Indiana University: How to Form a Lasting Undergraduate Philosophy Club

Forming and maintaining a healthy, lasting philosophy club requires a lot of hard work. I remember that when I was an undergraduate at SMU, our philosophy club had about three members. It was basically a monthly social club where we hung out in the department lounge and snuck snacks out of the fridge that the receptionist had stashed there for us. It was fun, but there was still a lot left to be desired.

Now that I’m a graduate student at IU, I serve as the current Undergraduate Activities Coordinator for the philosophy department. This means I get to direct and oversee the club from an administrative position, and I’ve been fortunate to inherit a healthy and vibrant philosophy club. I thought I’d share some of the institutional wisdom we’ve accumulated, especially as things have gotten trickier with COVID.

So, how can you make your philosophy club something bigger than a sporadic small group hangout?

1. Appoint a graduate student (or trustworthy undergraduate) your Undergraduate Activities Coordinator

When Adam Leite became our new Director of Undergraduate Studies in 2016, he prioritized getting our philosophy club up and running again. It had been on-and-off-again since at least the mid-2000s, but getting serious meant introducing another level of coordination.

Most philosophy clubs have a faculty advisor and maybe a student officer or two elected at the start of the year. Adam’s idea was to introduce a reliable third party to do all the nitty-gritty work of finalizing and publicizing a schedule of events, reserving rooms, ordering food, dealing with reimbursement, recruiting undergraduate students, and so on. Whether you choose a graduate student or a trustworthy undergraduate for this position, the goal is to have a level in between high-level faculty oversight and on-the-ground student participation.

A faculty advisor can get overrun with obligations; a student officer can get sick or fall behind on work. But having someone whose job is to facilitate regular meetings and keep everyone connected during a long semester provides some crucial stabilizing structure. (And I’m sure I don’t need to mention how much longer semesters feel during pandemic!)

2. Make the Undergraduate Activities Coordinator position paid

Any philosophy club is going to have a large amount of turnover year-to-year. That includes your coordinators too! Since 2016, we’ve had four different graduate students hold the position.

But making the position paid means that it’s taken seriously, keeping the quality of the club higher over time. You don’t have to break the bank either; realistically, even a couple billed hours a week can make an enormous difference to the regularity of club activities and recruiting efforts. It’s also one more way for your department to take a small step towards financially supporting some of your most dedicated students.

I should add that departmental service like this is a useful resume builder, especially for grad students getting ready to go on the market!

3. Move beyond movie and discussion nights

Don’t get me wrong — movie and discussion nights are great events, and we hold them regularly. It’s really easy to say: Come show up and watch this movie! Read this paper and we’ll talk about it! Students find these events valuable, and they’re common for good reason.

But holding a wider variety of events lets different kinds of students pick and choose the events that interest them, increasing the reach of your philosophy club. Just this semester, we’ve chatted with an invited speaker, held a reading group, met up for monthly social-distance picnics, and put together various info sessions and writing workshops. You’d be surprised how many students will come to at least one of those.

Next semester, we’re planning to hold a symposium organized by and featuring our undergraduate students. We’ll have to run it over Zoom because of COVID, but that’s just one more wrinkle we can figure out together. If you’re going to have an Undergraduate Activities Coordinator, why not keep them busy working creatively?

By the way, a note on Zoom: We’ve found it really helpful to use the same link for every event, and we even reserved a custom Zoom room URL with www.tinyurl.com that’s way easier to remember and publicize. You always have to be careful about the possibility of Zoom-bombing, but we haven’t had any problems with that yet! (Even so, you might want to use the waiting room feature if you’re concerned.)

4. Reach out as many different ways as possible

Along the same lines, you can’t reach every student the same way, particularly during pandemic. We’ve had a dedicated listserv for years, and encouraged students to give us their email address during meetings, but this year we’ve started getting more creative by pushing into social media, having officers recruit their friends and social contacts more proactively, and emailing professors each week with upcoming events to publicize. Some instructors even choose to give extra credit for attending particularly relevant events, and I’m more than happy to let them know who attended.

Students are especially tired and hard to reach in pandemic, so reaching out in multiple ways has proved essential this year. Try to present your philosophy club as a space where students can get away from their daily routine and engage with material they actually enjoy.

5. Create a dedicated food budget

Sneaking snacks out of the fridge as an undergraduate was fun, but even a small food budget can go a long way, particularly for callout meetings at the start of the semester. Your budget doesn’t have to be huge, and you don’t have to cater every event, but I guarantee that students will show up for pizza.

Obviously, catering has gotten trickier with the pandemic. We’ve been using a local food delivery service to drop off dinners at students’ homes on the night of catered events. It’s a bit more finicky to schedule, and it means that our food budget doesn’t go quite as far with delivery fees and tips, but students are more thankful for the occasional catered event now than ever, especially given increased food insecurity during pandemic. They also appreciate the flexibility to order food from any restaurant they want within budget!

6. Establish a MAP Chapter

I’d get in touch with MAP, or Minorities and Philosophy, as soon as possible. The MAP website has a variety of resources to help you diversify what your philosophy club is reading and discussing. We’ve also found that holding MAP events increases our undergraduate outreach, and gives us a slightly different space to discuss materials that we might not otherwise get to.

Some of the most vibrant discussions we’ve had have been at MAP meetings, whether we’re reading W. E. B. Du Bois on (not) voting, or Liz Anderson on the epistemology of justice. It’s a great space to link philosophical questions with current events, and students are eager to discuss these issues. I’d definitely recommend looking into applying to create an official MAP chapter to get started.

It takes a lot of work, and a bit of dedicated budget, to ensure that your philosophy club is robust enough to last year after year — and even through a global pandemic! My message to any faculty reading is that you don’t have to do all the work, and you probably shouldn’t try to do so either. By empowering an Undergraduate Activities Coordinator to work as a go-between yourself and interested students, and making sure they have the tools to succeed, you can give your philosophy club the best chance to flourish and grow over time.

The Undergraduate Philosophy Club Series of the APA Blog is designed to share insights about undergraduate philosophy clubs.  We would love for your undergraduate philosophy club to be a part of the project.  Please email sabrinamisirhiralall@apaonline.org to nominate an undergraduate philosophy club.

Ricky Mouser

Ricky Mouser is a PhD student in philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. His current research explores the relationship between moral skepticism and skepticism about other minds, as well as philosophical disagreement in general. He also has interests in philosophy of language and aesthetics.