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New Philosophy Major Approved for Texas A&M-Corpus Christi–So How Does One Recruit Majors?

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Don Berkich (Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) writes:

In the midst of all the bad news for philosophy from Middlesex and Southern Mississippi, it may be heartening to announce that the Texas A&M System board approved the Philosophy Major at A&M-Corpus Christi Friday.  I believe this makes us the only A&M system school outside College Station to offer the BA.  Alas, we likely will not see approval to hire additional faculty any time soon, but it is a strong step forward. My colleague Andy Piker deserves most of the credit for a monumental, three-year slog bringing this about. Please see here for more information. Any advice you or the good folks on Leiter Reports may have for recruiting majors would be greatly appreciated.

Since almost all my teaching has been at the postgraduate level (either JD or PhD students), I'm afraid I don't have any useful advice to offer on this topic.  But I imagine many readers do, and that this will be of wide interest, especially at a time when administrators often appeal to enrollments and numbers of majors in deciding on cuts to programs.

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15 responses to “New Philosophy Major Approved for Texas A&M-Corpus Christi–So How Does One Recruit Majors?”

  1. Lisa Shapiro

    Here's a really simple trick. In my department the Chair sends congratulatory letters (paper not email) out to students who earn and A range grade in our (large) intro level classes. The letter explains that the A is a real achievement, encourages them to think about majoring or minoring, and directs the student as to which courses to take next if they are interested. This has only been happening for 2-3 years and I can't confirm results since university stats lag behind, but it can't have hurt. Students have come to the department and commented on the letter.

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  2. Anon Grad Student

    As a current philosophy PhD student who went into undergrad a committed engineer, I wanted to comment on "conversion to philosophy" from the student's perspective (with the usual caveat that 'anecdote' is not the singular form of 'data').

    What worked for me was that my first philosophy class got me -doing- philosophy as soon as possible. While it's tempting to use an intro class to give students a grounding in the "lay of the land" with a brief dip into many historical figures, that seems to me a strategy that only serves students already interested in philosophy, or those whose interest will never get past cocktail party chit chat. If you're trying to bring people into the fold (so to speak) you have to introduce them immediately to the primary reward for pursuing a difficult and often misunderstood course of study: the pleasure of thinking carefully about a difficult problem.

    If my intro class had been less about forming my own arguments carefully (we mostly started with paradoxes and well worn examples to prime intuitions, then went from there) and more about the difficult work of understanding serious philosophers' arguments, philosophy wouldn't have gotten the hold on me that it now has. Just because the most important skill your majors are going to acquire is learning how to read (or at the very least it's equally important) doesn't require that you start teaching them that skill right away. If you want them to keep going back down for the boulder every time they lose their grip on it (and a philosophy education feels Sisyphean at the best of times), you have to give them a taste of what's at the top of the mountain.

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  3. Eric

    One tried and true method is to highlight the statistics about how Philosophy majors do on standardized tests, including GRE, MCAT, and LSAT. I don't know if it is still true, but at one point, philosophy had one of the top positions for average LSAT scores. If students have their eye on grad school, law school, or med school, this might be all the selling you need.

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  4. John Schwenkler

    My department does something similar to Lisa Shapiro's: the chair sends out an e-mail each semester asking faculty to identify students who've been doing particularly well in our required core classes, and then writes those students a note encouraging them to consider a major or minor.

    In a university that doesn't have philosophy requirements, a way to get students through the door in the first place is to offer introductory classes like "Philosophy and Film" – several departments at my university do this, and it's regarded as a quite effective way to recruit potential majors.

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  5. Steve Petersen

    I wonder if anyone has experimented with recruiting in high schools – perhaps volunteering to give a lecture to some AP class on a classic paradox or something, to see if it gets any gears turning in the heads of potential philosophers. Philosophy faces the severe disadvantage that very few people come into college knowing what it is – especially bad for schools that ask for a major on matriculation – so that's where I've been thinking about trying to apply some leverage. I would think a fair number of high school teachers would happily yield their class for a day.

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  6. Tim

    Our state system was thinking about shutting down our university's philosophy program around this time last year. At that point we had 11 majors. Since then, we have done a recruiting blitz and increased the number to 25, and we are still trying to improve. We did a whole range of things, some of which are mentioned above, or based on advice we gathered from more successful programs.

    (1) Send letters to "A" intro students once the semester is over. As Lisa Shapiro mentions, this seems to make a huge impact on the students, and whether they change to a major or minor or not, it definitely has a positive effect all around.

    (2) Do a blitz around registration time. We talk to students in each of our courses, giving them lists of stats about scores on the GRE, etc., and telling them about what specific courses we are offering the next semester.

    (3) Talk to groups of undeclared majors. There are hundreds of undeclared majors enrolled in special Freshman courses at our university. I'm not sure what they do in those courses, but around registration time every semester we go and give talks to them as well. It's mostly drudgery, but some of them respond to it.

