YOUR COURSE schedule shouldn't make you yawn. Many students are often less than enthusiastic about their courses. They sometimes chalk that sentiment off as a necessary evil of required courses and area requirements. But finding interesting classes and getting excited about learning is crucial to getting as much out of an education as possible.
The University Seminars (USEM) program, which offers small seminars on non-traditional topics to first-year students, offers relief from course boredom. With its recent awarding of sabbatical fellowships to USEM professors, the Office of the President has taken steps to ensure the continued value of USEMs in providing intriguing course options. The University should continue to expand the program with more fellowship money for USEM professors.
President John T. Casteen III recently announced the awarding of the first two Storrs and Shaughnessy University-Seminars Sabbatical Fellowships. The fellowships provide a semester of full-pay research leave so that professors are able to produce work that will eventually become the basis for a new USEM. Farzaneh Milani, associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Sarah Farrell, assistant professor of nursing, are the first two recipients of the awards.
These fellowships and the seminars they'll produce will bring new and exciting topics to first-years, bridging the often-expansive distance between the worlds of underclassmen and research professors. This improves the quality of the so-called "First Year Experience" in several ways.
First, it exposes students to the most interesting and intriguing topics in various fields before they are turned off to the field by boring survey classes. While they are necessary for foundational knowledge, large introductory classes are often painful for professors to teach and for students to take. If these courses provide a bad first impression of a subject, students may get an overly negative impression of what a field is really all about.
An extensive array of USEMs promises to capture the interest of students at the beginning of their undergraduate years so they get early contact with the interesting parts of different fields. As a result, students could decide earlier what major interests them and avoid wasting credits by switching majors or delaying their decision.
These fellowships also reward professors for doing research that is interesting from a purely academic perspective, even if it may not be directly useful. Because many research grants are provided by corporations in the private sector which are usually funding projects to serve some tangible interest professors have an incentive to devote effort to developing technology or new ideas that will make a profit or benefit a third party. Research projects purely for the purpose of exploring intriguing subject matter often get lost in the process since there may not be anyone to fund them.
Furthermore, the USEM program does an excellent job of serving a main mission of a liberal arts education: teaching students to think critically. By remaining outside the realm of classes taken to fulfill area requirements or as prerequisites, USEMs encourage students to work for the sake of exploring a new area of knowledge instead of satisfying a requirement. As a result, such courses provide more room for activities that demand thinking instead of memorizing facts and regurgitating them on a multiple-choice test.
Critics of the USEM program may argue that the core knowledge provided by those often-despised required classes is the most important thing to be gained during college. But USEMs need not be seen as a threat to a traditional curriculum, but rather as an addition to it. There's room for both USEMs and traditional courses; in fact, seminars that promote thinking and get students excited about learning have the potential to improve students' desire to move quickly through those introductory courses in order to get to the interesting advanced work they got a taste of in their seminar.
The only drawback of the fellowships is that there will only be two awards for the immediate future. The program can only realize its full potential if it can provide first years access to new, well-researched USEMs on a large scale. To do that, the number of fellowships needs to be expanded.
According to University spokeswoman Louise Dudley, the fellowship program is funded by an endowment, so at least two awards will be awarded every year for the foreseeable future. But, she noted, unless private donations are earmarked for the program, the likelihood of expanding the number of fellowships in the near future is low.
The fellowships promise to maintain the success of the USEM program and keep it on a path of steady improvement. In order to keep that trend of improvement going strong, unrestricted money from the Capital Campaign -- money not designated by donors for specific projects -- should be devoted to increasing the number of fellowships available to professors. If that happens, no first-year ever should have any reason to yawn at their course schedule.
(Bryan Maxwell is the Cavalier Daily Opinion Editor.)
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