Effectiveness of track programs: University of Alabama

The following is an email sent to me by one of the professors at the University of Alabama's Philosophy department.  I wrote him asking a series of questions about how their Pre-law track had worked out, if it had attracted more students, etc...  It tells a very interesting story of how they saved their department with their track programs.

The pre-law concentration is one of many moves made on the department’s behalf when I was our chair and we were threatened with losing the right to offer a major in philosophy...
 So we didn’t just save ourselves; we saved ourselves by adding to the ways in which we can do something valuable for the students at our university.....
I would recommend it to any department that has someone who finds the law interesting...

The following is from the letter the professor sent me:

The pre-law concentration is one of many moves made on the department’s behalf when I was our chair and we were threatened with losing the right to offer a major in philosophy.  The threat came from a committee of the state legislature  called the Alabama Committee on Higher Education, the apt acronym for which is “ACHE.”  ACHE decreed that any department that wasn’t graduating an average of at least 7.5 majors per year was a waste of the taxpayers’ money, and should be reduced to offering courses that might count as ingredients in a liberal education (for us, Intro, logic, ethics, probably that would be all) and maybe also courses that would serve the interests of departments that were producing enough majors (medical ethics, I don’t know what else.)  It didn’t matter to ACHE how many faculty the department had, even though it ought to be easier to generate majors the more courses you can offer.  Nor did it matter  whether your subject was one that led immediately to jobs in the field for those who took a bachelor’s degree in it, as (of course) philosophy certainly does not.  It didn’t matter whether the idea of a University that had no Department of X would be widely regarded as dubious.   All that mattered was whether there were at least 7.5 students per year  graduating with a major in the subject.

 

At the time, we weren’t even approaching that number and never had, so it didn’t look good for us.  Once it was clear that the number was non-negotiable, we tried everything we could think of to meet the criterion.  One of the ideas I had was that there are many more students who want to be lawyers than there are who want to be philosophers, and many more jobs for those students, and that there were lots of philosophically interesting questions about the law.  With the advice of friends and acquaintances who teach in our law school, I developed three courses at the relatively introductory level: one on criminal law, one on civil law and one on Constitutional law.  I put those in a  continual rotation with a fourth course called Philosophy of Law, which concerned the nature of law and legal systems.  That fourth course was one I was already teaching from time to time, but not regularly.  By putting it in sequence with the new three, we always had a law-related course coming up in the next semester, if you liked the one you were taking now.  We regarded our logic course as useful for the LSAT, and when we added a political philosopher we also put the introductory course on political philosophy into the same package.  Then we advertised this, pointing out how close it was to a Minor in philosophy and what a student would need to add to make it a Major.  We emphasized that it was not necessary to take all the courses in the package, and we left “enrollment” in this track entirely informal.  I mean by this that there was no need for the student to get permission from the department to take this package of courses, and no need to fill out any forms.  We wanted it to be hassle-free, just something a student who already had law school in mind might pick up to add a touch of class to the application.  (This does mean we don’t have records of how many people are doing it.)

 

Advertising this as the pre-law package was just packaging, but it worked like gangbusters.  We now have 80-some students for whom philosophy is either their sole major or part of a double major.  Since I teach four of the courses the are in the pre-law track, I can recognize the names of the ones who have done at least two of those courses and might mean to do more.  By that criterion for being in the pre-law track, about 30 of the 80-some majors are in it.  This isn’t the only thing that saved us, but it helped a lot.  I also believe a philosophy major is very good preparation for law school, and that philosophical courses about the law are the place where students can engage a kind of question that is just ruled out in pre-law courses taken from departments of political science and history, and in prelaw course offered by our College of Commerce and Business Administration.  So we didn’t just save ourselves; we saved ourselves by adding to the ways in which we can do something valuable for the students at our university.  I want also to repeat that this isn’t drudgery for those who have to teach the prelaw courses.  The questions in them are fun to think about, and a good portion of the enrollment will be bright and highly motivated students who find the question you want them to explore very engaging.  I would recommend it to any department that has someone who finds the law interesting.

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