The Great Books Are for Everyone

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Zena Hitz.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John’s College, a Great Books school. She is also the founder of the Catherine Project, a free program allowing participants from around to world to participate in reading groups of the great books. She is also the author of the wonderful book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Zena sat down with me while visiting Austin to discuss the joys of the intellectual life, the state of the modern university, and how she is bringing humanities education to thousand of people through the Catherine Project. Below are highlights from our conversation. For the entire dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page. A CONVERSATION WITH ZENA HITZJARED: Zena Hitz, thank you for joining me.ZENA: Thanks so much, Jared. It’s great to be here.JARED: I wanted to talk to you because I was first exposed to your work through Lost in Thought, and then after I read Lost in Thought, I found out about the Catherine Project, and I’ve now participated in one Catherine Project group.ZENA: Very good, very good.JARED: You started this thing, the Catherine Project. Could you start by telling us what it is, and also how you got started?ZENA: I had a kind of longing back from when I was straight out of grad school and started teaching undergrads intro to philosophy and stuff like that. A lot of the job of teaching philosophy at a public university is teaching people who don’t want to learn. So I developed this preoccupation with: what would it be like if you tried to find the people who only want to learn? Suppose you could just filter for the desire to learn.My first idea was to have an open ancient Greek study group in Baltimore, which is where I was living at the time. We were going to read the Iliad, and this wonderful librarian helped us out, and a couple people turned up. They were grad students at Hopkins or whatever. So it turned out to be my friends. It was very small, and I realized I didn’t know how to reach people in an ordinary city who would want to do something like this. So there was a contact problem. How do I find these people?But I was still haunted by the dream, and it sat in the back of my mind for, I don’t know, probably 20 years, 15 years. And then, as I talked about in Lost in Thought, I went through all kinds of transitions and tried to figure out what to do with my life, and finally settled on going back to St. John’s to teach. So I went back in 2015, and then in 2020, of course, we had emergency online COVID classes, which anyone who was teaching at the time knows was absolutely miserable. Just the worst kind of teaching you can imagine. Because it was unexpected, and these people were in their parents’ basement, and I was teaching a class called junior math, which was Newton’s Principia, one of the hardest books I know, and we just couldn’t do it.JARED: That was a very St. John’s sentence.ZENA: I have a lot of St. John’s sentences. I’m a Johnny born and bred, so that’s the way it is. But we couldn’t do it, because reading something that difficult requires having an in-person community to talk to people and get help and stuff like that. So we kept trying. We put in a college try, but it was really painful. Anyway, that’s a little bit beside the point.The point is, I was really upset about being online. I wanted to just send everyone home and give them a chance, maybe, to fix their grade, but we had to do it. And I was very frightened. I thought, once universities figure out that they can have classes online, they’re never going to go back, because it’s so cheap. Administrators are just like that. They just want stuff that’s cheap. They don’t care about educational quality. So I was very angry, and that sometimes can be very productive.I thought, if I were stuck on this forever, what would be the best way to learn? What would be the best way to teach? I thought, maybe it’s a bit like an Oxford tutorial situation, where people went away and read off screen and t