"Freeing the Mind": MIT Professor Craig Wilder discusses BPI in the MIT "Spectrum"
For the past three years, MIT’s Craig Wilder has been working with inmates at medium- and maximum-security prisons in upstate New York through the privately funded Bard Prison Initiative. And the “street-smart, funny, sarcastic men,” he says, are extraordinary students.
“One thing I love is that the guys show up to class really prepared and enjoy wrestling with you intellectually. The lectures I give are as intense as any lecture I give at MIT.”
Inmates are earning associate and bachelor degrees through New York’s elite Bard College, whose liberal arts curriculum is being taught inside five New York prisons. Two hundred men and women participate in this program, where only one in 10 is accepted on the basis of essays, test scores, transcripts, and GEDs, if they didn’t finish high school.
Prisoners study English literature, sociology, philosophy, or theology. Maybe they’ll read a book by W.E.B. DuBois or perhaps a biography of Albert Einstein. The day inmates began discussing Modern European Christian Philosophy, Wilder says, laughing, “I’m thinking, ‘Where is this coming from?’ But it was coming from the classes they were taking, and the books they were reading.
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