Seminars receive mixed marks

When Princeton's freshman seminar program was first formed two decades ago, professors hoped it would quell what they saw as a rising tide of anti-intellectualism and bring students and faculty closer together.

"Students didn't seem to engage very much intellectually, even though they also had precepts," history professor and program founder Anthony Grafton said in an e-mail. "We had the sense that we were turning off a lot of really gifted people."

As members of the Class of 2010 look back on their first semester, some of those who took freshman seminars this fall say they are pleased with the personal attention they received from professors and the intellectual engagement the courses provide. Forty percent of the class took freshman seminars in the fall term, Associate Dean of the College Peter Quimby, who is the director of the freshman seminar program, said.

Others familiar with the program, however — including faculty members who teach freshman seminars — worry the classes only partially improve the larger problems they were meant to address.

Former seminar program director John Fleming GS '63 said he believes the classes benefit students but worried that they fail to leave a lasting mark.

"My criticism is that they're the frosting on the nonexistent cake," he said. "It is more and more the case that the ideal we present — undergraduates working alongside great professors — is getting to be rarer and rarer in the freshman and sophomore years."

"The freshman seminar is a good thing," he added, "[but] it ought to be presenting a kind of pattern to a freshman. It means you hit the ground running in having to get some research skills."

Grafton agreed that larger issues, including lack of academic interest and poor interaction between students and faculty, remain to be addressed.

"After two decades of seminars, Princeton still does not provide an intensely intellectual environment for most undergraduates," said Grafton, who created the program in 1986 and was its director for 12 years. "And many still tune out the academic side of things here pretty effectively."

In all, 70 seminars will be offered this year; more than half were offered in the fall.

Seminar professors this fall included former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine '56, Provost Chris Eisgruber '83 and "Practical Ethics" author Peter Singer.

John Marshall '10 was in popular English professor Jeff Nunowaka's seminar, FRS 165: A Brief History of Individuality. He took the seminar for its topic, but found that his experience went beyond the subject of the course.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Nunokawa invited the class to his apartment to see a movie because "everyone in the class is friends with him," Marshall said. "[The seminar] helped me to know my professor on a personal level and have a personal academic camaraderie with my classmates."

But Brenda Jin '10 said she was disappointed with her seminar. She took FRS 153: France and the Holocaust, in part to fulfill her historical analysis distribution requirement, and she came away thinking that her time could have been better spent in a different course.

"I don't regret taking it, but I wouldn't recommend taking a freshman seminar," she said. "I wouldn't do it again because I feel like I have a lot of other course work to get done, and since they only let me take four courses this semester, I feel like I could have started something else really cool."

Fleming said that some of the best seminars offered have often gone unnoticed. "Freshmen don't know anything," he said. "Some of the very best seminars have been under-enrolled. I don't want the huge course to be 'The War in Iraq,' or any very obvious topics."

Nonetheless, he added that the program "is one of the times when you see where the institution is putting its money where its mouth is."

"It makes a statement about the kind of institution we want to be."