Engaging hearts and minds in virtual space

Engaging hearts and minds in virtual space: an interview with Mary Finn, Founder of Premise

Humanities Watch: What led you to establish Premise?

Mary Finn: I started Premise in February 2021, almost a year into the pandemic. I’d spent the year trying to make sense of the changes we were experiencing in our lives. I grappled with big questions about personal versus collective responsibility, the purpose of work, and the nature of friendship. Like most people, I experienced isolation. But, I also experienced unexpected connections through conversations  on Zoom with friends and family all over the world. 

I started Premise in part because I became convinced, despite a long-held skepticism, that meaningful conversation can happen online. Also, I am confident that I’m not the only person trying to make sense of life’s big questions, especially as our lives have been increasingly upended.

Premise is the second program I’ve founded that seeks to build a space where people from all walks of life make meaning together. In 2013, I started Polis. One major difference between the two programs is that Polis was an in-person program, and Premise is exclusively online because of ongoing pandemic conditions and the online medium allows for a range of participants who adds depth to the class conversations. In the most recent Premise course, we had students from as far away as Dubai and the age range in the class was 23-60. Premise is intergenerational and intersectional by design.

I am interested in ways that “regular” people can cultivate and sustain a life of the mind. I want to make philosophical inquiry, text-based discussion, and humanities-focused conversation accessible to as diverse a population of adult learners as possible. I’m convinced that a wildly heterogeneous group adds necessary depth to inquiry-driven conversation. The diversity of students and teachers in a Premise course isn’t a nice-to-have but an essential ingredient to the experience and community I’m after.

HW: At this time, what are its mission and your vision for its future?

MF: I believe every adult should have the opportunity to experience the joy and belonging that comes from shared intellectual exploration. Intellectual life should have an emotional core. Therefore, Premise courses invite adults from all walks of life to participate in the unpacking of life’s enduring questions through literature, poetry, non-fiction writing, and film.

Led by instructors who seek to build a community of learners, Premise classes are joyful, purposeful, and challenging. Our students gather to better understand themselves and are buoyed by the kinship of learning and talking with others.

HW: Premise offers a clear alternative to traditional courses, be they for credit or continuing education. How do its offerings supplement or supplant these conventional courses?

MF: Premise isn’t in competition with traditional academics. We need universities, long-form college courses, and academic research. My life is all the richer because of my humanities-centered education at American University, Brown University, and St. John’s College. Yet, there are real academic barriers for adults who are beyond college-age. The expense, time commitment, and assessment obligations often scare away prospective adult learners.

Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, once said something like, “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to live for the rest of your life.”  Those of us lucky enough to access traditional university programs often develop the foundation of that “interesting place to live,” but how do we keep it up? How do people who have never had liberal arts or humanities training develop the skills to make sense of their experience and make good judgments for others?

Premise is meant to run alongside traditional academics and provide an ongoing, low-cost, barrier-free opportunity to keep up an intellectual life. I ask prospective students,“Your life is busy, but is it full?” Premise is designed to be a place where adults, especially busy adults, can build a full life.

One way that Premise is different from the traditional academic setting is that we are an intergenerational learning community. The conversation that takes place across generation in Premise courses is essential for building empathy and developing an historical perspective on identity, politics, and culture.

I want Premise participants to leave a class session feeling that they’ve eaten a nutritious meal rather than the feeling many of us get when we scroll social media for hours on end, which feels much more like a junk food binge.

HW: You have been educated at St. John’s and have a deep interest in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. How has this background shaped the design of Premise?

MF: I graduated from the liberal arts graduate program at St. John’s College (Santa Fe, NM). I was a high school teacher when I attended St. John’s. The college allows teachers to complete the program during the summer semester.  My participation in classes at St. John’s was formative in several ways. First, I should say that I recognize and agree with much of the critique of the St. John’s program and required texts. The over-reliance on a single canon of “great” works is problematic.

And, two things can be true at the same time.

Many of the classics and “great” books have enduring themes and ask persistent questions that get at the core of the human experience. At Premise, we definitely include Eastern and Western classics as texts in our courses. Yet, our instructors also know that such books aren’t the only way to get at life’s questions. Our definition of great books is expansive.

For example, I recently designed and taught a course on “What is Home?” I could have selected the Odyssey to get at that question. But instead, I choose to focus on the conversation on essays about home and place from Joan Didion. I think there are many paths and texts to enter profound and complex discussions and the classics are just one path, not THE path.

I learned how to facilitate conversations as a student at St. John’s. Many St. John’s tutors (professors) are highly-skilled and experienced discussion facilitators because all St. John’s classes are seminar-style. As a high school teacher, I had a keen interest in dissecting the teaching strategies. The core pedagogical framework for Premise grows from my experience in these facilitated discussion courses.

The Premise discussion framework and guidelines provide the pedagogical underpinnings of the program. Premise courses are an inquiry-driven, text-based, and small group.

I have long been a reader and student of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work. In 2012, I was invited to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at Bard College on the writings of Hannah Arendt. My first iteration of Premise, the in-person program, Polis, grew directly from my NEH fellowship. I designed Polis as my final project as a fellow. The goal was to incorporate Arendt’s ideas about the vita activa(outlined in her work The Human Condition) into the program design.

Arendt’s ideas of the public and private sphere and the necessity of public discourse as an essential component of the human experience deeply informed the mission of Premise. I don’t market Premise as a civic project because I have a hunch that language about civic virtue won’t appeal to a wider audience, but it’s baked in nonetheless.

As I mentioned earlier, I want Premise to positively impact individuals. I want participants to feel they have a place to go to feel intellectually nourished. But, perhaps even more important, I also have collective and community goals for Premise.

I am trying to build a sustained and vibrant community of adult learners, especially people who haven’t considered “learner” as part of their identity for a long time. People need to practice talking to those who may not share their beliefs and opinions. We live intellectually and politically siloed lives, and we need more spaces where we can practice deep listening, try on new ideas, and learn to be at ease with the discomfort that comes from not always knowing what we think.

In her work The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes, “To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

Premise is a place where students ask and talk about the unanswerable and the answerable questions and make sense of our lives.

HW: What do you see as the place of humanities in contemporary culture, within the academy or outside it?

MF: I see the humanities as providing the necessary framework for collective and individual inquiry.  The humanities help us learn how to spend time with texts that show us the vastness and complexity of the human experience. We need a wide lens to gain as deep an understanding of our experience as possible and, when done with the intention of expansion and range, the humanities can provide that lens.

Obviously, Premise didn’t invent discussion-centered learning. At Premise, we borrow from  the long tradition of the Socratic seminar and constructivist learning and we do so with a spirit of egalitarianism and the belief that authentic interpersonal relationships can be built from the shared academic inquiry. I’ve learned quite a bit about program design from the history of French salons, the Saturday Nighter groups during the Harlem Renaissance, and community-centered programs such as the Chautauqua Movement.

I’ve recruited and assembled a cohort of instructors and program advisors who want to teach and lead in a public intellectual context. Many, but not all, Premise instructors have a background in teaching at the college level. The unifying feature of all Premise instructors is that they are constructivist and inquiry-driven in their approach to teaching. There’s a time and place for lectures, but Premise isn’t it. Premise instructors are also authors, podcasters, and artists and a curated selection of their work can be found here. I’m in the process of recruiting new instructors and advisors and readers of the Humanities Watch community are more than welcome to reach out by completing this short form: https://www.premiseinstitute.com/teachpremise

HW: What types of courses have been in particular demand, especially during the pandemic?

MF: Premise courses are designed around enduring life questions. Each course begins with a question, and each instructor’s biography leads with a question they’ve been chewing on of late. I want to send the message to students that we start with inquiry, and then select texts that help us get there.  Rather than coaxing students to sign up for a course on Camus, we lead with the question, “How will the pandemic shape us?”.  Students enter the conversation with a common text, in this case, The Plague, and then there’s an opportunity for a more egalitarian experience.

Thus far, the most popular courses have been:  How do illness and death define our identity? (Susan Sontag and Zadie Smith) and What is feminist power? (Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq).

Readers are welcome to register for Premise courses. If the $35 registration fee isn’t doable, Humanities Watch readers can use the code “Trypremise” and the course will be no charge.