Low-income residents study the humanities for free in Odyssey Project

Project Called a Model Humanities Course

Like many single African American mothers, Robesia Davis started her family early. Today, she has six children and one grandchild, the child of her teen-aged daughter. Davis tried returning to college once, but the work demands of W-2, a state-mandated welfare reform program, made an already difficult proposition impossible.

That changed in October when she enrolled in the Odyssey Project, a free 6-credit course for low-income people offered by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).

The project addressed many of the barriers facing lower-income people who would like to pursue higher education: Classes are held in the evening, child care is provided, and all the costs are covered, even transportation.

Giving people access to the study of college-level humanities - usually considered the prerogative of the affluent - is the whole point of the Odyssey Project.

The 18 members of the first class are mostly African American women, and many are single parents. All must hustle to make ends meet financially. But they also are interested in continuing their educations.

"At first I thought, 'This gets me out of the house and I'd be learning something,'" says Davis, who spends part of her day as caregiver for her toddler grandchild. "Then, during the course, I realized how much I'd missed learning. I knew I had to return to school."

Davis plans to continue her education this year at UWM.

Of the original 29 participants in the project, 18 finished the course and most of those earned 6 college credits from UWM. The group took on Greek philosophy, world literature, intellectual history, and art history, while simultaneously working on English composition skills.

"The spirit of the program is based on the idea that liberal arts should be accessible to all people," says David Mulroy, associate professor of classics and coordinator of UWM's Odyssey Project. "It assumes intelligence on the part of participants, but not a high level of education or training."

Working in partnership with the Children's Outing Association (COA), the Odyssey Project's classes were held at the COA Child Care Center twice a week in the evenings for most of the school year.

Besides camaraderie, says student Charles Ratlift, the intangibles of personal pride and accomplishment ranked as the project's greatest benefits.

"I will never again go into a doctor's office or a public building and see (famous) pictures on the wall in the same way," he says. "We learned that from art history. It opened my mind."

UWM launched the program last fall with a $40,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), which is administered by Bard College in New York.

The Odyssey Project was modeled after the Bard-Clemente program at Bard College, founded by writer Earl Shorris. Among Shorris's nonfiction books are "Latinos: A Biography of a People" and "New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy."

Shorris believes that study of the humanities makes contemplation, the necessary precursor to action, possible. Those in poverty are kept there by society's insistence on training them to do a task, rather than teaching them to reason and try out new ideas, he says. "The distinction is between doing and thinking, between following and beginning."

Programs funded through Bard already operate at 16 sites across the U.S., including in Chicago. And the Bard-Clemente program has inspired a number of similar programs, such as the Great Books program for the homeless at Notre Dame University.

UWM was one of five new sites begun this academic year.

The Great Books Program in the College of Letters and Science and The Milwaukee Idea Office jointly administer the UWM Odyssey Project.

Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation has given $20,000 to ensure that the program can continue for another academic year. But Mulroy says more fund-raising is necessary to renew the program each year. The cost of offering the course is between $40,000 and $50,000 per year.

Meanwhile, graduates of the project says they face their own funding questions to continue college.

Davis acknowledges that she may have to put her grandchild in day care. But then she adds, "Our family would have to sacrifice a little to get a lot."