    (4) Recruit the Honors students. At our school, there are few kids who do the sort of independent reading that would make them interested in the texts we teach in our philosophy courses. The one exception seems to be the Honors kids, and we've had some success in persuading them to join our major (they are also more amenable to double-majoring than most others).

    (5) Carry the registration cards with you. Believe it or not, some students plan on switching majors, but they don't get around to it for a while because they're not sure exactly who to talk to, or what color card they need to get signed.

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  7. Landon Schurtz

    At my undergrad institution, there was only a philosophy minor, but after the administration made some noises about approving a major if our enrollments went up, a few of us very dedicated phil students and the two (!!) full timers who taught the subject started a full court press for our classes, with some success. We used a variety of techniques, some of which have been touched on.

    (For comparison purposes, my undergrad institution was a small liberal arts school that used to be a land-grant college, packed with a lot of first generation students and adult, evening-commuter students.)

    Like it or not, the "philosophy is the 'real' Pre-Law" major brought in a fair number of people – at many institutions, the "Pre-Law" track, such as it is, is in Political Science, which doesn't even crack the Top 10 for highest scoring LSAT majors, whereas philosophy sits at #2 (under Math/Physics). Since phil people also do very well on other standardized tests, generally speaking, and those numbers are important to undergrads, making hay of these statistics, as poster Eric suggests above, does generate some results – at least, it did in our circumstance.

    Also, we distributed feedback forms, and a lot of the kids expressed sentiments similar to those of Anon Grad Student, above – they wanted to dive into compelling issues as soon as possible, rather than doing dry historical surveys. They liked talking about the morality of euthanasia, or whether personal identity survives a brain split, and so on. Ethics and philosophy of religion (my undergrad is in the South) were very popular, especially medical ethics courses, but anything that dealt with "weird" metaphysical problems was also at least mildly successful. Philosophy of Law was very successful, dovetailing with all those kids who came in thinking about their LSATs.

    Finally, we used fliers. Not just the old fashioned way, either. Statistics show that fliering gets about a 2%-3% uptake, so if you're trying to boost your enrollment by, say, 20 to 30 kids, you need to hand out a thousand fliers. If you're thinking that there aren't enough corkboards on any reasonably sized campus to post that many course announcements, you're almost certainly right – that's not how to get results. We were lucky enough to have a professor who'd had a whole other life in marketing before coming to the academy, and he helped us develop a "strategy" for flier distribution that involved not only the usual corkboard displays, but also handing people fliers in the quad (yes, most of them throw them away… 97%-98% in fact), leaving piles on fliers on surfaces in conspicuous places (such as in high traffic areas of the student center), and posting fliers in areas where students often post non-academic announcements (like concert fliers and calls for participants in a study and so on). It took some doing, and a LOT of photocopying (vary the color of the paper of your fliers every 100 or so, so the students don't immediately recognize what your flier is for, and wind up re-reading it repeatedly), but it brought it, according to our feedback forms, almost exactly the number predicted.

    Cheap? Sort of – but it works. And some of those students turned out to be pretty good. They weren't "mind controlled" into being there against their wills or anything, they just needed their latent interests to be "activated" by some clever marketing techniques.

    There. Now they can't say we never got anything from the guys in the business school.

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  8. Josh Dever

    Here's an idea I've toyed around with for some time, but which I've come to realize I'm too lazy ever to get going. It's directed more at general encouragement of high-quality undergraduate philosophy majors than at raising numbers at any specific institution, though.

    In math, there are a number of excellent competitive math events at the middle school (e.g., Mathcounts and AMC8) and high school (e.g., ARML, AMC10 & 12, USA(J)MO, IMO). These competitions even at the lowest levels are nicely designed to require genuine mathematical thought and talent, rather than simple algorithm-crunching ability, and at the top levels feature some tremendously difficult and beautiful problems. It seems to me that math, as an academic discipline, gets three benefits from these competitions:

    (1) The competitions serve as a filter for the identification of talent. (I believe, for example, that MIT asks about AMC12 scores on their application form.)

    (2) The competitions also get mathematically talented kids self-identifying as mathematicians from an early age. The kids get the positive feedback from doing well in the competitions (plus some extrinsic rewards in some of them), and start thinking of themselves as mathematically talented — thus increasing the odds that they'll pursue math later in their academic life.

    (3) The competitions also serve as a training program for the mathematically talented. You could make a pretty good math curriculum (better, in many ways, than the standard high school one) just out of practicing on AMC12 exams. The kids who seriously pursue these competitions begin their undergraduate studies with a host of skills they wouldn't otherwise have had.

