#52: our humanities

Teaching in the DOGE-targeted Illinois Humanities's Odyssey Project

Dear Readers:

Wanda, the site director for the humanities/writing class I teach, always says I should write an issue of my newsletter issue about the class. I love the class, I’ve been teaching in the program it’s associated with for four years now, it’s my favorite teaching job I’ve ever had—but I always brush her off. I brush her off because her prompt is too hard. The class is too much. Writing about it feels like writing about the world, the whole world.

But I think I need to write about it now, because the class is a project of Illinois Humanities, which gets part of its funding from the NEH, which DOGE came for last night. I was surprised to learn that Illinois Humanities’s budget is only $6 million, and it only gets $2 million of that from the NEH. How do they do so much with so little?

And why would DOGE bother with so little? It doesn’t make sense.

I need to tell you about my students. They are human beings who have been deeply affected, in life-trajectory-altering ways, by the carceral system, foster care, predatory for-profit educational institutions, public housing, public hospitals, public you-name-it. They are all different ages, from 18 to 80, literally. They are great-grandmothers, daughters, mothers, hospital staff, traffic guards, short-order cooks, activists, poets, artists, nonprofit workers, and veterans. I’ve taught dozens of students in my four years in this program, and not one of them has been white. Only two have been men.

In my day job at the University of Chicago Lab School, we talk about colleges and other schools being hard to get into. Lab is hard to get into, the University of Chicago is hard to get into. But the Odyssey Project is hard to get to. You have to go through systems that are set up to steal your time, your hope, your self-esteem, your dignity, and your freedom. You may have to take public transportation, sometimes for hours, from all over the city, to attend these 2-hour humanities classes, two evenings a week. You may have to come from work, leaving their family obligations. You may have to come when you’re exhausted. When you’ve had a really bad day at work.

But despite how hard it is to get to, Odyssey students keep coming, because they see, in reading, writing, and thinking in this community, an opportunity learn and change and grow. Education. They have a right to this, but that right has been denied, as a matter of routine—as the way things work—throughout their lives.

My Odyssey students bring curiosity, joy, openness, enthusiasm to the classroom. They bring their hearts and souls and minds. I can’t believe they do—I wouldn’t. But the students in this program are extraordinary. They take a little thing—a free college class, just one little class—and make it into a huge thing. They run with it, making of it a huge intellectual community. They have standing behind them Illinois Humanities, which is full of people who understand, respect, and care about them—like Becky Amato, who oversees Odyssey, Wanda Obazee, the South Side site director who I mentioned before, Stephanie Banks, the TA for the class—the latter two of whom are Odyssey alums. This is a classroom more powerful than any I’ve ever been a part of.

I could tell you a hundred stories about how brilliant Odyssey students are, how often they’ve shown me secret corners of poems I’ve been teaching for years that I never noticed. The sensitive, nuanced arguments they make about a text. The alacrity with which they incorporate the language of the texts we read into their conversation. The student who volunteered to read some of her freewriting aloud then burst into song in the middle of it.

How willing they are to try. How do you stay that willing to try? How am I, with all my love and enthusiasm and respect for these students, supposed to stay that willing to try? I guess that’s another thing they’ll have to teach me, if I get to keep teaching in this program.

When you’re in a classroom like that, you see what public education can do. How capable it is of building community, equality, democracy. So I guess I just answered my own question: That’s why DOGE would care about such a small amount.

Bea and I had a brief moment of fame a couple years ago when we appeared on an IH fundraising flyer, hugging each other by the border with Iowa.

If you are reading this, you are a friend of mine. Please, please call and email your congresspeople and tell them a friend of yours teaches in an NEH-funded program and she and her students will be deeply impacted by these cuts.

Thank you for reading, thank you in advance for calling and emailing, thank you for being a friend of mine.

Sincerely,

Lucy