In spring 2023, we hosted the first-annual Oklahoma Philosophy Day at the University of Central Oklahoma. The event was more than just a conference, including sessions devoted to community building, networking, and teaching along with research presentations. We wanted to share our experiences as organizers, in the hopes that they might be useful to others interested in hosting a similar event.
Before COVID, our department hosted an undergraduate philosophy conference, with the standard format of presented papers from undergraduates, comments from UCO students, and an invited keynote speaker. We were ready to host our 24th annual conference when COVID struck, cancelling the event in 2020. It remained dormant for the next two years, as surges in COVID variations made advanced planning difficult. As we discussed bringing the event back, we realized we had an opportunity to reconceptualize the conference and to turn it into something more inclusive and more broadly appealing to philosophers in the state.
Our early insight was that philosophers do a lot more than just present research. We wanted to try planning an event that would include other aspects of what we do (such as teaching and community outreach). We also wanted to make space for philosophers at all levels, from pre-college students at local schools, to undergraduates at both two-year community colleges and four-year universities (whether a major, a minor, or just an interested student), to community members such as alumni or interested laypersons. The same applies to philosophy instructors: Oklahoma has one PhD program and one terminal M.A. in philosophy, alongside UCO and other four-year institutions (public and private), plus quite a few two-year schools. At many of these institutions, there may be only one philosopher on the faculty, or several adjuncts without a philosophy department. We wanted to host an event that would be interesting and useful to all of us.
With this in mind, we decided to rebrand our “Annual Southwestern Conference for Undergraduate Philosophers” to the first “Oklahoma Philosophy Day”. The results, which we’ll discuss below, were successful far beyond our expectations, enough to safely say that Oklahoma Philosophy Day will also be an annual event. In what follows we outline our planning process in order to assist other programs that might be interested in hosting a similar event.
Oklahoma Philosophy Day was a one-day event, hosted by the Department of Humanities and Philosophy and the College of Liberal Arts on the University of Central Oklahoma campus on Saturday, February 25, 2023. We met from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm. We alternated between plenary presentation sessions and parallel panel discussions.
Our full schedule was:
9:00 – Open breakfast and registration
9:30 – Welcome and Opening Remarks
10:00 – Undergraduate Student Presentations
11:30 – Discussion Sessions: (1) Going to grad schools; (2) Philosophy outside the academy
12:15 – Lunch
1:15 – Graduate Student Presentations
3:00 – Discussion Sessions: (1) Philosophy Student Clubs; (2) Teaching Roundtable
4:00 – Plenary Address (Heather Stewart, Oklahoma State University)
5:30 – Closing remarks
In addition, we had a game room open all day, operated by a UCO faculty member and gaming aficionado.
We were able to host all of our sessions in one hallway of the same building, and breakfast and lunch were both provided on site. We had sixty-one total participants throughout the day (plus about ten faculty and staff volunteers). Participants included high school and college students, parents of presenting students, alumni, and instructors from nine educational institutions across the state.
The first constraint on any event is funding and logistics, so we began by securing institutional support from our department and college. In addition to hosting the event and providing technical support, our College and Department both pledged financial backing and the assistance of staff to help with planning and hosting the event. The Philosophy Club at UCO (our student organization) also contributed to our budget and planning process.
One of our early priorities was to provide free breakfast and lunch to all participants, knowing that complimentary meals would be valuable to students and faculty alike. We knew that this would require a larger budget than we would likely be able to secure internally. Some research pointed us to the Berry Fund for Public Philosophy, which we applied for in October 2022. We were able to devote this funding to our keynote honorarium, allowing us to reserve our own institutional resources for the rest of the budget.
When we learned we had received a grant from the Berry Fund in early December, we sprang into action to begin planning Oklahoma Philosophy Day in earnest. In order to accomplish our goal of bringing together philosophers across the state, we had to manually collect email addresses for every philosophy instructor and graduate student in the state we could find. Once compiled, we sent out a Save the Date in early December, hoping to catch people’s attention before finals had ended. We followed up in early January with more event information and a registration form, which included solicitations for student presentations and discussion session ideas.
