I have many concerns regarding Janelle DeWitt and how she conducted herself in class. She has narrow ideas about what is valid and good scholarship. Unfortunately, this view seemed to be affected by the race and gender of the students. More than once she chose to ignore the pronouns requested by the transgender student in class. The most alarming was her racially insensitive and bias statements on non-western thought. Besides this, she is inconsistent with her grading and provides zero explanation for it. In this class you either conform and agree with her or be outcasted. I received the grade I wanted but it wasn't easy swallowing and witnessing the racial aggressions so I will not be taking another philosophy class with J. Dewitt. I suggest fellow POC to stay clear of her as well.

I LOVED Professor DeWitt. She is such an interesting person and gives engaging lectures, and is extremely fun to talk to during office hours. I took this class remotely, and while I think this class would be 1000x better taken in person, she did the best she could given the circumstances. My main grievances with the class was that she went over the allotted lecture time almost every class period, but she recorded all the lectures and kept them up for the whole quarter so its not as though I was time constrained by her taking them down a week later. The second half of the class is super interesting, talking about abortion and the death penalty and gun control, and you get to choose what you write about for the final paper. Her midterm and final were slightly challenging, but only if you didn't watch and write notes for her lectures. I made sure I took meticulous notes for each lecture since the exams were open note and I was a fine. Definitely would recommend this class!

DISCLAIMER:I took this class remotely in Spring 2020.
For this class, we had a midterm which was 2 essays in 24 hours, a final paper due Week 10, and a final exam that was multiple choice. The workload was not heavy at all but there was readings that I never really did. Her lectures were recorded and posted asynchronously so we were able to watch them whenever we wanted to. What bothered me about her lecture style is that she did not use slides. Instead, she would screen-share her notes on a word doc and would read off of them pretty fast. This made it difficult to pay attention because I found myself racing to copy her super long notes instead of listening to what she was actually saying. Her lectures were also usually over an hour which made is very tiring to copy her notes three times a week. The first half of this class was very boring but the second half was super interesting since we learned about abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and gun control. I think I would have enjoyed this class more if her lecture style was more accommodating (for example, if she provided us with slides that we could annotate) so that I can actually pay better attention. The professor was really nice though and I do not blame her considering that we are all new to remote learning. Overall, this is a pretty easy class just keep up with the lectures so that you do not have to take notes for hours the week before the exams.