As a philosophy minor, one of my largest post-graduate regrets was that I was not able to take a class with Dr. Jacques Catudal, the head of the philosophy department. Like many others, I changed to English from another major. Many of my peers have remarked that if there was a philosophy major at Drexel, they would have surely transferred to that, which begs the question, "Why isn't there one?" When I got the opportunity to interview Dr. Catudal, I figured I could kill two birds with one stone.
ASK: So, who was the first philosopher to influence you?
JC: This is going to sound corny, but I think the first philosopher to really influence me was Plato. For a lot of students, reading Plato's dialogues would seem to be a very dry affair. But when I was an undergraduate, I was responsible for presenting Plato's Republic to a seminar class in two sessions. They say you never have to learn anything as well as when you have to teach it. So I took a very close reading and in fact provided an outline of the Republic, which took me almost a week to prepare. Being that close to it, it's almost as if the work came alive. All of the sudden I noticed that there was not only a literary structure, but what I would later discover to be a kind of philosophical structure. It absolutely thrilled me.
But that was very late in my undergraduate career. I was in drama school before that and was looking at courses to become a drama director.
ASK: Where about?
JC: The University of New York. We were talking about the existentialists earlier and [I studied] producing and directing existential plays. I sat down one day and thought, "What is it that I really like about this stuff?" It wasn't all of the stuff associated with the theater per se, such as blocking out the plays, it was the ideas in them. As a freshmen/sophomore, I had no conception that there was such a thing as philosophy; I never had it in high school nor my first or second years. In fact, a teacher said to me, "You know what you ought to do is read some of the existentialists." I thought, "Hmm that's interesting" and I went to the library and picked up this little book. This was sometime around 1972. I'm right there in the stacks and there's this little book, which was just called Existentialism, and I started reading it and got so engrossed in it that I finished the whole book in the course of half a day. It was just unbelievable stuff and I knew there was something there. When I transferred to New York State University it was as a philosophy major. It was there that I fell head over heals for Plato.
ASK: Anyone else?
JC: Later and now I guess, the philosopher that has most influenced my way of thinking among the great "dead white men," as I like to call them, is the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. I did my dissertation on Kant; he is, to me, the greatest. Don't get to teach him much, unfortunately. He was a fascinating figure.
ASK: Maybe if philosophy became a major you could have a class on him.
JC: When,not if. When we get the major, which I hope will be September 2009, there is going to be a new course as part of around 15 new courses coming to the major. One of the new courses is a seminar on a famous philosopher. We could certainly do Kant or an introduction to Kant; we could touch on his first critique — Pure Reason. That would be fun, I think.
ASK: How is it coming?
JC: The major is well along. The degree requirements and the plan of study are completed. The proposal has been completed; all the new courses have been completed. What's happening now is this very long, very rigorous, approval process where it goes through different committees at various levels of the University and we're just beginning that stage of it. The philosophy faculty decided in a meeting on July 25th of 2007 that we wanted to pursue a major. Most of them haven't been around as long as I have and didn't know that, in fact, there was once a philosophy major at the University. It was born in 1985. But it was a very strange program.
It was a major in applied philosophy, which led to a Bachelor of Science, not a Bachelor of Arts. It was a crazy little creature. I think we only graduated one student in five years; it wasn't marketable from a business point of view, but I think more seriously from the educational point of view, it raises some very serious questions. However, the president [of the University] was intent on developing a number of new undergraduate programs for this department, but this department at that time was called the Department of Humanities and Communications. We're going way back now. When the University was formed, sometime around 1972, the articles of incorporations only allowed it to create Bachelor of Science programs, not BAs. I think it failed also because around 1992, this University was in a real crisis and it was just about belly-up; this is just before Papadakis got here. And at that time about 80-plus percent of the philosophy faculty left the University. I was the only tenured philosopher left. So we haven't had a philosophy major since 1993 or '94. So now we've decided it's time. I think it's a very exciting major.
First of all it's going to give students 48 hours of electives — that's a lot of electives. We think that's important for a number of reasons. When you come to college, part of the goal is developing autonomy, and you don't develop autonomy by being told what classes to take. College is supposed to be a period of discovery and you need to follow your interests. In some of the majors at the University, it's almost scandalous how little free electives there are.
We also think [the new major] is important because it's what the American Philosophical Association recommends for the construction of major programs of study. We've incorporated that into the program.
Thirdly, one very attractive feature of the philosophy major would be to allow for a double major. The advantages for a student going to medical school who has double majored in philosophy and biology, or a student going to law school who has double majored in philosophy and history, let's say, is just incredible. So we think that having that many free electives will make [double majoring] a little bit easier. Particularly as the University begins to pass new Bachelor of Arts programs, I think for the right kind of student, the double major is the right option.