    It's a great system, and it seems to me that philosophy might be wise to have something similar. Obviously, there are differences between the disciplines that make writing competitive exams easier in math than in philosophy, but I think I can at least hazily envision (and hence give reason to believe in the possibility of) a multiple-choice exam for high school students with little or no previous exposure to philosophy, that both selected for those with the ability to grasp subtle and careful distinctions and arguments and helped introduce some important ideas to the audience.

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  9. Andrew D. Cling

    There is no substitute for enthusiastic, effective teaching in introductory sections. Next–several comments have noted this, but it is probably the best recruiting strategy–encourage talented students to take more philosophy courses and make sure you tell them they are good at philosophy (this is important, because very good students will recognize how difficult philosophy is and may not know they are good at it). Rather than using a letter from the chair, I'd recommend that the instructor for whom they are doing good work speak to talented students directly. Finally, take some time in each class during the registration period to discuss the content of upcoming courses.

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  10. Amy Lara

    We've had some success going to high schools and community colleges in our region and talking to guidance counselors. Most of them had *no* idea that philosophy was a good pre-law major; in fact, most of them didn't know what philosophy was at all. After we talked to them they directed some of their students our way. We've also recruited well from honors classes and through the student-led philosophy club (the strength of which varies depending on the current crop of students). Our pre-law track has also been pretty successful, but we lose a lot of students to poli sci because it's easier to get an A in those classes (at this institution).

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  11. Maureen Eckert

    Letters of congratulation and invitation have worked well at my department. One thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is that philosophy majors and minors themselves are a strong draw for other students interested in philosophy. In practical terms, this means having a strong philosophy club and intellectual culture at large in a department is crucial. The main thing I'd say builds a very strong student organization is consistency. Whatever the student attendance, the meeting must proceed. There are cycles in attendance, and weathering them through the lean times tends to lead to stronger attendance in the long run. Pizza or snacks sweetens the deal. It's a heavy service commitment, but worthwhile for building the value a philosophy department can have to students.

    At my university we meet once a week throughout the semester. Students themselves plan the meetings, learning how to work with each other to hold events, discussions and host guest speakers. Their involvement makes a difference. I am a very "hands-on" faculty advisor, and always attend meetings, and other faculty, even those from other departments, know there is a regular forum to discuss philosophical issues and socially interact with students and staff. A philosophy department benefits, I believe, from being the department where something interesting is always happening.

    Another thing I would suggest towards this point about students being our best advocates is utilizing Experiential Learning programs to offer your philosophy majors credit for tutoring. Earning credit is important, as Service Learning appears on official transcripts and students are supervised and experience review processes. When philosophy majors have the opportunity to become tutors, they gain many benefits for their own learning (and gain insight into teaching). One of the profound benefits is also that students help each other–they are "in it" together. When students in entry level courses have the chance to interact with highly motivated majors and see their work improve, the social connection is powerful and positive. A philosophy department, I find, benefits from being a department rich with supportive academic resources. The social dimension of these resources seems very important to me.

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  12. Anonymous Undergrad

    If I may just add something to Anonymous Grad Student's comments:

    I switched from Econ and PoliSci to Philosophy in part because of the historical tradition. However, I certainly agree that dry historical studies are boring. The difference for me was that the history of philosophy was presented as a history of ways at looking at the world, with views still relevant to us (e.g. Hegel-> McDowell). Also, I appreciated how philosophy was willing to be self-critical: in econ, you usually learn only how to do things (with lip service paid to how your methods make tremendous assumptions), whereas in philosophy justification from premises is what counts. The latter's a lot more satisfying. But nevertheless I agree largely with what you say: thinking about problems, and then trying to solve them, is why I keep coming back to my courses.

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  13. Mark

    If you're looking for high school students who might have an inclination for philosophy, look at debaters.

    There's a format, not yet at the national level, and so only practiced in some states, called Lincoln-Douglas debate, which is a value debate, and which is very philosophical. That was my event in high school. We were known to amateurishly thrown around bits of moral and political philosophy.

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  14. Don Berkich

    I want to thank you for your thoughtful contributions. This has been very, very helpful and given us much to think about as we plan. I'll report back how we're doing in a year. Again, thanks.

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  15. Anonymous graduate student

    I speak from my personal experience (with the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence) in saying that the romanticism of an examined life was a big draw for me. It may be prudent to mention this at the end of a list of more practical (that is, career oriented) considerations, so that it doesn't appear to be a trade off. (In a direct competition between romanticism and practicality, I'm aware that practicality wins in a recession.)

    I'm enthusiastic about studying philosophy because it has made me a critical thinker, and this has made my life richer. It has given me the means to justify my opinions, or reject ideas if they are unjustifiable. It has made me a skeptical consumer of media. It has affected how I think about every aspect of my life. This is a unique advantage of philosophy over other majors: its wide scope. It is worth mentioning.

    This may seem embarrassingly earnest for an adult in the profession, but for a confused, newly independent first year student trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be, a passionate speech can have considerable purchase.

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