On a sunny Tuesday autumn afternoon, the Utah State Philosophy Club meets on the grassy quad next to Old Main right at the base of the northern Utah mountains. They keep company with relaxing students crashed in hammocks held up by campus trees and students playing quidditch on a nearby lawn. These are the more casual meetings of the club at which students are free to raise and discuss general philosophical topics that they’ve been thinking about since the group last met two weeks prior. These meetings have been about issues such as death and the afterlife, criteria for membership in the moral community, the metaphysics of time, and philosophy in students’ favorite popular culture.
Our club has no membership requirements. The philosophy program emphasizes public philosophy, and we view the club as an important element of that mission. Originally an agricultural college, the school enrolls roughly 28,000 students a year. The philosophy department is fairly small but covers a significant amount of general education requirements. Many students are drawn to study philosophy with no prior exposure to the discipline simply because they took a lower division course for gen ed and found themselves captivated. This is the way that most of our students learn about our club—through an announcement that their professor makes in class. Some of our students have gone on to graduate study in philosophy, but we know that is not the path that most of them will take and we embrace that fact. What is important to us is that our students live philosophical lives, use their philosophical skills to ask good questions, give and respond to reasons, contribute to their communities, and become the best, most flourishing versions of themselves.
The club has existed for many years; I have served as advisor for two but have been involved for longer. We have a president, a vice president, a secretary, and a treasurer who are self-nominated and are elected by a majority vote of members of the club. I meet with the officers once a month to discuss club business and events for the semester. As the advisor, I help to plan all the events and I attend all the meetings. I try to let the students make a significant number of the important decisions, though I have to take over sometimes when it comes to inviting guest speakers and navigating technology and space. Our club has a Facebook page.
We do our best to make sure that our events engage young philosophers at all levels of development. Sometimes discussions are open and lightly moderated. On other occasions, we bring out guest speakers, and several times a semester we host community events in public forums. We sometimes assign readings in advance (for instance, we recently assigned Sartre’s No Exit and discussed it as a group with an eye to perhaps putting on a reader’s theater version in the amphitheater in the fall). It is always our goal to keep the club accessible and to accommodate walk-in members on any given day. When we have assigned readings, we are sure to read passages aloud during the meeting so that the students who weren’t in a position to do the reading can still participate in the conversation. Occasionally, we assign a podcast for participants to listen to and we’ve found that this diversity in media keeps things fresh and lively.
Experimenting with Zoom during the pandemic opened up the possibility for a wider range of speakers to engage with the students and faculty. Our students are studying during challenging times, and we understand that philosophy club can be a space where they can work out complex thoughts about what’s happening in the world around them. During this time, we’ve heard from speakers on topics including universal basic income, pandemic ethics, gamification, and expertise.
A signature program that we’ve developed and have now implemented many times a semester over the course of the last three years is our Ethics Slam Program. An Ethics Slam is an event held at a community venue; our events have been at coffee shops, pizza parlors, and libraries. These events are community conversations. We target local establishments that community members already spend time in and that they’re comfortable with. Ethics Slams are modeled after Poetry Slams; they’re moderated open mic discussions. We created a list of goals and best practices that we put on a poster and review at the beginning of every event before the discussion gets off the ground. We’ve found success with topics that are in the news that people are already thinking about. Some of the topics we’ve selected have been gun control reform, peaceful protests, climate change, free speech and the internet, identity politics, etc. These events attract community members across a wide range of ages and get these people speaking with one another about critical issues of the day. We conducted Slams over Zoom with great success. Utah State partners with another local University, Weber State, to put these events on. Perhaps the most significant challenge that we face as a club is encouraging diverse membership. In some ways, this is a consequence of the more general problem of attracting diverse students into our courses and our major (i.e., the problem of recruiting diverse students into philosophy). We welcome suggestions for dealing with this problem. Solutions we’ve tried include asking a diverse range of students about the kinds of topics they’d like to discuss at meetings so that they feel both interest and partial ownership over the club. We also try to directly ask folks who we think would enjoy the activity and try to encourage a sense of belonging through invitation to friendship. Our students appear to be genuinely interested in engaging with diverse perspectives.
We’re proud of our philosophy club at Utah State. We are extremely lucky to have a community of scholars in the department who are interested in making philosophy an immersive experience at Utah State rather than just a cluster of courses. All of my colleagues have been actively involved in the club and the students really value their presence and contributions. We are also fortunate to have an extremely curious, hardworking, kind, and passionate group of students who make attending meetings a joy. Our guiding slogan was coined by my colleague and friend Charlie Huenemann, “Ancient questions, modern answers. Modern questions, ancient answers.”
Rachel Robison-Greene
Rachel Robison-Greene is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University where she regularly teaches courses in ethics, metaphysics, and logic. She earned her PhD in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2017. Rachel was the 2019 Tom Regan Animal Rights Fellow and serves as a board member and Secretary of the Culture and Animals Foundation. She is the author of Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations and the co-author of Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Coronavirus. Her research interests include the nature of personhood and the self, animal minds and animal ethics, environmental ethics, and ethics and technology. Rachel also dedicates much of her time to public philosophy projects. She has written over 120 articles in public philosophy, including articles for the BBC, The Philosopher’s Magazine, The Prindle Post, and 1,000 Word Philosophy. She enjoys traveling and spending time in nature.
