Since returning as a faculty member in 2003, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Elise Springer ’90 is no stranger to campus. Springer studied music as an undergraduate at Wesleyan before discovering her fascination with philosophy during her senior year. A specialist in moral philosophy, Springer teaches Introduction to Ethics and Moral Responsibility this semester.

The Argus: When did you cultivate your interest in moral philosophy?

Elise Springer: There was an odd way in which coming to Wesleyan for me was coming to a more mainstream environment. The very first class that I took at Wesleyan was an ethics class. It was Philosophy 212, which is the staple of what I now teach at Wesleyan. It was a big class with over 30 students, and the desks were all facing forward towards the chalkboard. There was something close to a script for how the class was going to go that the professor stuck closely to. This was an unfamiliar experience for me as a college student. I dropped the class right away and I thought, “This is not for me.”

What I’ve learned is that every student’s first exposure to a discipline is not a reliable representation of the possible relationship between a student and that discipline. It is highly contingent of the first impression. I feel that lesson very profoundly because the very thing that is now my intellectual passion is structured around the same stuff as the class that I decided to drop. I have no illusion that I now teach the class in a way that satisfies every student in the room, but I am humbled by the awareness that I stand as a representative for the field that I love. Any person in that room may have a profound relationship to philosophy.

A: Did you major in philosophy at Wesleyan?

ES: I was a music major. I came here largely because of my interest in world music. I continued to value the Music Department as a real highlight of what Wesleyan has to offer. I found as I finished my degree that I wanted to do a thesis project—a highly conceptual one, at that. I did not find anyone in the music department who seemed completely engaged with the project in the way that I was conceiving it so I went shopping with my thesis proposal. After various meetings that had less than promising results, I found myself directed to Terry Winant, a Professor of Philosophy who is no longer here. Although I never took a philosophy course prior to my senior year when I audited a course, I ended up writing a thesis in the music department with a philosopher helping me think through the structure and the questions of my project.

There is that odd fact that what I studied as an undergrad really did not overlap at all with the field that I went in to. I did not have a single philosophy grade on my transcript when I applied to graduate school, except for my audit senior year. I had this “aha!” moment after graduation when I was talking to Terry and a few others. I thought these are the kinds of questions that I ask myself and I had no idea that one could specialize in thinking thoroughly and critically about them. I valued at Wesleyan the fact that even without having studied philosophy, I learned in my classes a way of taking ownership of the process of reading and thinking and writing that enabled me to learn a new discipline even after having finished my BA in a different field.

A: How has your perspective changed since becoming a professor?

ES: There is something very odd about coming to teach here at Wesleyan, in that the whole campus was familiar to me and so unlike other places where I was hired as a new faculty member. I did not have to ask myself, “Where is that building? How does the curriculum work? What kind of students am I going to meet?” There was a very strange combination of familiarity and being completely a newcomer at the same time. I was switching fields and it had been 13 years since I had left. Almost none of the professors were the same and certainly I was not working within the same part of the school that I had spent time as an undergraduate. On the other hand, I think it was not a challenge at all to understand the level that I could pitch my expectations and assignments so that they would both challenge and interest Wesleyan students.

A: How has Wesleyan changed since you were a student?

ES: Of course, history has moved on and culture has changed. It is hard to distinguish how Wesleyan has changed from how our larger society has changed. When I was a student, we talked to our parents once a month. We did not have cell phones and didn’t talk to our high school buddies. Going to college was a thing of independence. Students today arrive at Wesleyan as professional students. They’ve already been thinking about their resume. When I was a student, it was still very much that extracurricular activities were not sought out for making an impression on future schools and employers. It saddens me to see a self-consciousness in students about whether their interests are acceptable ones. And of course, it was a pre-internet culture.