USC's Philosophy Department
When I first became DUS, I noticed that our listed requirements for graduating with departmental honors were unclear and inconsistent across sources. We also didn't initiate communication with undergraduates about this opportunity. Unsurprisingly, almost no undergraduates were pursuing graduating with honors. So, I coordinated between our department's Academic Advisor, our Program Administrator, and our Undergraduate Committee, and developed new honors requirements. Once it was on the books, I began communicating about the Honors Program to all of our majors every semester. We also initiated a policy of letting students know when they were on track to being eligible for graduating with Honors as part of their standard advising. Finally, any student who happened to fulfill the requirements (perhaps by taking the Honors Capstone out of interest rather than due to pursuing any particular graduation accolades) would automatically graduate with honors without had to opt into it.
This project is still in progress! Michael Hall (in Mathematics) and I have co-developed a Math and Philosophy Minor. We noticed that the USC Philosophy ...
I added a Logic requirement to our Philosophy major
I removed redundancy in our logic courses by removing some courses and redesigning others
I increased efficiency for logic teaching by moving toward offering large lecture courses for our Intro Logic class
We faced two problems: First, students who wanted to move between our majors (switching from one of our majors to another, after completing some requirements) faced difficulty because so few of the requirements matched, even though many of the categories were intended to be similar. The second problem was that students were struggling to complete their majors on time because many of our courses were over-enrolled or infrequently taught, leaving students with few options for satisfying distribution requirements even when they’d planned carefully to do so. Often students would remedy this by doing independent studies, which placed an extra burden on our faculty. Or they would simply leave our majors.
My solution was to standardize many of our requirements across majors: almost all of our majors and minors now require a Logic course. And any time one of our majors or minors requires a course from a distribution category (e.g., from History), the courses that are options for meeting that requirement are the same across our majors and minors. (With three majors and two minors and over 350 students, this makes advising much easier as well.)
The second part of my solution was to expand the options for fulfilling distribution categories as much as possible, while remaining true to the spirit of the major and minor including that category requirement. In making these expansions, I first consulted with specialist faculty in those areas, then gained the approval of the department's Chair, Vice-Chair, and Undergraduate Committee, as well as another department if the course expansions included classes offered by other departments. In some cases, I doubled or tripled the number of courses students could choose from for their categories. For instance, in 2022 we faced many complaints about untenability of our PPL requirements. So I gained faculty approval for dramatic expansions of the Constitutional Politics, Comparative/International Politics, and Politics, Law, and Public Policy distribution requirements. For the 2023/2024 course catalog:
- We added 5 courses to Constitutional Politics, taking the options from 4 to 9
- We added 8 courses to International Politics and Law, taking the options from 4 to 12
- We added 6 courses to Politics, Law, and Public Policy, taking the options from 6 to 12
And we made similar changes to a wide range of distribution requirements across our majors, while also preserving the vision and rigor of the programs of study.
When I became DUS, I initiated a practice of communicating directly with all of our (350+) majors and minors through an email every semester. Near the start of each term, I send a message detailing the events in the department for that semester/year, as well as discussing any relevant advising information. For instance, in our most recent email, I covered:
- Colloquia
- The Undergraduate Majors and Minors Fair
- A Cookies and Questions Philosophy Event
- Undergraduate Mentoring from Graduate Students
- The Undergraduate Philosophy Club
- Weekly PhilosoTEA
- The Center for Law and Philosophy Events
- Events from the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project
- The Mind and Language Talk Series
- The California Metaphysics Conference
- Graduating With Honors
- Contact Info
I feel that (a) it's helpful to have all of this event information gathered together in one place. And while they can always browse our departmental calendar, having it all in a list (with links to speaker websites) is a helpful format. And (b) it's good for students to hear directly from the DUS, rather than just through University advisors and administrators. I want to take the first step in reaching out to students, rather than just waiting and seeing if they contact me with questions.
