​In the immediate aftermath of her 2025 Tom Regan lecture, philosophy professor Sarah Scott (left) reports a huge upsurge in interest in animal studies at Manhattan College.

Her Animals and Society class is overtallied at 31, with another nine students on the waitlist. As a result, she says, the department chair has decided to submit this “special topics” class to the curriculum committee so that it might be added as an annual class in the catalogue. This was not the only outcome of the lecture (which you can see in its entirety here), which was on the leading nineteenth-century antivivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe. Manhattan College’s Dean has discussed alternatives to animal use with the college’s biology professors, and students who do not wish to conduct animal experiments can now choose an alternative assignment.

As Sarah told us, staging the Regan lecture at a small college like Manhattan generated much more stir than it would likely have had if it had been held at a larger, more widely known place of learning. Three classes attended the lecture, as did the Dean and other faculty members. That the lecture was in the philosophy of animal rights, Sarah added, valorized both taking animals seriously as subjects of intellectual inquiry and the rich history of philosophy, with both reinforcing the value of the other. It’s perhaps, therefore, not surprising that interest was piqued among students and faculty that animals and philosophy deserved both further investigation and action. A further point shared with us was that the response to the talk by Sue Leary (pictured right), who’s been professionally involved in the anti-vivisection movement for more than four decades, demonstrated that the lecture was not simply a historical excavation of a nineteenth-century movement, but the context for a living issue that demanded moral and policy attention.

You can read a sample section from Sarah’s lecture in our annual report.