When I tell people I’m a teaching professor, they sometimes ask what that means. In the University of California (UC) system, being a teaching professor is a bit like being a professor at a liberal arts college, only with teaching assistants and other forms of support typical of research universities. I teach two undergrad classes every quarter, or six a year. The main differences with most of my colleagues are that, in addition to supervising graduate students, they teach four classes a year, one of which is typically a graduate class. Otherwise our jobs have much in common.

Being a teaching professor in the UC system is pretty great! To my knowledge, only a handful of people have held such a position in UC philosophy departments. One is my colleague Reuven Brandt. Another is Mara Harrell, now at the University of Virginia, who was also a teaching professor when she was our colleague at UCSD. (Check out the journal Mara edits, Teaching Philosophy, for great articles on the theory and practice of teaching.) David Jennings is a teaching professor in philosophy at UC Merced, while Brian Haas is at UC Riverside (where teaching professors are called professors of teaching).

Classes I regularly teach include Topics in Political Philosophy; Contemporary Moral Issues; Ethics and Society I and II; Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics; and Philosophy & Literature. In 2026 I’m excited to be teaching a brand new class, Philosophy & Animals.