Literature for life: an interview with Zena Hitz, founder of the Catherine Project.

Humanities Watch: Tell us a bit about the Catherine Project: what is it, how did it come about? How does its platform compare with learning in academic institutions?

Zena Hitz: It is an adult education program. We offer programs that are free – no credit, no fees, no grades. We’re breaking education out of the credentialing system and making it available to any adult who wants to study for any reason. The education is based on reading great books and having conversations about them, following the examples at Columbia Core, University of Chicago, and St. John’s.  Our groups are a collaborative effort; the professors don’t teach in a traditional way. It has a group leader or someone with a Ph.D. who leads the discussion but is not passing along content. 

We have two types of offerings so far: reading groups, which are led by experienced discussion leaders, about 10 readers per course on Zoom (everything right now is on Zoom). We’ve had groups on Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, Russian novels, Confucius, Euclid based upon interests of the leader and the group.

We also have groups in “dead languages”: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, who teach these languages.

Our “signature product” – if we wanted to use that language! – are tutorials of about 4 readers led by people holding a Ph.D. or equivalent. And those tutorials meet weekly over twelve weeks on a canonical text: Homer, Greek philosophy – one group read in sequence Iliad / Odyssey, Virgil / Ovid, and Dante over three consecutive twelve-week terms.

These tutorials have weekly assignments or reflection papers. I think of it as a mentoring program for people who have not had the opportunity to learn from books before; they can receive guidance from experienced teachers.

The first year we ran groups for 120 readers out of my Twitter account. Now we have a paid staff, Director, web page, with about 300 readers. We’re growing very quickly every term.

HW: How did it start?

ZH: As I mentioned in Lost in Thought, I always wanted to create a free educational program, unplugged from any institution. I had already my Ph.D., converted to Catholicism, and in the early “mid-life” crisis I describe in my book. I tried running a Greek reading group in Baltimore, but the problem was that most students were graduate students. It was difficult to see how to reach interested people beyond the academy. This was around 2007.

When I was at Madonna House, I envisioned a residential library, with an open door. That was my second idea. This may be coming into view as we proceed.

I went back to St. John’s, which is a close model but is constrained by institutional apparatus and the strains on small liberal colleges. When Covid hit, I was doing emergency Zoom teaching and I was trying to make it work for my students. I discovered that really small groups and independent work are suited for Zoom. When my book appeared in 2020, people began writing me and asking about how they could become liberally educated outside the conventional channels. I was trying to help them find a structure and instruction to guide them in this effort. While I was on Twitter, contacts began urging me to find a way to create reading groups, and with volunteers we started the Catherine Project. I recruited Scott Samuelson from Iowa to run tutorials and former students to run reading groups. We ran it through Twitter.

One of the reading groups had been reading Kafka’s The Trial and wanted to read Either / Or by Kierkegaard. I posted a message on Twitter asking for readers, and more than 100 people signed up! We ended up running 5 groups on Either / Or. That’s when things started to take off.

HW: So how does the learning and intellectual life relate to technology?

ZH: I am officially a Luddite. I’ve never had a smart phone. I came to video conferencing technology reluctantly. But it allowed me to reach people I could not reach when I started in Baltimore. I had a way of reaching 1000s of people from all walks of life. This was the Aha! Moment. And it is so simple. Zoom is basically easy to use. I’ve been inspired by Jonathan Rose’s writings on grass-roots intellectual movements. It can pull people in from all over the world.

In one of our first tutorials, the tutor I recruited from Twitter to teach the Iliad and the Odyssey disappeared after a month. His three readers – one in Montreal, one in Dubai, and one in Nairobi – kept meeting reading Homer together once a week. So there are people living around in the world who have no intellectual communities where they live and they can meet on Zoom: the only constraint is time zone.

Reading great books at the moment is a niche interest – not everyone knows he or she wants to do it – and that makes it hard to build communities locally. Building them online is very easy – it travels by word of mouth, social media, websites, etc.

In the long term, I believe in in-person education. I’d like that to happen with us. With technology, sometime clusters of people appear organically and put them together. We might find in-person groups from our network. My dream institutions are brick and mortar residential libraries, either urban or rural, similar to a public library but with a more serious set of books, where you can go really study something, with some staff and community around it.

HW: What is a “great book”?

ZH: That is a great question. Personally I would say that a great book is a book that can provide an education on its own. It has sufficient depth and complexity that people can learn from it: beginners as well as those who have studied it for a longer time.

Great books form “traditions”: a “tradition” is one book talks about another book: they form links over time and space. My understanding of what is called the “Western tradition” – a phrase I do not use very much – if we start in ancient Greece, there are some threads connecting that world to Egypt and the ancient Near East, but also to the Hebrew Bible… Then there are threads which connect to Ethiopia and the Coptic Christian church, a church that developed independently outside the Latin / European churches. Another thread goes from Greece to Rome to northern Europe back to Eastern Europe, and so forth. There are a lot of overlapping threads that go all over the world. There are also Chinese and Indian traditions, with their networks and ties to Europe too. The European tradition develops into Latin American, African American, postcolonial literature, all of which are responding to an earlier set of books. They’re part of the traditions.

I use “traditions” plural, I use “canons” plural, because it’s more accurate to how these books have emerged.

There are people who will find these definitions unsatisfactory, but I am just finding the people who just want to do what I’m doing; there are people from all over the world and all walks of life who just want to do it.

This is not about the restoration of the West: it’s about liberal education: education for human development.

A couple of allies have come forth recently: Roosevelt Montas, as well Anika Prather and Angel Parham, who are working on the black classical tradition. As Anika has found, you just scratch the surface and many black intellectuals were classically educated. Huey Newton read Plato’s Republic. Anna Julia Cooper is treated as a feminist – and she was –, but she’s mainly a defender of classical education: that’s what she believed in. There’s been a flattening out of their profiles and a lack of concern with what they really cared about.

HW: Why is your organization called The Catherine Project?

ZH: There are two Catherines: Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of philosophers. She refuted 50 philosophers we a single argument: we aspire to her simplicity.

And Catherine Doherty, the founder of Madonna House where I stayed. The life of the mind was very important to her in his ministries. She began in Harlem and would resort to Thomas Aquinas to help resolve controversies among the people she know.

She began a lending library in Canada in the 1940s before the regional library system was up and running. She would find books for people who wrote her: that idea of supplying needs simply without expense guides us.

HW: Is there a crisis in the humanities, and if so, how would you characterize it?

ZH: It’s maybe a bit worse than a crisis: I would call it a collapse. I might characterize it in terms of institutions closing, departments closing, enrollments dropping, funding disappearing. But I would point to the cause, if I identify one cause, it’s that of scale. I don’t think the humanities work on the type of scale that most of our colleges and universities run on. If you get 12 college students in a room having read a Shakespeare play, they will love it: but they fall asleep in a required Shakespeare lecture course of 60 people. These large lectures take out all the habits of mind that we consider crucial: serious work on writing, serious work on reading: all of that requires small scale, requiring personal mentoring. We just haven’t done that.

As a result, many young people think that humanities work is boring, a joke, and not intellectually serious.

I had an incredible conversation with a Princeton undergrad who told me, “We do STEM because our humanities classes are not to be taken seriously: they’re too easy.”

I thought about that conversation and my own teaching experience at conventional institutions. I was always digesting material for students in gradable chunks.

There are other things: people don’t believe in it anymore, there’s job training, and so forth. But it’s the scaling that’s the problem: that’s why the Catherine Project will always have small groups. We will never scale. And I think that’s the problem with other approaches to online learning: they are always trying to reach a greater scale, bigger groups. We are using technology to bring more contact, higher quality education to more people.

HW: But how do we contend with the idea that humanities are “useless”?

ZH: My thinking on this has developed on this question. As a natural contrarian, I began defending the humanities as useless, since it ran counter to the current way of thinking about the humanities. What I really mean is that it is not useful in a conventional way: it’s not for a particular job, it’s not necessarily for advancement or social justice. It is useful for the development of one’s mind, heart, spirit: it’s a way of growing as a human being.

It might help you be successful – I think it often does – but it will also help you in case you are confronted with failure. And when we fail, it’s not always our fault: that’s part of the mythology of education that we won’t fail if we study the proper subjects. But you might still end up being a political prisoner in Siberia through no fault of your own.  And liberal education provides you with resources to keep you going under such adverse circumstances. Your liberal education belongs to you in all types of circumstances.

Education as job training is heteronomous: companies decide what job training is, a very small number of people, and they don’t have your interests in mind. They offer incentives but they don’t care about your well-being. So there’s something in considering education for citizenship, with respect to your role in society, what a community is: there’s a kind of egalitarianism in it that’s quickly being lost.

HW: The Greeks have a shaped your intellectual life. What do the Greeks still have to tell us? Why read the Greeks?

ZH: The reason why we read the Greeks is because the people who read them go bananas. My students are terrifically excited about reading Oedipus Rex right now: they pour over every detail.

The Greeks are educational magic. There’s a reason why we have been running courses on Homer since we started The Catherine Project.

I don’t like the traditional arguments about the Greeks being foundational for who we are. They are in a way, I suppose, but the Greeks are also very weird, weirder the more you read them. But any ancient book, any great book, shows you a piece of your humanity that you did not know before. It shows you possibilities for being human, both good and bad. That’s what the humanities are all about: it’s about seeing different dimensions of the human being.

We can think about universality and humanity in a way that is not static and fixed, out there that we can grasp all at once. Humanity is something that we approach piecemeal, piece by piece, through literature. The Greeks show us that: they thought so much about what it means to be a human being: both good and bad. There’s a difference often between poets and philosophers on this: the poets recognize the innate dignity of suffering, for example at the end of Iliad.

You need to feed your imagination with different possibilities for different modes of life. There’s nothing more useful than being able to re-imagine your circumstances.

HW: How can people get involved with The Catherine Project?

We welcome readers from all walks of life and we’re always looking for volunteers. There are portals on the website.The project has taken a life of its own: people love our groups, and the groups flourish organically.

The motivation for The Catherine Project is not to change the face of higher education: it’s a response to a need. People know they need it, and they want it, and we’re going to give it to them. If institutions begin to do their job again, we’ll fold up: we don’t need to be here. But if people could see the response to our offerings, they would weep.  This kind of education changes lives.  It’s not a joke.  If you doubt that, come and see!

For related posts on humanities and technology, see here and here

H/t Scott Newstok