Conspiracies of Learning and the Catherine Project

Our imaginations are haunted by monoliths, haunted, so vividly that they shape even our thoughtful reflection. We not only have opinions, but ideological commitments. We not only have bad moods, but mood disorders. At work, we do not provide a simple service, but rather toil for an industry. It would be strange to say that I teach at a small college, that is, a plot of land the size of a city block with five hundred people, encountered one by one, classroom by classroom. Rather, I participate in a vaster monolith called higher education or the university. Within this industry, there is something called a crisis.

Monoliths appear to us under the guise of impossibility. A monolith acts or suffers in ways that we cannot influence or control. In the age of the internet, monoliths are more prominent and more powerful than ever. That is because text-driven spectacles flood our eyes and ears. The sale of those same eyes and ears has made a few people transhistorically rich and so powerful that, as it seems, they make monoliths real.

The past shows us numerous occasions when more or less ordinary people pop a monolith like a balloon, or at least dissolve its influence over a certain area. A group of families in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s wanted food that was both healthy and inexpensive. The supermarkets sold processed food at high prices. The families took matters into their own hands. They took orders, bought wholesale, and took turns hosting the distribution out of one garage or another. They called it a Food Conspiracy.[1] A monolith, supermarkets, had turned out to be dispensable. The Conspiracy developed into cooperatively owned grocery stores, the largest of which, Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, still operates on its principles fifty years later.[2]

The global scale of the monolith, its massiveness, is part of what makes it powerful. Yet that same scale is a vulnerability. After all, you and I are not global beings. We live in a dwelling with somewhere between one and twelve residents. That dwelling adjoins some others, either nearly or distantly. We walk in increments measured in fractions of meters. We speak to people face to face, at best, or screen to screen, at worst. Even in these days of automated humanity, we usually interact with individuals, with people. We have co-workers, friends, fellow hobbyists, those who share the subway or the bus with us, those on the highway commuting with us, shopkeepers and haircutters, and perhaps a wealthy overlord or two.

Thanks to our smallness, we cannot touch or influence a monolith, not even if our social media followers number in the thousands. But also, thanks to our smallness, we have resources and scope to act below the radar. I write this essay from my own experience founding a learning conspiracy called the Catherine Project, a workaround for the monolith of our educational institutions. But I know of two others founded since then: a summer program for college students to study great books and local ecology on Cape Cod, called the Gull Island Institute;[3] and a second, a learning community for adults called the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life.[4] None of these organizations charge tuition or fees; all were founded on a small scale, by a handful of people.

Speaking historically, the great conspirators against the monolith of education were the working men and women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who took the education allotted for the rich and made it their own. Historian Jonathan Rose chronicles the results, for the UK in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, and for other countries in Readers’ Liberation.[5] The growth of literacy in those years was fuelled by a thousand societies and institutes, many operating in and through the labour movement. They studied astronomy and the sciences; they read classic literature.

The Food Conspiracy escaped the monolithic supermarkets by seeing and replicating their human elements: the desire for food, and the ability to pay for it and transport it, outside of the monolithic access points. If one were to seek to make films without the monolithic film industry, similarly, one would find a new pathway from artists to lovers of good movies, finding alternate sources of equipment, networks of staff, and means of distribution. Any of the beleaguered arts industries—indeed, any precious human thing—can be fought for and preserved via these means.

As Rose tells it, the operation of the working peoples’ institutes was breathtakingly simple. They reproduced the main elements: something to learn (books, mostly) and people to learn it with (one another). No tuition was charged; no grades given. Credits or degrees were not necessary, especially not when the dignity of life and work was at stake. What truly matters about the practice, the human need for it, becomes luminous once it is removed from its deadening institutional context.

Rose cites one student, Richard Hillyer, a cowman’s son born in 1900, who describes his mind ‘being broken out of its shell’ in his first encounter with the world of literature. Hillyer recalls the moment that his teacher stopped to explain what a ‘poet laureate’ was:

So, for ten minutes, [my teacher] let himself go on [the meaning of the term ‘poet laureate’], and education began for me. […] Here were wonderful things to know. Things that went beyond the small utilities of our lives, which was all that school had seemed to concern itself with until then. Knowledge of this sort could make all times, and places, your own. You could be anybody, and everybody, and still be yourself at the same time.[6]

We can look to these brave people of the past under the weight of our own monolithic crisis in higher education. The monolith is not fully an illusion. Our practices are trapped in real institutional constraints, and those institutions face common challenges: over-regulation, higher expenses in personnel and maintenance, alongside lower revenue from taxes, philanthropy, and tuition. Our overlords attempt solutions to match: professional administrators, higher fees and tuition, higher housing costs, lower pay and benefits, and programs more likely to draw revenue. That all puts what matters about learning, whether it be literature or philosophy, physics or theoretical mathematics, in a peril which is far from imaginary.[7]

