How Liberal is SCU?

turtlerock
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:18:06 +0000

Yes, The Santa Clara is completely student ran. So we both agree then that it’s the students themselves that are editing their peers? I’d sonsider that even more reprehensible.

The political scene at SCU is very non-existant. I know these’s a link somewhere where I read that the student elections (for the Associated Student Government, the elected offices held by students on campus) turned out an exptremely low number of voters. I’m pretty sure it was <20% of total voters eligible who actually casted a vote. This is unfortunate since you can easily vote online. It basically means that a lot of the students just don’t care about politics at SCU. I think this may be because a big portion of the student body comes from money and they don’t see politics playing a big deal in their lives.

With that said, there are some interesting programs involving politics at SCU. I know they at least used to have (should still be going on, but I can be corrected) a club in the PoliSci Dept called the Fireside chats where ANY interested student could come to the weekly meeting in the evening for a couple hours and just chat/debate about certain political and social issues that are even suggested by the students themselves. I thought that was always a pretty innovative idea. There’s also an equivalent Philosophy Dept club called Cafe Socrates.

Philosophy at SCU will depend. I’ve heard it’s very ethics heavy, as opposed to metaphysics or epistemology. This is good if you’re thinking about going to law school as they even have a pre-law emphasis in the department. Circling back to your question about liberalism in the school - the Phil profs are going to be the most open thinking of the bunch.

Philosophy classes themselves I’m told are fun in the sense that it seems like the students do some reading of a philosophical nature and then come to class and just talk/argue/debate, or otherwise GIVE THEIR OPINION about it all. Nothing’s right or wrong because it’s based on opinion. Opinion that you eventually need to back up with facts in a subsequnt paper. Philosophy majors write a lot. Most, if not all, of the phil classes will not have a final as a test per-se, but will require an extensive paper at the end of the class.