Published: Jan. 31, 2018

The 2019 Morris Judd Undergraduate Essay Prize will be awarded to the best undergraduate essay submitted on any topic in the values area. The prize comes with a cash award of $500 as well as formal recognition of the honor at the Department’s spring commencement ceremony. The competition is open to all current CU undergraduates with a major or minor in Philosophy.
 
In order to be eligible for consideration, a paper must be one that was written for a course in the Philosophy Department at CU at the 2000 level or higher during any term in 2018, though it may be a revised version of that paper, and the paper must have received a grade of A or A- when it was submitted for that course.  Papers must be no more than 4,000 words long and each student may submit only one paper.
 
The prize is named for Morris Judd, a former Instructor in the Philosophy Department at CU who taught a variety of courses including several in the values area.  The Department held Judd to be an outstanding teacher, but his appointment at the University was discontinued in the early 1950s when he refused to answer questions about whether he had ever been a Communist.  You can find more information about his story here: http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_13137226
 
To enter the competition, students must submit two documents: (1) a copy of the paper (as a Word document if possible) that does not contain the student’s name and (2) a document containing the student’s name, e-mail address, title of the paper, word count, course the paper was written for, semester in 2018 when the course was taken, name of the course instructor, and affirmation that the student is a philosophy major or minor.  Submissions, as well as any queries about the competition, should be sent to david.boonin@colorado.edu.  The deadline for submission is Friday, March 15.