Philosophy

What makes a philosophy program at a University better or worse than another program? I live in the Dallas area, where there are two philosophy programs in my area. One is at The University of North Texas, the other at Southern Methodist University. One's a public, state-funded school with a broad program in philosophy and religious studies, the other is a private school with about 15 different courses in their undergrad program. What would make one better than the other?

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I think the practice of "rating" different departments is tricky at best, and at worst sheer fraud. So my answer will be very indirect.

Obviously, students want professors who are engaging and interesting to teach them. But from a distance, I think it can be very difficult to assess whether either of the places you are looking at would be preferable on this score. The only access the general public has to student responses to teaching is something like ratemyprofessors.com, which I would use only with the most extreme caution. For one thing, it provide samples from only the tiniest fraction of students who have taken the professor--and only those who liked or disliked the professor so much that they wanted to put ion the effort of a review. Moreover, their editorial standards are quite lax--in my own case, there appears a crank response from a supposed student who says he/she took a course from me that does not exist in our curriculum, and the likes of which I was not teaching the term reported. I assume someone meant it as a joke, but you see what I mean. I did protest its appearance, but never got a response from those who run this site.

So I expect you would find this a dead end, but you might see if you could go and ask some current students howw they felt about classes they had taken and such.

I think, however there is another measure that you can pursue, and this will give you very good information--though, again, it will not tell you all you would like to know. Go to the department's web site, and look up the different professors. Here are some questions to ask when you look at them (and their CVs, if you can access these--most good departments these day encourage their faculty to provide these on-line, because they tell you all about the professional lives of faculty):

Are the areas taught ones you would find interesting? (And ask yourself--if you don't think you would be interested, why wouldn't you be? Beware of thinking you already know what you don't know!)

Is this professor active in his or her field in a way other than teaching, and to what degree? Good teachers are often good precisely because they are enthusiastic and engaged in what they teach. The best indication of continuing engagement in one's field is if one is publishing research in his or her field actively and regularly. People have a kind of stereotyping prejudice that "researchers" hate to teach and are bad at it. I think the truth of the matter actually works in reverse--researchers actually love to teach, because it is a great way for them to share what they love. That doesn't meean they love teaching every class they may be assigned, or every student that might wash up on their shores. But the ones who have ceased to love their field enough to want to contribute to it professionally are much more likely to be bad teachers, because they don't any more like what they are doing, but need the paycheck. So check out your professor's research record--if they aren't doing much in that venue, you can expect even less in the classroom, as a generality. And even if they might still give fun lectures, they are obviously not widely known or respected by others in their field, so if you want to go on to do post-graduate work (especially in philosophy), their letters won't count for much.

The other thing I would ask about is how big the class sizes are, in general. Larger classes for philosophy are almost always worse than smaller classes, because so much of philosophy gets done in discussion and active engagement. It is almost impossible to be actively engaged when you are one among too many others in a large lecture hall.

Hope this helps!

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