Seminars Offer Freshmen Time in Studio

Years before President Drew G. Faust created the Task Force on the Arts in 2007 to examine the role that arts plays at Harvard, the Freshman Seminar Program was already responding to a perceived change in the student body: their increased interest in artistic endeavors.

The Task Force, comprised of faculty, students, and professional artists associated with the Harvard community, released a report last December emphasizing the value of the arts in research institutions such as Harvard. According to Faust, the findings called for an end to the “‘curricular banishment of the arts,” and has generated much anticipation for a greater presence of the arts in academic offerings.

However, the Freshman Seminar Program—which is entering its 50th year—had already begun to broaden arts-oriented curricular opportunities for freshman. These seminars, which typically are capped at a dozen or so students, provide incoming undergraduates with the chance to engage with faculty while exploring a specific subject. The program strives to emphasize humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences equally. Over the past decade, the program has expanded quickly, growing from 33 courses in the 2000-2001 academic year to 132 this academic year. Recently, it has added more creative arts and studio based courses to its selection, a process that has occurred in conjunction with the creation of the Task Force.

Mya M. Mangawang, who will teach her first freshman seminar entitled “Compulsion to Photograph,” this spring, believes that small class sizes are critical to enriching the study of arts on campus. Mangawang is new to the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Her hiring is part of a trend of employing young faculty to teachfreshman seminars that, according to the Program’s Department Administrator, Corinna S. Rohse.

“It’s a sign of the hiring in [the Music and Visual and Environmental Studies] departments,” says Rohse. “One of the first things they do is encourage [new faculty] to teach freshmen seminars, because how better to bring new students into your discipline than by putting together some young and new exciting faculty with young and new exciting students?”

To Rohse, many of the studio-based seminars have a notable sense of energy and excitement. “We have a special love of studio seminars and the other small literature-based seminars, which don’t have as high a profile as some of the other seminars out there do,” says Rohse. “But they have a very keen group of students.” Damon H. Krukowski, who teaches the popular studio-based seminar “Noisy Art,” believes that the intimate structure of freshman seminars is conducive to the artistic process. His seminar, which incorporates various media into the goal of making art from noise, is an example of one of the creative courses that has been a staple of the program ever since it began to expand. “There’s an aspect of play in the arts that seems to match a goal of the seminar program,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I think of my seminar course as an invitation, rather than an introduction.”

Sandra A. Naddaff ’75, director of the Freshman Seminar Program, notes that the influx of studio-based freshman seminars is a result of the program’s commitment to anticipate student interest by providing a wide variety of courses. While bolstering its offerings, the program has been actively engaged in providing classes that integrate elements of the creative arts. “What we hope most for in the freshmen seminars,” Naddaff says, “is that students will have curricular experiences that broaden their horizons in some way.”

Though the VES department offers many studio-based courses, non-concentrators often find it difficult to get accepted into them. Thus, the opportunity for freshmen to take classes taught by VES faculty is another reason Naddaff feels it is important to offer these first-year seminars. “It is a way for students who are not concentrating in VES to have the experience of a studio course they might not otherwise get,” Naddaff says.

Rohse says freshman seminars are a means for incoming undergraduates to experiment with new and unexplored subject matter. She has noticed that students often discover a new passion and then decide to concentrate in that area. In fact, according to Krukowski, a number of VES concentrators took “Noisy Art” in their freshman year. These concentrators include both students who were already familiar with the material, as well as those who had no experience with VES before. “Some certainly knew they would be in VES beforehand,” he says, “but others came to the seminar without previous studio experience—just curiosity...both those groups of students bring an equally important element to the seminar mix.”

—Staff writer Melanie E. Long can be reached at long2@fas.harvard.edu.