Building Up Student Bodies

College administrators may have inadvertently found a way to replenish the dwindling ranks on their campuses. “For the past ten years, I’ve been teaching along with other volunteers—college professors like myself, probation officers, judges and people from the community—in a program called ‘Changing Lives through Literature’ serving the Dorchester District Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Taylor Stoehr writes in Radical Teacher. “Our students are probationers of the Court, and after completing the ten-week course, they receive six months off their probation time.”

“I work in the men’s group (there is a women’s group too), which averages twelve or fifteen graduates each semester, the great majority of them people of color, reflecting Dorchester demographics.” Stoehr is an English professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

“Changing Lives began as a single experiment in new Bedford in 1991, and has spread entirely by word of mouth to a dozen other jurisdictions in Massachusetts, as well as scattered courts in six other states, in each of which the curriculum and pedagogy vary considerably, though the goals are the same.”

Another source of student bodies for colleges and universities are welfare rolls. “I tend to think of community colleges in general, and my own in particular, as a ‘Last Chance Saloon,’ a bastion of equal opportunity in a society that increasingly rewards those born rich and powerful,” Susan Jhirad writes in Radical Teacher. “Community colleges serve not only women on welfare, but the laid off worker, the disabled, the poor, the returning veteran, the immigrant, the ‘displaced homemaker,’ people of all ages ethnic and economic backgrounds.”

Jhirad is an English professor at North Shore Community College in Massachusetts. She, who describes herself as a “political activist,” organized her students to lobby to get college attendance to count as a work-related activity in the state’s welfare reform package.

To their dismay, the effort, in part, backfired. “When M., an outreach worker for [the Welfare Education and Training Coalition] WETAC testified at the State House about the difficulties of her life, she proudly stated that she was managing to raise five children, attend U Mass./Boston and work as a social worker, the testimony was used against her,” Jhirad remembered. “Some said, well, if she can do it, why can’t all of them?”

“Activism can be a double-edged sword for women on welfare.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.