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Outstanding Teaching Award: Matthew McCormick

It can be a touchy subject, but philosophy professor Matthew McCormick’s seminar on atheism is a popular series among students, and helped him win a 2007-08 Outstanding Teaching Award.

“It’s an important area of philosophical research that’s relevant to everyone, even non-philosophers,” McCormick says of the seminar. But it’s only been offered at the undergraduate level one or two times in the country. “I was pretty excited to develop something new and innovative like that.”

McCormick says the class is not about trying to indoctrinate anyone, and notes that he frequently makes a case for believing in order to challenge standard atheistic arguments. “I’m not trying to make atheists. In fact, I got an e-mail from one student who, I think, has gone the other direction in part because of the class. The goal is for all of us to arrive at a more considered, better justification for what we believe.”

The professor first became interested in philosophy as an eighth-grader while listening to the minister in church and began to question some of the teachings. “I think a lot of philosophers encounter philosophy first in religion,” McCormick says.

His approach to lecturing may also have played a role in the Outstanding Teaching Award. McCormick has a self-deprecating sense of humor which he infuses into his classroom work. “I’m pretty sarcastic and pretty irreverent.”

Prior to his arrival at Sacramento State, McCormick was working on his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in New York. When his wife, Rebekah Donaldson, was offered a position in California, they moved west and McCormick became a lecturer at Sacramento State.

In addition to the atheism seminar, McCormick teaches philosophy of religion and critical thinking. “It’s a great department and a great university,” he says. “We’re now one of the biggest—if not the biggest—philosophy departments in the CSU system.”

McCormick says the most challenging aspect of teaching for any professor is drawing out those students who are not so interested in the subject matter. He adds, though, that subjects such as religion and atheism generate enough interest on their own. “Those are great topics because everyone’s excited and enthusiastic about them,” he says. “You go in there and ask the right questions and boy, the students just go.”

Noting that he has a voracious appetite for ideas, McCormick says the best part of teaching is that people get to learn even more. “You never have to know something as well as when you teach it,” he says. “I just learn so much. It’s still surprising that I get paid to read and think and write and acquire all of this information.”