To supplement my emails, I've also begun producing a semesterly Philosophy Booklet with helpful information for our majors and minors (and also anyone interested in Philosophy events). In particular, this document includes descriptions of all of our undergraduate courses being offered in the upcoming semester. Though there are (very short!) generic course descriptions in the University course catalog, courses are often taught differently by different profs and across different semesters. It's helpful for students to have a more detailed idea about what each course will cover in the semester when they're considering taking it.
Here's the newsletter I made in spring 2024, and the more elaborate one I made in fall 2024.
As part of our outreach, every summer our department sends out a welcome letter to incoming freshmen to introduce ourselves and share some of the opportunities we have available. To add a resource to this, I created a "Getting To Know Our Faculty" website. Though faculty have their standard pages and bios on the University website, the page I created is an introduction (to any faculty who wanted to opt in) that's directed specifically to our undergraduates. It's more informal, a little more personal (including questions such as, "How did you get into Philosophy?" and "What pop-culture do you like?") and also includes some advice for undergrads.
One of the semesters I was interim DUS, I organized weekly Philosophy Dinners with undergrads and faculty. I chose a food court, Mercado La Paloma, that is within walking distance of the Philosophy Department and is quite inexpensive but has a great selection. Every week there were multiple faculty there with me, hanging out with the undergrads. This was somewhat short-lived, however, because it required a steep investment from faculty for the amount of benefit the undergrads were getting from it.
I think there are many reasons for keeping thorough records here. One is that the DUS tasks often involve a team of people working together, and it is very helpful if the members of that team can be kept in the loop. When someone isn't in the loop, it's hard for them to know which questions to ask or what information they're missing. So I keep track of everything I can think of that's relevant, and I put it into a shared Dropbox folder that I then send to our department's Academic Advisor and our Program Administrator. Some examples of what's included in the folder:
Records of decisions made by the Undergraduate Committee at our meetings, often also including justifications given for those decisions
Records of each year's program changes submitted to USC for updates to the Course Catalog
My annual DUS To-Do List, which covers most of the recurring tasks I perform in this role, the time of year I carry out the tasks, and relevant information for each task
The materials we've sent out to undergraduates, including our welcome letters
Each year's departmental committee assignments, so members of this team will know which faculty to contact for different kinds of issues they encounter
Resources such as infographics and presentations I've prepared for our undergraduates
A second hope I have for this folder and in general for my record keeping is that it'll help preserve institutional knowledge. When I stepped into the role of DUS I had almost no guidance, and almost no context for what had been done before. When someone else takes over this role, I don't expect them to do things the same way I have! (On the contrary, fresh perspectives can help as people bring their own ideas for improvements!) But I also think that it is helpful for people to know what happened earlier, so they can make informed choices about what to do next.
You can find a list of our majors, minors, and other programs here.
Our majors are:
Our minors are:
We offer this progressive degree:
And the Linguistics department offers:
Note that for the requirements for the various majors and minors, you should contact your academic advisor. (The links above take you to the 2021/2022 course catalog. The requirements in the catalog change over the years.)
Follow the steps described for the question above. But also know that to meet our logic requirement you must know both propositional and predicate logic; the logic course you took elsewhere needs to have covered the syntax and semantics of quantifiers and you should be comfortable doing proofs in predicate logic. (It’s likely you’ll also have been introduced to modal operators and Free Logic.) To have an externally-taken course satisfy the logic requirement, the materials you send me (such as the syllabi, but also sample assignments or exams if possible) must show that you’ve done this more advanced logic work.
Absolutely! We typically have an undergraduate/prof meet-and-greet every semester, or at least every year. Majors and minors will get an email letting them know when that will take place. (Though the events are open to anyone who wants to come.)
We also have a variety of events described on our departmental Events page. Among them are the department’s regular colloquia, where profs from other universities come to give presentations and then answer questions. Undergrads are very welcome to attend those, and you can find our colloquium schedule here. No advance registration required.