Current events or the news is the monolith by which monoliths live, move and have their being. It is not news that our dean is in conflict with the provost, or that a student behaves badly, unless those events can be seen as monolithic. Of course, the bad behaviour of students, and conflicts among university administrators, are in the news quite often these days. But they do not appear as they might to someone on the ground—as a difficulty to be managed or solved—but rather as monolithic signs that signal yet more monolithic events: the rise of wokeness, the death throes of late capitalism, the corruption or degeneration of the youth, the collapse of the university, the collapse of society, the death of learning, and so forth.

Underneath the gross distortion of human events on campuses into monoliths, we cannot number those teachers and staff who manage and resolve campus conflict on a daily basis, without media attention, hidden from the eye, bearing results only on the human scale and leaving monoliths untouched.[8] The humble exercise of courageous reasonableness forms an enduring alternative to forming new conspiracies and associations.

My imagination was captured long ago by the stories captured by Jonathan Rose. At that time, before the destruction that 2008 wrought on educational institutions, I was teaching at good public universities in the US. I was in a privileged position: well paid, not overworked, with basic supports in place, and with lively students in every classroom. Even so, I found my educational ideals ill-suited to the scale at which I had to operate.

I had between thirty and sixty students in the same classroom, and so taught between sixty and ninety students total at one time, without assistance. Under the pressure created by such a large number, the conventional mode of teaching seemed the only one possible. I digested the readings into lectures with clear bullet points; I took questions to break up the tedium and tested the digestion of the students regularly. Essays had to be formulaic or marking them would be nearly impossible. The grading formulas wore me down. As a liberal arts undergrad, I had worked with my teachers at close quarters—I came up with my own essay topics and was helped to develop my own thinking. I could only do that for these students if they sought me out; it could not be managed on the scale at hand.

Liberal arts education on a small scale is still available at some small colleges and elite research programs in the US, and wherever the tutorial system thrives in the UK. But at a large public university in the US, the structures are not in place. I longed for a way to reach a public university population—or even broader than that—with a form of liberal learning modelled on mentoring.

Around this time, I started a group, open to the public, that read Homer in ancient Greek. We met in a public space, an old and beautiful library. But I could not see a way to find all the people in the city who might be interested in such a thing. There was no obvious place to advertise. As a result, our group was small, mostly composed of local graduate students and people who were already in my network. Disappointed, I set aside my dream of a humanized university that consisted only of its most basic relationships.

It took a crisis for the dream to rematerialize. In March of 2020, the small discussion classes at my small liberal-arts college had to go online, to a then-unfamiliar video-conference format. I raged at the change. Why couldn’t we simply declare the semester finished? The accreditors would not have it, nor could the school afford to refund half a term’s tuition.

We got to know the obstacles of a video classroom: the loss of privacy for students, the bad lighting, the broken sentences through creaky connections, the stilted conversation, and the loss of non-verbal forms of communication. My mind went into anxious overtime. What would be the best way to use this technology, if it were necessary? I was advising on long essays at the time and talking to students on the phone one by one. It seemed clear that small groups were not as bad as large ones; the smaller the better. A face-to-face conversation was almost as good as a real one. Reading books—real books, paper books—was still possible, away from the screens. Writing papers was still possible. The screens did not in fact exhaust all human spaces—it only felt that way.

The elements of a learning conspiracy became suddenly visible to me: books, mentors, and peer group leaders. Video-conferencing software was now widely available and by necessity had become familiar, even in remote parts of the country or the globe. All that was needed was publicity and volunteer teaching. I pulled some volunteers from among my friends and posted about the organization on Twitter. The Catherine Project was born.

We began with five Oxford-style tutorials on Homer and Plato and offered a pair of reading groups to participants. I took applications by direct message on Twitter and filled up the groups quickly. We wanted small groups, as video worked best on that level, and so that we could see, hear and get to know our readers. One of my volunteer leaders disappeared a month in. No one told me, and the readers continued meeting weekly over Homer’s Odyssey, logging in from their homes in Montreal, Nairobi, and Dubai, until their plight was discovered some weeks later.

