As many of our members know, leading a heterodox life can take you to interesting, uncomfortable places – places that change how you think. The path of Jody Lewen, the president of Mount Tamalpais College at California’s San Quentin prison, is a good example of that.

In the institution’s own words, “Mount Tamalpais College is an independent liberal arts college dedicated solely to serving incarcerated people. For nearly 30 years, we have provided rigorous higher education and college preparatory programs at our main campus, located inside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (formerly known as San Quentin State Prison). We are driven by the belief that every human being has the right to educational opportunities that allow them to flourish, intellectually, socially, economically, and professionally.”

Lewen told me in a recent conversation that she came to this work “in a very roundabout way” during a period in which she was becoming disillusioned with some aspects of academia. Her CV looks pretty traditional: a bachelor’s degree in modern European history from Wesleyan, a master’s in comp lit and philosophy from Freie Universität in Berlin, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.

As a grad student, she was “interested in the social and cultural constructs of racial and national identities, really interested in the question of how certain concepts of identity come to be imagined as located in the body – like the idea of ‘Jewish blood,’” she explained. She was fascinated by concepts of race and nationality and how they intersected with the psychological construction of the sense of self.

About halfway through her dissertation, Lewen found herself at a conference on psychoanalysis sitting next to a woman who had helped found the college program at San Quentin – initially an extension site of Patten College, a small, non-denominational Christian college based in Oakland, California. One of Lewen’s fellow grad students was teaching as a volunteer instructor at the school, and Lewen ended up co-teaching a course on communications with him there.

“I fell totally in love with it,” she recalls. “These were adults who really wanted to be in college – incredibly diverse intellectually, politically, demographically.” Many of the students had reached prison without high school diplomas but earned them while incarcerated. “Intellectually, it was so stimulating,” she says.

Having studied fascist, communist, and totalitarian systems, Lewen found herself fascinated by the prison.

“I was incredibly naive,” she says. “I had been a kind of classical social justice warrior, but I knew nothing really about the prison system. At first it was like moving to another country,” like when she first moved to Berlin after college, where she then stayed for seven years.

Soon, the person who had been coordinating the program announced he was leaving, and she found herself taking that over while still working to finish her Ph.D. She found herself finishing her doctorate “in my spare time, like a hobby” she kept up while devoting most of her energy to Mount Tamalpais.

When she started working in the prison, Lewen knew she held stereotypes about incarcerated people, “but I was really not prepared for the extent of the stereotypes I had about prison staff and administration, or for how resistant I would be to overcoming those stereotypes." She says she came to see her own anti-law-enforcement bias as, “a kind of orthodoxy.”

As she got to know the staff, she came to understand them as people with their own unique backgrounds, and often real insight into the failings of the criminal justice system. When she spoke in positive terms with colleagues or friends on the outside about prison staff, she would often “watch their facial expressions go stone cold. That was such an education. The whole thing ended up being a kind of deprogramming experience as a progressive….Almost nobody I knew wanted to talk about the staff as human beings.”

The backgrounds of prison staff, as well as the location of most of the other prisons in the state – particularly in California’s Central Valley – also gave her an education about the harsh economic realities faced by so many people living in California’s rural communities. She began to appreciate her own privilege while also understanding how academics who regularly critiqued “privilege” often failed to recognize the socio-economic biases of their own positions. Rhetorical reductions of the prison system, for example, to an extension of a racist, repressive state apparatus often missed that “there are millions of average people who simply don’t want to be raped, killed, or stolen from” and who who’ve been taught to believe prisons keep them safer.

Lewen found herself struggling with intellectual and political tensions she had never considered before. While the data showed that the more education people get, the less likely they are to return to prison, some corrections officers would point out to her that prisoners getting free education that their own kids couldn’t get for free just felt unfair. “It wasn’t just about the rational arguments for them. Those conversations, their attitudes, exposed me directly to all this justifiable rage and bitterness that so many Americans hold, and that is so critical to understanding American political culture. It also helped me hear very differently the judgy condescension, the nails-on-the-chalkboard elitism of so many progressives,” she remembers.

Long story short, she stuck with the work, initially founding the Prison University Project to support the program, and in 2022, after two decades, transforming it into an independent, accredited liberal arts college, Mount Tamalpais College.

Not too surprisingly, Lewen found HxA to be a natural home for her complex politics and perspectives on higher education. She noted to me that the most recent national conference, last year in Brooklyn, was much less racially diverse than she expected, given “the vast and brilliant heterodox community that is not just white, particularly within the black community.” (She’s right.)

She was also surprised to encounter so little discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict and how it is playing out on campuses, beyond one dedicated session from the Nantucket Project. She had hoped to run into more people like herself, raised Jewish and wanting to “talk about what it is like to stand apart from, or break with, a dominant culture at a moment of crisis, particularly when people are literally feeling under siege.” And she noted what she described as a curious thread of contempt toward the notion of subjectivity generally, and a heavy reliance on fairly simplistic notions of “truth” as the guiding force for all intellectual inquiry.

Lewen also noted the relative lack of women at the conference, something that has been a concern for years. When I asked her about why she thinks women don’t attend and join HxA in numbers comparable to men, she posited that “a lot of women are in fact more bridge-builders, and I think our egos are often just wired a little bit differently.” I suggested that HxA President John Tomasi’s vision of working more with “principled allies” rather than “campus contras” might bring more women into the movement led by HxA.

Lewen hopes in the coming years to bring heterodox speakers of diverse stripes to Mount Tamalpais College so that "the heterodox academic world is available to our students.” The students themselves, she notes, “are incredibly heterodox,” and in fact run into trouble sometimes because of this once they are out of prison and enroll in college outside. “They are often very concerned about fitting in and not offending” when they move on to post-incarceration higher ed. “They’ll get lectured for not stating their pronouns, or schooled by some punky 20-something year old kid about not using the ‘right’ language. I want them to know there is this larger conversation going on.”

She sees HxA as doing important work, and wants to help it expand its reach into far more diverse communities and places. “I want to be a force for good within the organization,” she told me. “It’s desperately needed in the world.”

Join Jody Lewen in HxA membership.