On the screen in front of Kevin Klipfel, a group of women had gathered around a single camera in a nondescript institutional room. There were folding chairs, fluorescent light, but no obvious clue as to where they were. If you’d stumbled into the Zoom call without context, Klipfel says, it might have looked less like a correctional facility than a seminar room. “It could have just been a bunch of women you were talking about the meaning of life with.”
In fact, they were students in the USC Dornsife Prison Education Project, joining from the Santa Fe Springs Women’s Facility.
Klipfel, a teaching and learning librarian and interim head of instruction and assessment at the USC Libraries, spent part of the fall 2025 semester teaching a seven-week philosophy course through the program. The course, Thinking Critically About What Matters, drew on Western and Eastern philosophical traditions to explore how values shape the choices people make—and how wisdom might help them live with greater purpose and integrity. By the time the course ended, Klipfel says, the experience had changed him and left its mark on a book he was simultaneously finishing.
“I got maybe more out of it than they did,” he says.
That kind of self-effacing candor is characteristic of Klipfel. He was initially reluctant to be featured in a story about his Prison Education Project experience at all, aware that hundreds of USC faculty members, students, and staff have done extraordinary work through the program since its founding at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 2017, engaging more than a thousand incarcerated students over forty-five-plus courses— with far less fanfare. His participation, he is quick to point out, was not unprecedented.
What may be distinctive is the angle from which he came to it.
For Klipfel, getting involved in prison education was not incidental to his identity as a librarian. It was an expression of it. His forthcoming book, Thinking Critically About What Matters: A Punk Rock Guide, co-authored with his wife, Lyndsay Klipfel, argues that libraries do more than provide resources. At their core, they democratize access to information and empower people to make thoughtful decisions about what to believe and how to live. “Democratizing information is the core historical value of librarianship,” he says. “Education as a fundamental human right is core to our very identity.”
Seen in that light, prison education is not a departure from library work. It is the mission of librarianship taken seriously.
Klipfel returned from a research leave in 2025 thinking about purpose. He had spent much of that time writing his book on critical thinking and meaningful action, and he had also been reflecting on what it might look like to put those ideas into practice beyond the university. He recalls reading Will Guidara’s “Unreasonable Hospitality,” with its emphasis on service as a form of purposeful action, and asking himself what that might mean in his own professional life.
“I wanted to use the position I’m in to do good,” he says. “Be good, do good—that was the spirit.”
He reached out to leaders of the Prison Education Project, only to discover that he already knew some of them through earlier work with the USC Writing Program. He imagined volunteering in some modest capacity—helping with grading, perhaps, or assisting behind the scenes. Instead, when he mentioned the book he’d been writing, the conversation quickly shifted. Would he be willing to teach a class based on it?
Soon, he was.
His students came from the Santa Fe Springs Women’s Facility, a transitional correctional facility in southeast Los Angeles County. Roughly 15 to 25 women attended each session, ranging in age from their 30s to their 60s. They were participating in the Prison Education Project as they prepared to re-enter society in the final years of their sentences. Few, if any, had ever attended a university. For many, Klipfel was likely the first academic librarian they had encountered.
The launch was anything but orderly. Klipfel had drafted a syllabus months earlier, but the logistics kept shifting. The class was on, then off. It might be taught in person, then online. He was not sure whether students would have the readings, whether they would have pens and paper, or even what kind of classroom interaction would be possible. Then, with roughly 24 hours’ notice, he got the message: you’re teaching this course. “It was very sort of chaotic,” he says, “a lot of last-minute come-together.”
The course itself was a practical introduction to critical thinking through philosophy. Students kept an “Examined Life” journal throughout the seven weeks, reflecting in writing on questions about wisdom, happiness, success, courage and self-knowledge. The class began with Socrates and Plato, moved through the Apology and the Allegory of the Cave, then turned toward Bruce Lee, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism. In one week, students were asked to practice sitting meditation and write about what they noticed in the movement of their own minds. The aim, throughout, was not abstract mastery of a canon but what Aristotle called “practical wisdom”: the ability to make values-based decisions about what matters in life.
From the second the Zoom session began, Klipfel says, the dialogue was extraordinary.
“It was probably the most receptive group I’ve ever had,” he says. “From the second they turned on the Zoom, it was amazing dialogue.”
What he encountered was not a classroom that needed to be persuaded to care about philosophy. It was a classroom ready for it.
That readiness changed the material itself. Plato’s Apology, in which Socrates stands trial and refuses to abandon the examined life even under threat of death, had always been familiar territory for Klipfel. But teaching it in this setting brought out dimensions he had never fully appreciated. “Western philosophy literally starts with a man on trial for his life for questioning the authority of dominant cultural values,” he says. His students responded immediately, and, as he puts it, “expressed their admiration for Socrates in very colorful ways.”
The Allegory of the Cave opened up similarly vivid conversations. In the parable from Plato’s Republic, prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for reality until one escapes into the light and sees the world as it is. In many classrooms, the cave becomes a metaphor for education in the abstract. Here, it felt far more immediate. Students connected the “shadows” not just to ignorance, but to inherited beliefs, social pressures, and internalized values that had shaped the decisions that led them where they were. One woman, Klipfel recalls, said she had been incarcerated for half her life because of some of those values.
The practical philosophical question that kept surfacing was one at the heart of Klipfel’s course and book alike: How do you live with integrity? How do you stay true to yourself while also navigating systems of authority and social control with wisdom?
Those conversations often centered on freedom, defiance, and self-command. “None of us like to be told what to do,” Klipfel told the group, a line that carried obvious weight in the room. The challenge, he says, was figuring out how to hold onto one’s values without simply reenacting old patterns—how to be authentic without, in one student’s words, getting “put in a box.”
For Klipfel, the experience also sharpened his own thinking. He had entered the course with a nearly finished manuscript. He came out of it having revised some of its core ideas. Talking through the material with his students forced him to clarify his definitions, rethink his examples and refine the logic of the book itself. “I owe a lot to them,” he says. “Last-minute fundamental changes to my book came from working and talking to these women.”
The course also reaffirmed something Klipfel already believed about librarianship and education. You do not need elite credentials or specialized language to ask serious questions about how to live. Philosophy, in his telling, is not the property of gatekeepers. Socrates, after all, did his work in public, walking around Athens and talking to ordinary people about truth, wisdom, and the good life. “I don’t think we’re esoteric gatekeepers of knowledge as librarians,” Klipfel says. “I want to go where people are.”
In Santa Fe Springs, he found that some of the richest philosophical conversations of his career were waiting for him there.
One detail from the course has stayed with him in particular. In seven weeks of class, he never once asked his students why they were incarcerated. The question didn’t feel useful, and it didn’t feel right. “I’m not going to define you by the greatest mistake you’ve made,” he says. “That’s what society does.”
Instead, he came to know them through their journals, their questions, and the way they grappled with ideas about happiness, loyalty, meaning and peace of mind.
This semester, Klipfel has returned to the Prison Education Project classroom—this time in person, at Amistad de Los Angeles, a men’s re-entry facility across the 110 freeway from USC’s University Park Campus. He’s adapted the course for the new context, adding additional texts alongside Plato and the Zen philosophers.
One is the “Saved” chapter from The Autobiography of Malcolm X in which the civil rights leader describes his self-education in prison, teaching himself to read, working through the dictionary word-by-word, and discovering books in a form of freedom no one could take from him. Asked by a reporter about his alma mater, Malcolm’s answer was simple: “Books—a good library.”