Deans Urge Freshman Seminars

Faculty members will meet tomorrow to discuss a plan to expand the Freshman Seminar program in order to give more first-year students the opportunity for small-group instruction with Faculty members.

In a proposal sent to Faculty members on Thursday, Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen '81-'82 and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz outlined a plan that recommends boosting the number of freshman seminars.

"[Our] concern is whether freshmen are in small-group instruction experiences with Faculty," Pedersen said.

She said that although efforts to increase student-Faculty interaction over the last few years have yielded improvements within concentrations, first-years--who have not yet joined a concentration and are not enrolled in tutorials--haven't benefited.

The Pederson-Wolcowitz proposal highlights the positive experiences most students have had in their freshman seminars but suggests that relatively few first-year students have the chance to work closely with Faculty members.

"[Freshman Seminars] integrate students into the life of the faculty, mitigating the isolation many students feel during their first year here and fostering ties between students and faculty that often endure for years," the proposal reads.

This fall, about 700 first-years applied for spots in the Freshman Seminar program but the program could accommodate only 230 students. And according to Pedersen, the Freshman Seminary program has shrunk almost by half since the 1980s.

The proposal also suggests increasing Faculty involvement in the program--as of now, two thirds of the seminars are taught by lecturers rather than by Faculty members. In addition, it says the Faculty should consider granting exceptions from Core requirements--or even departmental credits--to students who take the seminars.

"We have a lot of undergraduate requirements in comparison with other universities," Pedersen said. "We would want the effect [of the proposed changes] to be freeing on the curriculum."

But, Pedersen said, the initiative would ultimately have to come from the Faculty, since Faculty members will have to contribute time and resources for the seminar program to grow.

" There are many worthy goals in terms of undergraduate education," Pedersen said. "Our concerns are always whether we can meet all of them what are the tradeoffs."

For instance, while Pedersen said she would like freshman seminar offerings to expand to even more areas beyond the humanities, she said some innovation is needed to conceive of small-group instructional experiences within the sciences.

Departmental resources will also play a key role in whether any of these changes can occur.

"The science departments feel very stretched and a bit short-staffed, and they're worried about their capacity to offer freshman seminars and, at the same time, to offer intro classes regularly and have them well-taught," Pedersen said.

Although members of the Faculty will debate the merits of the proposal at a Faculty meeting tomorrow, Pedersen said she is unsure when Faculty will vote on the particular changes.

She said she is hopeful that more first-years will reap the benefits of small-group instruction in years to come.

"We can do a better job of supplying these courses and do a better job letting freshmen know about department courses where they can work closely with a faculty member," she said.