Can Philosophy Exist?

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It's a spring afternoon, a Friday, and most of the 14,000 students here at Bergen Community College, just outside New York City, have left for the weekend. But in a new classroom building on the campus perimeter, about two dozen students -- who include a young, tousle-haired man in a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a middle-aged woman who says she's here because she is passionate about humanity -- intensely debate whether anything is ever absolutely right or wrong.

Paul Eckstein, the laid-back, bearded professor of a class in contemporary moral issues, offers a shade of gray for every situation the students might be inclined to believe is black and white. Gesturing with his hands for emphasis, he points out how drastically public opinion on topics such as abortion and war have changed over the years.

"You should never be so sure that you are right and others are wrong," he says, scanning the faces in the room. "Someone else might come up with something you never thought of."

"So there is no right or wrong?" a young woman wearing a head scarf asks with an exasperated tone. "Nobody's ever gonna agree?"

Mr. Eckstein, a philosophy professor here, doesn't answer. Instead, he throws out another subtlety for the students.

Such is the ethereal nature of philosophy, a subject that often deters the relentlessly job-oriented students at colleges and universities who fear it has nothing to offer their quest for careers. But here at Bergen, where only half the students attend full time and nearly half are enrolled in job-training or other nondegree programs, the philosophy-and-religion department is hopping.

Bergen has eight full-time faculty members in philosophy and religion, and more than 2,000 students enroll in about 50 sections of philosophy and religion classes each semester. The department offers a smorgasbord of courses beyond the introductory level, including "Ethics in Business and Society," "Eastern Philosophy," and "Women in Religion," despite the fact that credits in the discipline are not required in any of the college's degree programs.

While the majority of community colleges have only one or two philosophy professors who teach mostly introductory courses, Bergen's program has triple the student enrollment of similar-size institutions -- at both two- and four-year colleges, according to an informal survey by The Chronicle of programs across the country.

"I've worked at a few other community colleges where, as far as philosophy went, we always found it difficult to have enough students to support one full load for one faculty member," says Judith K. Winn, Bergen's president, who came to the college nine years ago. "I'd never seen anything like it. It's the strength of the faculty ... that makes this possible here."

Many of the department's Ivy League-trained professors say they were pleasantly surprised to find that this community college was the perfect place to realize their professional aspirations.

Much of the robustness of the department can be credited to its chairman of 30 years, George Cronk, who has consistently reached out to students and administrators. Mr. Cronk and his colleagues could be a case study in how to take a fledgling department at any institution and build it into a powerhouse program through hard work and persistence.

Helping at Registration

Mr. Cronk, a mild-mannered professor who is also a lawyer, would have jumped at a job at a four-year institution where he could do research when he first began his career. After completing his Ph.D. at Southern Illinois University, he spent the better part of his first decade at Bergen as the only philosophy professor, tucked into the humanities program. He says he was miserable because he wasn't at a research university.

"But I've always been an activist," he says. "So I began promoting the program like mad."

By the early 1980s, the college had hired another philosophy professor, Michael D. Redmond, and the two of them took it upon themselves to become experts on the entire college curriculum so that they could help students during registration. It paid off handsomely.

"Many of the other professors would stand up against the wall in the gymnasium and look as though they really didn't want to be bothered with helping students through the registration process," says Mr. Redmond, now vice president for technology and information services at Bergen. "Because we were so helpful, inevitably, students would say, 'By the way, what do you teach?' And many of them would end up in our classes."

Once they got them in, word of mouth quickly spread that the philosophy professors were pretty cool, students say, because of their ability to boil down Socrates to something relevant to daily life.

"Their general attitude is one of respect for students," says Martin Berman, a student in Mr. Eckstein's class who takes the courses simply for personal interest, and is not in a degree program. "We talk about all these big ideas, but they never talk down to us."

Mr. Cronk also gained favor with administrators at the college by becoming more involved politically. When the New Jersey Board of Higher Education forced an overhaul of the general-education curriculum at state institutions in the early 1980s, he volunteered to spearhead the college's effort. That position helped him push the idea of an independent department for philosophy and religion, a move that gave the discipline a higher position on the liberal-arts totem pole.

Mr. Cronk, the current head of the Faculty Senate, also led the committee that made sure the college was in line with its accreditor's standards when its accreditation was being reviewed in the mid-1980s, a position that has been held by a professor from the department of philosophy and religion ever since.

"The philosophy professors have become incredibly involved with supporting the goals of the college in many ways," says Ms. Winn.