Our first transformative moment was in November of 2020, during a surge of Covid infections that stranded nearly everyone online. One of the reading groups had finished Kafka’s The Trial and wanted to move onto Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The leaders wanted more readers in the group for extra help in tackling a challenging text. I was tired and unimaginative. I simply posted on Twitter: ‘Who wants to read Either/Or on Saturday nights?’ I got over one hundred responses for something like three spots. I hit the phone and the email, trying to recruit extra group leaders for the excess. We tripled in size overnight, from forty readers to a hundred and twenty-five.

The second transformation took place in the spring of 2021. I had been running the project on my own, with no funding, while teaching full-time and promoting a new book. I was exhausted. I knew a highly qualified person who needed a job, so I thought I’d set out trying to raise money. A year’s salary plus health insurance would run around $100K. I contacted every wealthy person I knew and found myself with pledges of only $6000. I paused to think. I remembered a fund called Emergent Ventures, whose director had interrogated me in detail about The Catherine Project’s ‘business plan’ a year earlier. I had failed the interrogation dramatically, having only my anarchist dreams in my defence. As a Hail Mary pass, I wrote to the fund again, with a report on how we’d spent our year. By what still seems to me a kind of miracle, they supplied all our first year’s funding.

With a full-time staff director and some volunteers, we set up a governing board, a website, a bank account, and applied for 501(c)3 charity status. In the meantime, we expanded, doubling every term until reaching the limit of our volunteer pool. At this writing, we have offered close to 1,000 courses, hosting close to two thousand unique readers every term.  All of our courses are small, averaging ten students each, to guard our culture of close reading and serious conversation. We have begun to offer in-person courses to train and support our leaders.  Ever since our initial grant, the vast majority of our budget comes from individual donations, thanks to dozens of dedicated volunteers.

Our volunteers with academic jobs marvel at the freedom of teaching without strings attached. No grading is required; personal feedback, tailored to person and circumstance, is all that is needed. We post new offerings three times a year, but nothing determines that they come to an end. If the readers and their leader are willing, they continue indefinitely. Reading groups on ancient Greek and on Kierkegaard that began in 2020 and 2021 are still running strong. We also hold community seminars twice a year where a single text is read and discussed in common, in multiple groups over the course of a single day. One of our volunteers, a classics professor, complained that there is no context in a normal university to read all of Plato’s Republic in Greek. He figured five years was a good term. So, his readers began at the beginning, two full years ago, and reached book six of ten only last winter.

The Catherine Project, given its weekly meetings and its mostly online format, cannot provide the in-depth training in habits of mind, reading, writing and conversation, of a traditional university education. As in courses in piano or in martial arts, in-person models over an intensive period provide the best training. We may be able to develop this capacity, should we receive a building or buildings that could serve as a home base for more intensive studies. Until then, we feed those hungry to learn that come to us, in freedom and with seriousness. We demonstrate that the demand for the liberal arts, undertaken at a rigorous and serious level, is hardly drying up. The monolithic institutions have done no more than shut the kitchen doors and proclaim that no one is hungry. We hold out a humble model for the essentials of a life of the mind, that any reform-minded school might look to for inspiration. Lastly, we preserve and pass on human habits and practices whose future in our monolithic environment is not secure.

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Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, as well as the founder and president of the Catherine Project. She is the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press 2020) and A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life (Cambridge University Press 2022).

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[1] ‘Food conspiracy’ (Wikipedia) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_conspiracy> accessed 1 February 2024.

[2] ‘Get to know Rainbow’ (Rainbow Grocery Cooperative) <https://rainbow.coop/about-rainbow/> accessed 1 February 2024.

[3] ‘Gull Island Institute’ <https://www.gullisland.org/> accessed 1 February 2024.

[4] ‘Matthew Strother Center for The Examined Life’ <https://www.matthewstrother.org/> accessed 1 February 2024.

[5] Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale University Press 2001); Jonathan Rose, Readers’ Liberation (Oxford University Press 2018). See also Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People's History of Classics (Routledge 2020).

[6] Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale University Press 2001) 127.

[7] See for example the dramatic cuts at West Virginia University, a state flagship university, in the fall of 2023. Duncan Slade and Erin Beck, ‘WVU’s Board of Governors has approved budget cuts. Here’s what to know (Mountain State Spotlight, 15 September 2023) <https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2023/09/15/wvu-board-cuts-degrees-layoffs/> accessed 1 February 2024. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro just eliminated their physics program. See ‘North Carolina: 20 programs are being discontinued at UNC Greensboro’ (WXII 12) <https://www.wxii12.com/article/north-carolina-unc-greensboro-chancellor-announces-20-programs-cut-uncg-greensboro/46616151> accessed 1 February 2024.

[8] See Jonathan Marks, Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Higher Education (Princeton University Press 2021) for examples.