Michael Brown

1. 1.)    I have for too long been telling myself to close the gap between my passions and my activities; to translate what I love most about Cornell into a legacy I can bestow upon her.  Founding the Cornell Philosophy Forum in the Fall of 2000 has finally allowed me to make tangible my great personal love for the intellectual life of the campus in a way that creates a lasting benefit for the entire community.  The Philosophy Forum is a strange organization.  We began with two people, and our first few meetings in Rockefeller Hall were attended by no more than three or four curious thinkers.  We called ourselves the “Philosophy Forum,” yet we are not connected to the Department of Philosophy in any way, and none of the group’s first members were philosophy majors.  In fact, our first (and current advisor) is a photography professor.  I smile in recounting these oddities, for they demonstrate clearly our initial intent to create a non-traditional student group.  It is our goal (or the ‘philosophy of the Philosophy Forum’ as we refer to it) to create a community organization dedicated to providing an open forum for the sharing of thought, exchange of ideas, and disclosure of personal reflection in an environment of honesty, openness, and the utmost respect.  We wanted to create something more like a family than a club; an organic community congealed around the most basic human impulse to question our reality, our existence, and our meaning.  The success of the Philosophy Forum this year gives me the security in leaving Cornell to know that our goal has been met and will be sustained.  Over the course of this year we have grown from the two initial founders to over seventy students.  We have brought philosophers to campus both semesters to hold small group conversations with our students.  We have become newly funded by the SAFC.  We have built a diverse membership including a seventy-one year old woman from Japan, undergrads from Pakistan, Burma, China, British Columbia, and Long Island, and graduate students from Taiwan, England, Germany, and Chicago.  We have Engineers, Hotelies, ILR, English, Physics, and Art majors.  The exhilaration and joy all of us have experienced in coming together for the exploration of truth has spawned several side projects from the forum.  The organization is now managed by a “Council of Enthusiasts” who meet for brunch each Sunday to plan the group’s logistics.  These are “Enthusiasts” rather than “Executives” because their participation merely reflects an enthusiasm for the group great enough to put in extra effort, rather than any special designation of authority.  We are committed to being a non-hierarchical group.  Thus, my title is simply “membership enthusiast,” as jobs are assigned by task rather than rank.  In addition, our advisor has begun a Tuesday group in addition to our Sunday brunches and Monday meetings to explore the meaning of consciousness.  This is a more focused opportunity for philosophy forum participants to explore issues related to the human condition at its most basic levels.  All three of these weekly events are open to the entire community and actively publicized.  I believe the Philosophy Forum has changed my life and the lives of students in the community.  At the end of a meeting last semester one of our more crusty Physics grad students summed up the role of the group in our lives by saying in his closing comments, “Wow…this discussion just really made me happy today.”  That’s what the Philosophy Forum does: it is part symposium, part group therapy, part surrogate intellectual family and it just plain makes you happy.
2. 2.)    This year my involvement with MFCNS really began over the Summer.  The program enabled me financially to stay in Ithaca and conduct research with Professor Mary Katzenstein on theoretical issues surrounding prisons.  This was an invaluable opportunity to explore the life of an academic, and it aided me in ultimately deciding to seek a graduate degree in political theory in pursuit of a professorship.  I traveled to New York with Julie Albertson for a meeting at the Cornell Club of CNS alumni who are building a new organization.  I wrote an article for Julie about my experiences with the group in New York (which I’m still trying to find in print). Furthermore, I have had lunches with former trustee and Chair of the Cornell Fund, Laura Clark and university Vice President Carolyn Ainslie as a representative of MFCNS. 
3. 3.)    This year’s involvement in addition to the Philosophy Forum:

Quill and Dagger Senior Honor Society, President of the Ivy Council (student government of the Ivy League, like a United Nations for Ivy student assemblies), and Rabbi Ed Rosenthal’s group on Jewish mysticism (particularly interesting to me as a Catholic)