On May 26, 2012, Earl Shorris, founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the program that inspired the Free Minds Project, died at age 75. Shorris first wrote about his "experimental" course for

Harper's Magazine in 1997. Originally offered on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Clemente Course model has traveled from New York to Austin, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and as far away as Buenos Aires. Here, Dr. Sylvia Gale (SG), founding director of Free Minds, and Free Minds Director Viv� Griffith (VG) remember their first encounters with Shorris's bold idea and chart its lineage to the applications for next year's Free Minds class.

SG: I can still remember the charge I felt the first time I read Shorris's essay in Harper's. It was the winter of 1998. I had recently graduated from Reed College, and I was living in western Colorado, caretaking a friend's adobe house and recovering from a severe back injury. I discovered the piece in a stack of old magazines and read it next to the picture windows at dusk. Shorris described the Clemente Course as an experiment to test his hypothesis that people could transform their lives by doing the kind of reflective thinking that would lead them towards autonomy--by engaging in the life of the mind. Reading about it in my quiet mountain hideaway, I felt literally electrified, buzzing with the sense that Shorris and his first group of students had traveled across an immense--yet bridgeable--divide.

VG: I like to imagine Sylvia and I reading that article simultaneously across our own divide, this one geographic. I encountered Shorris's essay while teaching composition to freshman at the University of Cincinnati, where I was a graduate student in English. I was young and excited, and surprised to discover my students had to be dragged through a curriculum they considered little more than an inconvenient diversion on their way to careers in business and engineering. In a sly move, the head of the rhetoric department had filled our course reader with texts meant to challenge students to think of their education on broader terms. That's where I first read Shorris. I don't have any idea if the article left an impact on my students, but it certainly affected me. A decade after teaching it, I heard about a similar program being piloted in Austin, and I leapt to be involved.

This article is continued on our blog.