Right now, Furman is in the process of re-evaluating its First Year Seminar Program. The upcoming work of the First Year Seminar oversight committee are part of a larger evaluation of the program required by Furman’s accreditation agency, the Southern Association for Colleges and Schools. In the upcoming year, the oversight committee will be collecting information from students and faculty, researching student evaluations from seminars in years past, and proposing a potential set of changes to the faculty for a vote. Should the First Year Seminar Program continue, and what changes should we make to it?

First, what is good about the program that deserves to be maintained? Seminars offer students the opportunity to begin building a close relationship with a professor. Writing seminars do equip students with the skills needed to write papers at a college level and introduce students to the multitude of resources available to them through the university library. These writing seminars function as prerequisites for a number of upper-level courses, giving students the flexibility to take courses that suit their interests instead of simply restricting them to introductory-level courses in many academic departments. Also, if students are able to take a seminar that corresponds to their interests, the program offers a unique opportunity at the beginning of college to study a specific academic subject in a thorough and intensive way.

Second, what about the First Year Seminar program needs reevaluation and revision? The way in which classes are assigned gives students very little agency, and students often find themselves placed in specific studies that fail to pique their interests and that do not relate to the disciplines they want to study. The inconsistency in the content and difficulty of seminars compounds this problem. Some seminars are disproportionately difficult and require extensive research and work, while other seminars are less rigorous.

Third, how can the university change the seminar program that maintains the positive effects of the program while minimizing its less effective aspects? First, students should only be required to take one seminar, in the fall semester of their freshman year. This seminar should focus on cultivating writing skills in relation to a specific academic topic. Second, the seminars offered should be general and diverse enough so as not to limit students to studying a specific subject that fails to further their academic interests. Finally, the requirements for seminars need to be outlined with greater specificity, implementing standards that give professors the freedom to explore particular academic topics in complex ways while differentiating seminars from typical lecture courses. The university’s goal should be to create set of seminars for students in the first semester of their first year to provide students with the skills required to navigate their college experiences.

Finally, we need to realize what role alterations to the First Year Seminar program could have in larger policy debates on campus. More seminar classes require more professors to teach those seminars. Further, since beginning the seminar program in 2008 the university committed to hiring 15 new faculty members, in part to offer seminars. This trend of hiring new professors seems to be shifting in the opposite direction, as the administration is not replacing retiring professors in some departments. Only requiring one seminar per student would be one way to free up professors to teach other courses, which seems particularly relevant in light of the university’s current reluctance to replace retiring professors. These larger consequences should not dissuade us from evaluating the First Year Seminar Program on its own merits and flaws, but we must also realize that the choices the university makes in this situation affect a number of other areas of concern. We cannot discuss the seminar program in a vacuum; discussions about the seminar program should occur in a larger context and with an eye to other debates, issues, and questions that we should be addressing.