Though we don’t know the exact year it was founded, Fresno State Philosophy Club has operated for over thirty years. Back in the 1990s, the club met at a local English-style pub. In more recent years, the Philosophy Club has met regularly within the Philosophy Department’s conference room, which was renamed ‘The Phil Zone.’ The Phil Zone is open to all philosophy students to study, meet, or just rest between classes. It often becomes a welcoming locale for club members to engage in philosophical discussions after classes, after club meetings, or whenever a philosophical topic springs to mind. Students, including numerous members of the Philosophy Club, contributed to The Phil Zone’s décor, which includes posters that support greater diversity in philosophy as well as a collection of jigsaw puzzles that are gradually pieced together by philosophy students, faculty, and staff—metaphorically representing Fresno State’s various lovers of wisdom collectively piecing together puzzles of the mind, slowly but surely over time.
Fresno State’s Philosophy Club could not avoid unwanted alterations from the recent global pandemic, which has led to significant challenges for the club, as it has to life more generally. Attendance for meetings has dropped, but more worrisome, the welcoming social atmosphere that grew out of Philosophy Club was harder to maintain when classes moved online, as we were left without student interactions within the Phil Zone and, as such, the Club faced the various, unavoidable limitations that constitute Zoom club meetings. In this academic year, (2022-2023) club engagement is slowly improving, and students are likewise starting to return to the Phil Zone. Currently, the club has a mixed approach to meeting, with some meetings occurring in person (especially when the club has a special event), while others continue to be on Zoom. Even though Zoom fatigue may be keeping attendance numbers lower than the club officers would prefer, the small groups at club meetings are enjoying more in-depth discussions. The motivated engagement of the students who do come to meetings suggests that the club will eventually return to pre-pandemic levels of attendance.
The Philosophy Club’s Constitution generally structures the various official activities of the club, including the main officer positions and the methods for fair elections. Since there can be some value in club officer positions, we have attempted to add ad hoc officer positions whenever possible, to either allow for equity among students seeking office and/or to reward work that is required outside of the main officer positions of President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary. So, in the past, we have encouraged students to create and define additional Vice President positions. Hence, we have had students serve as Vice President of Publicity and Social Media, Vice President of Research and Events, and Vice President of Outreach. One of the challenges that occurs every few years involves multiple club officers graduating at the same time. Even when we can foresee this problem in advance, it can be difficult to urge students to take up officer positions in a club where they had not been previously active. In such a case, the faculty advisor must become more proactive in emailing all the majors and minors, seeking out nominations for club positions, and encouraging and reassuring students that they are indeed capable of running the Philosophy Club.
The faculty advisor of the Philosophy Club at Fresno State is there to advise, witness, and to protect the club’s autonomy. In other words, the advisor position must maintain a healthy distance—while some steps may be necessary to enable and ensure the club’s autonomy, it is essential to neither overstep nor allow others to overstep the students in their actual leadership over their club. As the advisor, you may perceive a potential mistake in the direction the club is taking, but respecting autonomy requires responding to such a mistake with gentle, rational persuasion such that club members either come to understand the mistake for themselves prior to making it, or are allowed to simply make the mistake and then learn from it later. Protecting the students’ autonomy can be the most challenging when potential hindrances come from other faculty members. Sometimes faculty can unknowingly and unintentionally present obstacles to club autonomy because the club is in fact a useful conduit for the meeting of shared interests. That is, Philosophy Club can provide various mutual benefits for the Philosophy Department, the University, and the students themselves. But this overlap of interests is of secondary importance to the students running the club their way, even if their way may, at times, align neither with the Department’s interests, nor even with the student’s own interests. Yet, the faculty advisor is not in an authoritarian role, but instead must realize their position is to facilitate the students in running their organization as they best see fit. So while it is important to encourage the students to see the potential for the Philosophy Club to provide mutual benefit to everyone, the faculty advisor must attempt to persuade the students to endorse these interests without overstepping their autonomy as it is ultimately up to the students themselves whether they wish to go along with faculty plans.
Although our Philosophy Club has shifted between weekly meetings or bi-monthly meetings, we have found that the club has more success with weekly meetings. Bi-monthly meetings tend to show diminished levels of active membership, while having lowered expectations for weekly meetings (not every meeting needs to be a significant event) tends to improve the levels of student involvement.
Our Philosophy Club has had very positive experiences with special events, ranging from movie night to grad school panels. Movie night is a great way, especially early in the semester, to get new students to join the club, as well as to initiate engaging philosophical discussions after the movie. Philosophy Club has also been very successful in securing funding for members to attend various philosophy conferences, especially the Pacific APA conference, which our Club has visited on numerous occasions. The Fresno State Philosophy Club also works annually (or almost annually, as it is always up to the club leadership) with the Philosophy Department to host grad school panels. At these panels, faculty discuss how to decide whether graduate school is right for you, and how to prepare applications for relevant grad schools, including Philosophy Graduate School, Religious Studies Graduate School, Law School, and various others. Through the Philosophy Club’s management of these panels, they retain a clear focus on student interests: the club recruits the faculty they wish to hear from, and they bring their questions and interests to the forefront so that the event is as useful for them as it possibly can be.
During the covid pandemic, there were various reasons that students, faculty, and staff felt a loss in social engagement. Through examining this feeling of loss, there can be a realization that Philosophy Club and other social entities like it are in fact contributing something valuable to the school community. Philosophy Club brings students together in a fashion that isn’t always achieved in the classroom. Part of this fact is possibly because they get to know each other while engaging in philosophical discussions without the need to think about how one’s thoughts impact one’s grade. Club interactions regularly evidence more freedom of discussion about a wider variety of ideas than can be available within focused classrooms. The students may also learn skills of reasonably and fairly critiquing each other in the low-affective club environment. Ultimately, Philosophy Club is a social environment where students explore and practice with philosophical concepts of their choosing based on their current interests, which enhances the very abilities we are likewise providing to them—hence, supplementing in a complimentary fashion our own philosophy teaching.
You can follow the Fresno State Philosophy Club on Facebook and on Twitter.
James Rocha
James Rocha is the faculty advisor for Philosophy Club. James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fresno State, and has won LSU’s Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award, Pierce College’s Alpha Gamma Sigma Honor Society Apple Award, and the UCLA Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award. James is co-author of Joss Whedon, Anarchist? (McFarland 2019), the author of The Ethics of Hooking Up (Routledge 2020), and has written numerous papers on ethics, philosophy of race, philosophy of law, and teaching philosophy.
