Author, Social Critic, Founder of Clemente Course Earl Shorris Passes Away

[MHV9218]

Another memorial thread, yes, but this is important. Very, very sad news, Shorris was one of the great men of our time who worked for good. If you haven't heard of him, you should have now from today's article. Author of some 16 books and the founder of the Clemente Course, a program which teaches college-level courses for free to students and adults in tough circumstances (be it the ghetto or Darfur, all around the world). Won the National Humanities Medal for his work, and was something of a legend in person.

 

http://www.nytimes.c...dies-at-75.html

 

Earl Shorris, a social critic and author whose interviews with prison inmates for a book inspired him to start a now nationally recognized educational program that introduces the poor and the unschooled to Plato, Kant and Tolstoy, died on May 27 in New York. He was 75.

 

The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his son Anthony said.

 

Mr. Shorris, who wrote a dozen books during the first 35 years of his career, many sharply critical of Western culture as sliding toward plutocracy and materialism, became best known in his final years for founding the Clemente Course in the Humanities. Established in 1995 with 25 students at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in the East Village of Manhattan, the program offers the disadvantaged a 10-month curriculum of philosophy, history, art, literature and logic. It earned Mr. Shorris the National Humanities Medal, presented to him in 2000 by President Bill Clinton.

 

Since 1995, the program has been introduced in about 20 cities around the country, as well as in Canada, Australia and Korea, according to administrators of the Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities, which oversees the project. In groups of 20 to 30 students per course, several thousand have tackled the program’s rigorous readings and explications of Aristotle on logic, Plato on justice and Kant’s theory of morality. The program is free, and books, carfare and baby-sitting are provided.

 

In every outpost, the target audience is the same: the poor and unemployed, low-wage workers, ex-convicts, addicts and the homeless. By Mr. Shorris’s own account, the enterprise has scored many wins and many losses. Some students were inspired, some were not, some died of AIDS, and some — like Moise Koffi of the Bronx, who described himself as drifting toward poverty before taking the course 10 years ago at a community center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. — went on to earn bachelor’s and graduate degrees.

 

 

Besides his wife and his son Anthony, Mr. Shorris is survived by another son, James; a sister, Mary Jean Roberts; and four grandchildren.

 

The Clemente Course “changed the direction of my life,” said Mr. Koffi, an immigrant from Ivory Coast. “I was in darkness, like the man in the story of the cave, and my mind was opened.”

 

Rest in peace Mr. Shorris.