Annual Report

During the 2018-2019 school year, Phi Sigma Tau initiated 1,241 new members. During the past seven years we have averaged about 1,225 new members each year. So, our membership seems to be holding fairly steady at around 1,225 new members a year.

Our main activity is the publication of Dialogue, our journal dedicated to student publications of work in philosophy. We also publish a Newsletter three times each year describing the activity of individual chapters. Students who enroll in our Alumni Chapter continue to receive the journal, Newsletters, and an Alumni Bulletin for one year at no further charge. After the first year of membership in the Alumni Chapter, we do ask a $5.00 fee for continuing, and that fee just about covers the cost of mailing the journal and other papers.  We do allow email memberships in the Alumni Chapter at no cost to our members.

One of our main goals is to encourage philosophical inquiry and discussion on college campuses by making students aware of the importance of philosophy. Our chapters often do that by holding conferences on their campuses, participating in local conferences, holding meetings that are open to the campus community, and engaging in other activities. In 2016-2017 we published a Supplementary issue on ethics, and we will consider occasional Supplementary issues in the future.  In 2019, the Phi Sigma Tau Executive Council voted to send complimentary copies of our journal to all schools that have Phi Sigma Tau chapters.  Because of limited staff, we were able to send copies only to schools that provided appropriate library addresses.

One main challenge is to encourage chapters to remain active. Since chapters are often small (philosophy programs are often small), a committed advisor is essential to keeping the chapter active and operating. Advisors are essential to encouraging students to plan and execute various activities. Usually a junior faculty member is assigned the role of advisor; this means that there is quite a lot of advisor turnover, and the advisors often have heavy demands placed upon them for publication and tenure.  A second challenge has been the cancellation of philosophy majors at several schools.

Since all of our staff work on a voluntary basis, time is limited. We need to work more to encourage chapters that are inactive to become active again. Last year we revoked the charters of eight chapters for inactivity. Sometimes inactivity is because an advisor has left, and often it is difficult to find out that an advisor has left a school. We are also looking to get some younger members onto our Executive Council to replace some members who are retiring; we will expect those members to participate in the work of the society.

Rising costs may impact membership, both because of possible lower enrollments and because students may have difficulty with the membership fee (though we have kept our membership fee quite low). The costs do not seem to have affected our membership requests this past year though. As tuitions increase and if students move to areas related to job opportunities, we may see a decline in membership, though often in difficult times, philosophy enrollments increase some.  However, financial difficulties at some schools have caused the cancellation of several philosophy majors; where possible, we will continue a chapter if a resulting combined major still meets our minimum requirements.