ASK: Drawing in students, expanding the diversity of the population as a whole.
JC: I think so, to a large extent.
ASK: Drexel is very much a business-oriented school. So what's nice is on the one hand you have a very beneficial career-building tool, and on the academic side, you now have a philosophy department.
JC: Absolutely. It's important for the students too because it turns out that philosophy is one of the best routes to graduate programs. Philosophy majors score higher than any other major on the Graduate Record Examinations in two out of three categories, in the verbal and an analytic writing, and they're very near the top on the quantitative part as well. They're also very good at the LSAT and the GMAT. So it really does prepare students for post-graduate study in a number of fields.
The interesting thing is that, in England, philosophy enrollment has doubled since 2002; in the United States it has significantly increased. Rutgers is going to be graduating 150 philosophy majors this June. Philosophy programs are growing very quickly and in part it's because of what students learn in a philosophy program. They learn the sort of things that employers are looking for — how to think critically, how to speak well, how to write well critically, and a whole host of other skills I've outlined and we've put forth in this major.
What we did is we said, "Okay look, putting together a major is a lot of work… while we're at it why don't we clean house?" There hasn't been a review of the philosophy program in 20 years. So, a new major, a revised minor, two new concentrations, 14 new courses and every other course (with a few exceptions), were all revised significantly. Most of the new courses are seminar courses for people who major and minor in philosophy. For example: Seminar in Ancient Greek philosophy, Seminar in Medieval Philosophy, a seminar in Rationalism and Empiricism, in American and contemporary philosophy. No more than twelve students sitting together in a room in a seminar format, which means each week a different student will present a different work, writing intensive.
We've also introduced some new courses for the general student body. We're changing the name of Introduction to Philosophy to Introduction to Western Philosophy and we're introducing a new course, Introduction to Eastern Philosophy, which I think will be very popular. We've got a new course coming that, at first, students won't know what it is. It's called Philosophy and Knowledge Organization and it's meant for freshmen and maybe sophomores, to give them an introduction to the way in which knowledge is organized. Why are the arts organized the way they are? Why are the sciences organized the way they are? What is the difference between the two? It gives them a map of the world of knowledge, a map of the University, a map of the library, which makes them able to move around more. I've found in my own lectures, and I know other professors have too, students don't know that world really well. If you ask them, "Where would you fit semantics?" They would go, "What's semantics?" They don't know the sciences, they don't know where they fit, they don't know why they fit the way they do. So we think that's very important. We've [also] created an advanced logic course, which I think will be attractive to the math and science majors.
ASK: And it's all just beginning?
JC: The hope is that the University can get it out of it before Christmas, then we go to Harrisburg and get approval by February. That's optimistic. It would be important to do that because if we're looking to [get a major by] September 2009, and we've got to get publicity materials and applications. I've already met with the office of enrollment management. They're very excited about having a philosophy major. In fact, the vice president, Joan McDonald, told to me that she sees that "the major growth," as she put it, is going to be in the arts and sciences.
It doesn't have to be a big program from a financial point of view. Really, I have a colleague in anthropology, Dr. Glascock, who started an anthropology major a view years ago. He likes to refer to it as a "boutique major." What he means by that is that he has just a few students, very highly qualified, but they get personal attention from the faculty. So you know not only are they getting their money's worth, but they're getting a really good education. I think we'd like to do the same thing. If we net between five and ten students a year I'd be happy, because over five years that's between twenty-five and fifty students at any given time. You get to know people on a first-name basis, what their strengths are, where they need help; it's a much more humane way of proceeding.
ASK: Creating a major seems to be a long process, even before meeting with the department.
JC: It's taken nine months to develop this major. There are two very different aspects to the philosophy major at the University: the service function and the major function. The service function is the most important, which may sound surprising, but for all undergraduates, it's the function that "butters our bread," it keeps us alive.
I did a study of the philosophy program and found that in the last five years we've taught 15,990 students — 751 sections of courses, 28 distinct courses. If you calculate the ratio of students to section (taking out the independent studies) you get 22.8 students per section, it's one of the highest ratios in the University. But what was more interesting to me was discovering that 77 percent of all the teaching we do comes down to six courses: Intro, 32 percent is critical reasoning, logic, engineering ethics, computer ethics, and ethics. That means that 23 percent of the teaching we do is for 23 courses, one percent per course. We can't proceed with a major and in any way affect those courses; those have to be successful. What we do has to build on the success of those programs.
Most people say, "Philosophy at Drexel? That's not that big of a deal." But, 3,200 students a year is bigger than a lot of schools with philosophy majors.
