We welcome donations to the Philosophy Department. Help us to continue our efforts to offer a rigorous, enriching and life-changing education to both undergraduates and graduate students. Some of the ways your donations can be used include: funding for student research, undergraduate scholarships, sponsoring student and faculty teaching awards, endowing a prize for philosophy majors, or a prize for best undergraduate philosophy paper, sponsoring summer funding for a graduate student, sponsoring a graduate student for a whole year, endowing an annual public lecture, or endowing one of our Centers, or a professorship.
In particular, the Philosophy Department has the following special needs and requests:
1) Funding for teaching prizes for PhD students: The Department established in 2014 two teaching prizes for our graduate student teachers, the Claudia Mills Teaching Prize for the outstanding Teaching Assistant of the year, and the Wes Morriston Teaching Prize for the outstanding Graduate Part-Time Instructor of the year. The prizes are awarded each year to two graduate students, and are intended both to recognize outstanding teaching of undergraduates in the philosophy department, as well as to acknowledge Prof. Mills’ and Prof. Morriston’s own outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching during their own career.
Each prize comes with $500 cash along with recognition of the honor in the department’s commencement ceremonies at the end of the year.
We would like to establish permanent endowments for these prizes, both to put them on a sound financial footing and to increase the amount. We welcome contributions to these prizes, in order to honor these professors for their outstanding teaching at CU-Boulder, as well as to recognize and encourage excellent teaching in the department.
2) Funding for MA students: Some of our MA students are without guaranteed funding, which means that they must pay their own way in order to study here. We welcome contributions to sponsor an MA student, with anywhere from $5000 to $20,000, which would be enough to defray or cover the costs of tuition, fees and living expenses for a year.
3) Undergraduate prizes: We would like to establish prizes for undergraduates, such as a prize for the graduating senior philosophy major with the highest GPA in philosophy, or a prize for best essay by a philosophy student. Each of these could be established as a named prize, to be announced each year at Commencement, with a cash prize. A $10,000 gift would allow us to establish an endowed fund to pay for an annual prize of $300.
4) POPCO funding: We welcome contributions to our Philosophy Outreach Program of Colorado ‘POPCO’ outreach program, which sends philosophy faculty and graduate students to high schools all across the state, to teach a class on philosophy introducing students to the topics in philosophy. Since philosophy is not regularly taught in high schools, this is an important way of introducing students to our subject. The POPCO program pays participants for gas/mileage and travel expenses for their trips.
5) Travel funding for graduate students attending the RoME Congress: The department hosts the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress every summer, which has become an important and popular conference on ethics. We welcome contributions to a fund that enables graduate students from other institutions to travel to the conference and present their work. Even $85 will defray the costs of their conference registration.
6) Summer Funding for PhDs: Our PhD students are funded during the academic year with teaching fellowships with stipends between $15K and $18K. But they are not paid during the summer, unless they win a summer teaching assignment. For the other students, we seek summer funding, so they can spend their summer months studying and working on papers and dissertations. $2K is sufficient to support a graduate student for the summer, especially if they can be paid as Research Assistants on work-study.