Nigel De Juan Hatton, Journalism Instructor
Nigel De Juan Hatton has volunteered as a tutor and teacher with the Prison University Project since 2003. He has also taught writing and literature courses at Berkeley Community College, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Richmond Hills Family Center in San Francisco. His own work focuses primarily on aesthetic and ethical forms of solidarity as a means to end cultures of homicide, discrimination, sexism, homophobia and economic inequity. In other words, he likes novels.

“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.” —James Baldwin