Journey of the mind

This is the counter-balancing theme of the Venture program: You are smart enough.  · · · 

In mid-January, at the beginning of the new semester, Westminster philosophy professor Bridget Newell introduces the class to the world's great thinkers by acknowledging how dense the readings will seem. "You'll be looking at the same paragraphs over and over thinking, 'What are they talking about?' " The class will study epistemology and metaphysics, they'll think about what makes a just society, about the nature of mind and soul.

Seventeen students sit at the horseshoe arrangement of tables; the original 20 minus three students who dropped out over Christmas break. Barbra Moeller got pneumonia over the break, but she's back.

"It's easy not to study these questions, because they're hard," Newell tells the class. But the questions will stretch you, she says, in the same way hard physical labor stretches muscle. And so they launch into Socrates.

"One thing he did was question authority," Newell says.

"Really?" asks Lisa DeHerrera.

"Lisa loves him already," laughs Steve Acevedo.

DeHerrera, the class rebel — always ready to defend the oppressed and the endangered — is astounded to find out Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youths of Athens. At 34, DeHerrera is a veteran of a year at the Utah State Prison and three years at the Nevada Women's Correctional Facility, on drug charges. "I was hell-bent on screwing up my life," she explains. In prison, out of boredom, she began reading whatever she could find, as long as it wasn't a romance novel. She read "Moby Dick," "The Divine Comedy" and "The Grapes of Wrath."

When she got out, she was terrified. "When you're in prison for three years you have time to think. I started looking at the women around me, women in their 40s and 50s and 60s, and I realized they're going to keep doing the same thing till they die. And I thought, I don't know how I'm going to change it, but I can't be that 50-year-old woman."

Her mom encouraged her to apply to the Venture program. "I will never forget that day," DeHerrera says about being accepted. "Never in my life has anybody that's not my family welcomed me with open arms."

The winter-spring semester includes philosophy, a continuation of Jean Cheney's critical writing class and American history. The teacher is Jack Newell, professor emeritus at the University of Utah. Newell is less interested in dates and treaties than in big ideas that have shaped the country's collective psyche.

"What makes a good life?" Jack Newell asks.