Alabama spanked Georgia this weekend, while my beloved Ole Miss stuffed alligator this weekend in Florida, but here’s a decidedly unathletic essay about what seems to be the finest philosophy department at any university in the Southeastern Conference: Auburn University. It’s a piece about Kelley Jolley, chair of the department, and his solo project to turn Auburn into a flourishing garden of philosophy to rival Plato’s Academus.

Jolley is always on the lookout for students with a philosophical bent, and has urged his colleagues to recruit aggressively as well. While I was at Auburn, he introduced me to one of the department’s current top prospects for graduate school, a rising senior named Benjamin Pierce. Jolley told me that Pierce’s gift for reasoning was first identified a couple of years ago in an entry-level logic class. “If A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C,” the professor said, introducing the so-called transitive relation.

“Not in rock, paper, scissors,” Pierce volunteered.

Pierce is now majoring in philosophy. “We have high hopes for him,” Jolley told me with the pride of a football coach talking up a strong tackler with great open-field speed. “I would bet that he ends up in a Top 10 graduate program.”

Read on and tell me if this man is the liberal arts professor of the future or an old lion who will soon be extinct.