A 'Departmental Identity'

The administration returned the support by gradually allowing the department to hire more faculty members through the 1980s and '90s. Mr. Redmond says that with each new hire and each new course the department was able to offer, he began to realize that something special was going on.

"A departmental identity started to form," he says. "Most importantly, we saw students getting engaged. ... Philosophy is an excellent discipline to make students understand that there's all this stuff that isn't figured out. Once you get them to understand that, they really open up. I think for a lot of the professors in the department, that has been the best part."

But the department's success has come at some expense. The philosophy-and-religion department has earned a reputation as the administration's "pet" among some faculty colleagues who, Mr. Cronk and others department members say, resent his marketing techniques.

"Did we work registration in order to promote the department?" he asks. "Absolutely. But every other department could have done the same thing."

Sandra S. Sliverberg, head of the math-and-computer-sciences department at Bergen, says she hasn't witnessed much resentment in the more than 30 years that she has been at the college. There is always some jockeying for students, she says, "and it seems like they did that successfully." She points out that students are given many choices of courses to fulfill their humanities electives. "I for one am thrilled when I see the college offering such a diverse amount of courses in any discipline like that," she says.

Mr. Cronk says that most of the philosophy professors have good relations with their colleagues in other disciplines.

And he doesn't regret the effort, noting that Bergen's department of philosophy and religion dwarfs those at all other community colleges in the state, and is larger than many of those at four-year institutions, according to his own research.

"East of the Mississippi, there's no other program like this," Mr. Cronk says.

At Kirkwood Community College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is roughly the same size as Bergen, five full-time philosophy or religion professors teach about 20 courses in the disciplines.

Like Bergen, Kirkwood is nestled in a solidly middle-class community where, over the years, liberal-arts enrollments have flourished at community colleges, fostering an environment conducive to the growth of disciplines like philosophy.

Robert Sessions, a philosophy professor at Kirkwood who says he keeps up with the efforts of his colleagues at other two-year colleges across the country, believes Bergen's program is extraordinary. "Most community colleges will have a few intro courses taught by an English or history professor," he says. "That's it."

Bruce K. Omundson, a philosophy professor at Lansing Community College, in Michigan, says his institution offers only introductory courses -- less than a dozen or so each semester -- and has two full-time philosophy professors and one full-time religion professor. Lansing has about 15,000 students.

"We don't have the ready-made clientele that history or English does," says Mr. Omundson, adding that the college is in a working-class community and leans more toward work-force training than the liberal arts.

"And we're dealing with a formidable discipline that has a reputation of being somewhere off in the netherworld," he says.

The Diversity Advantage

Bergen's professors credit the rich life experiences of their students with making the environment ripe for philosophical discussions.

Peter Dlugos, who has been a professor in the department for eight years, went to a Catholic preparatory school and grew up around families where everyone went to college. He says he always imagined he'd be teaching starry-eyed undergraduates like the ones he taught as a graduate student at the University of Virginia. When he came to Bergen, he met first-generation college students for the first time.

"All these questions that the Greeks and the Chinese philosophers talked about ... all of that stuff just became so floodingly relevant," he says, noting that he felt discussions on class and social status were more interesting with his Bergen students than with the University of Virginia students he used to teach.

"And the diversity of race, background, points of view that you get from students -- I couldn't dream up a better classroom setting," he says.

Many of the professors in the department have published extensively over the years. And they regularly play host to lectures by prominent scholars, most recently one on issues in the philosophy of science by H. Rom Harré, a professor at the University of Oxford, in England, who is a visiting professor at Georgetown and American Universities.

"It's priceless for us to be able to expose the students to some big names in the field," says Mr. Cronk.

Friends of Socrates

Having successfully engaged the students, the department decided to spread its enthusiasm for philosophy to residents of the surrounding towns. It now holds a monthly "Friends of Socrates" discussion at a local Borders, which attracts many people from Paramus and the surrounding area.

A recent Friday-night colloquy attracted more than 20 people, many of whom went back and forth for an hour and a half about whether faith and reason were two distinct principles, contemplating Darwinian theory and the meaning of the Biblical stories of Job and of Abraham and Isaac.

Florence Lipsenthal, a retired New York City public-school teacher, is a regular at the discussions. "For the college to do this is great because you end up meeting people from all walks of life at this event," she explains.

Her reaction is much like that of Bergen's philosophy students. She says, "I always come away with a new take on what I thought I knew -- what's right and what's wrong."