Michael Austin is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah. 

The first time I taught from the Fourth Edition of Reading the World was both the most difficult and the most meaningful class of my long career. The 19 students in the class were all inmates at the Central Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison, Utah—one of only two prison facilities in the state. College-level classes had not been taught in the CUCF since 2011, and none of the current inmates had ever attended a class. Because of the Biden administration’s expansion of federal financial aid for incarcerated students, we were able to launch a new degree program at the prison in the summer of 2025. 

The course was basic Freshman Composition, held once a week from 4:00 to 6:30 p.m. with no breaks. All course materials had to be submitted in advance for review by prison officials. There was no way to bring in handouts or extra readings, and the students had no access to computers or the internet. Most of the papers were handwritten and subsequently scanned by prison guards. It was essential that everything be planned well in advance; deviation was nearly impossible. 

That was the theory, anyway—the reality turned out to be something different. When I arrived for the first class, the students had just received their books that day and had not yet seen the syllabus that I had dutifully prepared two weeks earlier. Nothing I had planned for the day was going to work, so I had to innovate on the spot. Fortunately, the Fourth Edition of Reading the World offered a new type of reading: dramatic excerpts. 

We started with Cesare Maccari’s painting Cicero Denounces Catiline, which led to an extremely productive discussion of persuasion, the rule of force, and the rule of law. 

Then we did some reader’s theater. They read a short passage from Aeschylus’s The Eumenides in which Athena persuades the Furies to abandon their pursuit of Orestes and accept the Athenian jury’s decision. At the end, when the Furies agree not to destroy Athens, the students stood up and applauded Athena’s accomplishment, and we talked about the importance of persuasion in democracy. 

We then read a selection from an Egyptian play, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s The Sultan’s Dilemma. In this play, a Mamluk sultan is discovered to be an unmanumitted slave. The scene we read is a discussion among the sultan, his vizier, and the cadi about whether the sultan should resolve the issue by force or submit to the law. When we reached the point where the sultan says, “I choose the law,” the entire class stood up and cheered, “THE LAW.” Then we had a great discussion about leaders being subject to the rule of law (and what it means for democracy if they aren’t).  

I was mildly surprised by the level of engagement these students displayed on the first day of class—this has not been the norm in classes I have taught to more traditional students. But I was shocked by the overwhelming support students showed for laws and legal processes. I did not expect my students to come out advocating for anarchy and rampant lawbreaking, and I knew enough not to expect cartoon villains inveighing against “coppers” and “snitches.” But I did not expect a group of people who were currently being punished by the law to endorse so enthusiastically the value of the rule of law relative to alternatives like private vengeance and monarchical force. 

When I was editing Reading the World, I included both artwork and dramatic readings because I wanted to expose students to the different ways in which humans have made arguments about important things. I did not realize until the moment I entered this classroom the value these texts held for occasions that demanded the spontaneous creation of lesson plans. With these three texts, my students had a phenomenal, even life-changing discussion without reading anything in advance, and we turned what might have been a disaster into something productive. 

As the class progressed, it became clear that these students took each reading very, very seriously. And they had no problem talking about their lives as part of their reading. Higher education is the highest privilege that an inmate can earn. Not only do they have to have a completely clean behavioral record, but they must also make significant progress toward their degree in order to remain in the program. Nearly all of my students studied as if their lives depended on it, because, in some very real ways, they did. 

Each week’s class discussion was productive, with most students participating regularly. I watched with interest the readings they responded to the best; without exception, their favorite readings were the ones I considered the most difficult. After reading an excerpt from Plato’s Gorgias, one student tracked down a copy in the prison library so he could read the whole thing; he ended up reading an entire book of Plato’s dialogues before the semester was over. When we read a selection from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, one of the students reported that he had read the text five times before he felt he understood it, and he then led a spectacular discussion on evolution and how it worked. 

Perhaps my greatest surprise came when we discussed the nature of beauty (Chapter 4). I hesitated to include these readings in the course at all, since they seemed out of place in a prison environment, where aesthetic standards were relentlessly pragmatic and abstract notions of beauty seemed irrelevant to their lives. We read three selections from this unit: Edmund Burke’s The Sublime and the Beautiful, Tolstoy’s What Is Art?, and Gertrude Stein’s What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them? 

When class began, I asked the students which essay they agreed with most. Did they see great art as something sublime and awesome (Burke), as something accessible to all people (Tolstoy), or as something able to transcend time, place, and the context of the artist (Stein)? To my surprise, the number of students adopting each position was roughly equal, and they spent the class arguing fervently for their sides. I did little more than direct traffic. At the end of the semester, students overwhelmingly listed these readings as their favorites. 

In the last class period of the semester, I asked the students what they would like me to pass on to those who would be teaching them next semester. They responded with a single request: “Tell the next teachers not to dumb their classes down because we are in prison.” Another student jumped in and said that he was serving a life sentence without parole. The only thing he wanted out of this class was to prove to himself that he could take and pass college classes on his own. All of the students agreed. 

When the class was over, I got a note from one of the students that confirmed this sentiment. It is the most meaningful note I have ever gotten from a student: 

I wanted to thank you for a wonderful class. I also wanted to tell you that my greatest takeaway from it has been the confidence I gained from being able to read and understand difficult texts and see how they continue to impact our world. My entire life, I never believed that I had the ability or intelligence to read and understand things like the selections in your book. Coming to class has been a real pleasure. Thank you for showing up for us. 

This meant so much to me because it confirmed the philosophy with which I began Reading the World in 2006: college students need to do hard things because they need to know that they can do hard things. They need to understand that they are not at the mercy of the world but that they can read important books, have consequential ideas, and eventually influence the world more than the world influences them. 

We have made many positive changes to the Fifth Edition of Reading the World, most driven by the revolution in artificial intelligence since the Fourth Edition hit the shelves. We have added a section in the reader that includes narratives and arguments about artificial intelligence going back to the ancient world. We have included a section in the rhetoric on teaching with AI in the classroom. And we have added a thread running through all the chapters that focuses on the need to pay attention—a habit that has not fared well in a digital world based almost entirely on distraction. 

But we have not changed the core ideas behind Reading the World: combining consequential readings from a variety of times and places and encouraging students to master complex ideas. A summer teaching in a prison taught me that students value these things, and I do not believe I would be meeting my responsibilities as a teacher if I gave them anything less. 

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