Memorandum: Freshman Seminars

To: Academic Deans, Directors, and Department Heads
From: Bob Holub, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Todd Diacon, Vice Provost for Academic Operation
Subject: All Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty
Date: Jan 31, 2007

We are writing today to inform you of an exciting program we are in the process of implementing, and to ask for your participation and support.

As you know, the campus has placed an increasing emphasis on student success, and perhaps the best measure of our student success comes from retention of students. Our record in this area must improve, especially in the first and second years.

To address retention the campus has decided, pending final approval by the Faculty Senate in March, to implement a program of freshman seminars. These seminars will bring students into close contact with faculty members in their initial year, which will introduce them to the excitement of learning in higher education. The seminars will provide a counter to the large lecture courses in which most students have to enroll, and to the large number of teaching assistants who have contact with students in their initial year at UT. The seminars will not be the only way we will address retention, but we hope and anticipate that it will have an immediate and positive impact.

Participation in instruction of freshman seminars is open to all tenured and tenure-track faculty on the Knoxville campus. Any faculty member teaching a freshman seminar as an overload will receive a $1500 stipend in a research fund.

Seminars will be offered as First Year Studies courses and will carry the number First Year Studies 129. They will be one-credit offerings given on a credit/non-credit basis. It is expected that students will spend no more than two hours each week preparing for the seminar.

Faculty members are encouraged to choose topics that are appropriate to a one-credit course, that have some interest for incoming freshmen, and that give students an insight into the excitement of the academy. At the Provost’s former institution, a classics professor offered a seminar on “Indiana Jones and the Elgin Marbles: The Myth and Reality of Archaeology”; an astronomer gave a seminar on “Intelligent Life in the Universe”; an historian offered “Piracy and History in the British Empire”; and biologists gave seminars on “How and Why do Birds Sing,” “Evolution and Intelligent Design,” “Brain, Mind, Music, Culture,” and “Recent Climate Change.” Some professors teach their favorite book (the Provost used Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil successfully for many years), while others would teach an opera, then take students to that opera; or teach on the museums in the area and schedule field trips to these museums. Faculty should also feel free to teach something that might not come up in an ordinary course in their department, or something completely outside their disciplinary field, an academic hobby of sorts. It is important only that the seminar have intellectual substance, that it is narrow enough for a single unit offering, and that it have appeal for incoming undergraduates.

Senior administrators who hold faculty titles have already agreed to contribute to this program next year. Todd Diacon will offer a seminar on “Race and Race Relations in Brazil.” Bob Holub will read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil with incoming students. And Loren Crabtree will give a seminar on a topic related to this year’s life-of-the-mind book.

I hope that many of you will offer a seminar in the inaugural year of the program, either next fall or in the spring of 2008. To do so, please go to the Web site (http://www.utk.edu/freshmanseminar/) and fill in the form, or email us at froshsem@utk.edu, and someone will get in touch with you about your participation.