We spent the next month building our program schedule and working on back-end logistical matters. To build the program schedule, we sought to balance more formal and informal sessions with plenty of opportunity for discussion. We had two student presentation sessions and an invited public plenary session with a philosopher from an Oklahoma institution. For more informal, interactive sessions, we created parallel discussion rooms that aimed to appeal to a wide audience. We also had a game room open all day for informal interaction and philosophical discussion. We also reached out to student organizations and undergraduate/graduate advisors to help us promote the event to students. We also worked with the public plenary presenter, Dr. Heather Stewart from Oklahoma State University, to finalize the keynote details—a wonderful and timely presentation titled “Finding Philosophy’s Value in a World of Generative AI.”
Along the way, we had significant help from UCO students and staff.
- Event logo and promotional materials were designed by our College’s Graphic Design Coordinator.
- Advertising to local high schools was done through the Office of Enrollment and Student Success.
- Technology, including running the plenary session, was coordinated by our College’s Tech Support Specialist.
- Planning, swag preparation, and advertising was assisted by our Philosophy Club officers.
- Reserving rooms, handing finances, ordering food and swag from multiple vendors, was masterfully accomplished by our College Administrative Specialist and department Administrative Assistant.
- The registration table was staffed by faculty volunteers.
We are incredibly grateful for all of the help we had in putting on the event: philosophy and event planning are very different skill sets!
We were happy with the mix of session types we had and the pacing of the day. The various sessions were welcoming for students of all levels and familiarity with philosophy to see student presentations and engage in small groups in the discussion sessions, in the game room, and breaks.
We provided a survey via QR code at the event and followed up after with an email. Responses were overwhelmingly positive. Here are a few:
- It was coordinated for all levels.
- The presentations were over interesting, and diverse, topics.
- Loved the interactiveness—conversational sessions and the atmosphere made participating in conversations seem welcomed.
- I liked the presentations and the games. I liked how in between the presentations, there was an interval of time to just chat about philosophy or play philosophy games. The day ending with a keynote speaker was just the cherry on top.
- Collaborative, open, friendly environment.
The survey comments, along with the interpersonal interactions throughout the day, suggest that we met a need in Oklahoma philosophy—the need for community. We have already begun planning to host the event again next year and to continue fostering a community for philosophy in Oklahoma.
In reflecting on our experiences, there are a few specific lessons learned that are worth sharing:
- With a small window to organize the event, we relied mostly on email for communication, without a conference website for PhilEvents page. This made it difficult for attendees to track down information and to communicate to the community more broadly.
- We were incredibly lucky to have support from college staff, and they helped us think of all sorts of things we would not have remembered on our own (e.g., ordering extra trashcans from facilities for food disposal). We both went into the planning stages with a “do it yourself” mindset, which we quickly realized was unnecessary and counterproductive.
- Structured Free Time. One thing we did not expect was how popular the game room would be. This was a unique feature of a philosophy event, and one which allowed participants to take a mental break during the day. In a similar vein, one bit of common feedback we got after the event was that attendees wanted some kind of organized discussion during the lunch session, rather than being left to their own devices. We learned that participants appreciate being given an environment to relax without ceasing to participate in the event entirely.
- It’s natural in planning a new event to focus on the myriad ways that things can go wrong. We had to continually remind ourselves to consider how things might go well. One example was watching RSVPs come in and realizing that not only were people interested, but that we were going to have more attendees than we originally expected.
Finally, to reiterate what we said above, we owe a lot of the success of the event to the enthusiastic support of our college and department faculty and staff. When we first started batting around the idea of an Oklahoma Philosophy Day, the scale of the event was daunting. But the faculty and staff we approached gladly offered the resources and support and made it happen. We are looking forward to hosting another successful event in 2024.
Vanessa Bentley
Vanessa Bentley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma, where she teaches courses in philosophy of science, feminist philosophy, and applied ethics. Her research interests are in neuroethics, bioethics, and feminist practices in science, particularly in cognitive neuroscience and the neuroimaging of gender/sex.
Jerry Green
Jerry Green is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. His research is split between ancient philosophy, normative epistemology, and SoTL. He teaches classes on ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, ethical theory, and philosophy of religion, as well as biblical Greek and New Testament humanities.
