For more info and other writings, visit my Web site: EricThomasWeber.org. Follow me on your preferred medium: Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. I'm also on LinkedIn and Academia.edu.
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SOPHIA Strategic Planning Session, January 2015
Last night, Thursday, January 29th, 2015, the Board of Trustees and prospective future leaders of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA) joined together on a phone conference call. In the spring of 2015, Dr. Annie Davis Weber, the University of Mississippi's Manager of Strategic Planning, is teaching a graduate course on strategic planning in the university's School of Education. Her class includes a real strategic planning experience for her students. Fortunately for SOPHIA, I happen to know Dr. (Annie Davis) Weber quite well. SOPHIA is an organization that has been around for many years in a few forms. Over the last six years, I have served as Executive Director, working to get the ball rolling again on a number of activities that embody the values that attracted me to work with SOPHIA. At the same time, given our momentum and our need to take SOPHIA to the next level, we really needed a dedicated effort to plan our future strategically. All of these factors together have made for a pretty extraordinary opportunity.
The new SOPHIA is in the making. I can feel a great deal of energy coming not only from me or even from just a few of us, but from the group. This is exciting. It is also a really helpful and direct experience of the value and prospects of modern strategic planning. On a personal level, it's pretty wonderful also to see the brilliant woman I married in action - and to appreciate how great she is at what she does.
Stay tuned, because I sincerely believe SOPHIA is poised for some very exciting developments. I've already started getting a number of interested people, groups, and impressively organized and funded programs interested in collaborating with SOPHIA. If you're interested in publicly engaged philosophy, or just in thinking deeply about practical and timely problems, visit our Web site: http://PhilosophersInAmerica.com.
In the next two months we'll have a lot to tell you about our ideas. We will also want to hear your ideas and to involve you in the mission of creating a two way street and new public forums for philosophers and people from other fields and beyond the academy to join together in fruitful conversation, following Socrates example, but maybe without the hemlock.
Dr. Eric Thomas Weber
Executive Director
The Society of Philosophers in America
Weber's site:
