “sex, violence, gang activity, illegal activity of any kind, political content that is seen as subversive or unpatriotic, and anything that is perceived as useful for criminal activity or is a perceived security threat,” she said in an email. Academic programs in prisons also tend to experience tech challenges that prevent incarcerated students from accessing research materials, including a lack of IT support and infrastructure.

Burnett said the technology available to incarcerated students for their coursework also “varies widely” across U.S. prisons, from tablets and desktop computers to decade-old Chromebooks and typewriters. Some incarcerated students have internet access, but many don’t, “so we’ve made solutions that can work in any of those environments.”

College-in-prison programs currently have three options to offer JSTOR to their students. The first is an off-line version, an index of most-cited JSTOR articles across disciplines that students can browse and request to read, and which is designed for students in “minimal tech environments,” Burnett said. She added that the off-line version is offered in at least one prison in every state.

The prison programs can also give students full online access to JSTOR content, but with any hyperlinks to social media and its customer support chat function disabled. There’s also a “mediated” online JSTOR option that allows corrections officials to review and potentially remove reading materials. However, of the prisons that adopted the mediated version, half allow students to access all JSTOR content but retain the right to evaluate materials in the future, Burnett said.

Students are taking advantage of these expanding resources. A February news release from JSTOR noted that students in Ohio prisons have accessed almost 30,000 academic articles in the past year. Students involved with the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative, a support and advocacy organization for incarcerated learners in the state, access about 2,400 articles per month, according to the release.

Dyjuan Tatro, who was incarcerated for 12 years in seven different New York state prisons, said he knows firsthand how impactful JSTOR can be—he used it when he was earning his associate and bachelor’s degrees through the Bard Prison Initiative, where he now works as its senior government affairs officer. (The initiative spurred JSTOR’s first forays into expanding access to incarcerated students in 2007, when the college’s head librarian at the time requested an off-line JSTOR index, according to a blog post from the Bard Prison Initiative.)

Tatro said he devoured a variety of reading materials through JSTOR, from mathematical papers on differential equations to The Iliad.

“When you have a population of students who are being engaged academically at the highest levels, who don’t have these very rigorous educational backgrounds, they are curious, they are intellectually hungry,” he said.

He added that expanding access to JSTOR benefits not just students but prison populations over all, because students regularly lend reading materials to others.

However, Tatro noted roadblocks that may impede JSTOR access in some prisons, including those that have no computers available to students and those that have fire hazard restrictions that limit how many books or paper materials can be in a cell at a given time. Theoretically, a student requesting too many books or printouts of JSTOR articles could lead to punitive measures.

“I think it’s great,” he said of the JSTOR expansion. “But we should always be really, really sober about what the prison is and how it operates, because it will take every opportunity to discipline individuals.”

Burnett hopes JSTOR access can also help formerly incarcerated students who continue pursuing a college education after release.

When students leave prison, “the world has changed drastically since they were incarcerated,” she said. But she believes having experience using JSTOR helps them feel more prepared to venture onto a college campus.

Delaney, of the Vera Institute, noted that JSTOR’s milestone comes at a time when college-in-prison programs are expected to proliferate and expand after Congress restored Pell Grants for incarcerated students in 2021, a change that went into effect last July. The demand for these academic tools in prisons, and the need for correctional officials to be familiar with and comfortable providing them, is bound to grow as a result.

The increase of higher ed options and access to JSTOR in prisons “work together really well to give incarcerated students a really high-quality education,” she said.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed on March 1, 2024.

Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada

In an era marked by technological advancements, prisons worldwide are undergoing a transformative shift. The integration of technology in correctional education and workforce development programs holds the potential to reshape the lives of incarcerated individuals. Online educational platforms, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), are dismantling barriers related to cost, location, and distance, offering a wide array of subjects accessible for free or at nominal fees for verified completion certificates.

The New Face of Correctional Education

Such accessibility could redefine workforce development and reentry strategies, addressing the global skilled talent shortage. Initiatives like Workbay, Mount Tamalpais College, and the Second Chance Pell Experiment are pioneering this change, bringing education and remote work opportunities to those behind bars. The Federal Pell Grants, once more available for approved prison education programs via the FAFSA Simplification Act, is another step in the right direction.

Technology: A Tool for Transformation

The Massachusetts Department of Corrections is leading the way by providing inmates with tablets preloaded with educational content. However, the internet access is restricted to a secure network. This is a significant step towards integrating technology in the correctional system, albeit with caution. The use of technology in prisons necessitates careful consideration of usage protocols, safeguards, and monitoring mechanisms.

Beyond Education: The Potential of Tech in Prisons

While education is a central focus, technology’s potential in prisons extends beyond it. Possible implementations include increasing self-service resources, providing electronic resources to inmates’ families, exploring virtual mental health services, considering remote workforce development, and enabling virtual visits. If used appropriately, these advancements could significantly improve the reentry success rate of returning citizens by fostering skills acquisition and family connections.

One such initiative is JSTOR Access in Prison, which has reached 1,000 sites in the Washington State Department of Corrections, providing access to nearly 500,000 incarcerated individuals for educational purposes. This program has evolved from an offline index to digital delivery, including the use of tablets, revolutionizing how these individuals engage with education. The overarching goal is to ensure that education is a right, not a privilege, regardless of individuals’ location.

However, the advent of technology in prisons is not without its challenges. Concerns about exploitation and the potential replacement of existing services need to be addressed. Despite this, the potential benefits of this technological revolution in correctional education are immense, promising a brighter future for incarcerated individuals preparing for reentry.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in BBN on January 19, 2024. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada

This new essay explores the stories of two Asian-American and Pacific-Islander (AAPI) men from Sacramento whose lives changed forever when they got into trouble at a young age. One of the subjects is John Lam, an alumnus of Mount Tamalpais College who is now a full-time student at UC Berkeley. Read on to learn about the pivotal role of education in their transition from prison back to society and their rare second chances to start again. 

Read the full article here

Three incredible former MTC students, John Lam, Jesse Vasquez, and our Communications Associate Bonaru Richardson opened up about their experiences with incarceration, race, and education in this powerful story for the NBC Bay Area – KNTV Race in America series. Watch to learn more about what makes San Quentin unique, the bonds these men share, and how “education was the key.”

Attribution: This story originally aired on NBC Bay Area on November 16, 2023. Photo courtesy of Christine Chun-i Ni