Freshman Studies has a long and successful history as the starting point for Lawrence's liberal arts curriculum. Created in the winter of 1945 under the leadership of Nathan Pusey, who was to go on from Lawrence to the presidency of Harvard University, the course was designed as an alternative to a more traditional Freshman English requirement.
Typical Freshman English programs focus extensively on the development of skills in writing and reading, with course readings drawn from textbooks of miscellaneous short essays arranged around a number of broad, sometimes amorphous, topics. In such courses, the readings are largely subordinated to the pragmatics of the writing assignments. In contrast to such an approach, Freshman Studies has always centered itself around the study of whole "works" -- significant and compelling texts in philosophy, history, literature, and the natural and social sciences, as well as works of visual art and music. It was designed, that is, to develop the basic skills of reading, writing, and oral discourse as a corollary of an intellectual adventure rather than as an end in itself.
In the beginning, the course was a two-term sequence, taught in sections of no more than 15 students, by instructors who exchanged classes in the middle of each term in order to assure the students a multiplicity of points of view. Lectures took place outside the regular class hours, and students were required to write 11 essays (including a research paper), prepare two formal talks, and devote an additional three hours a week to a selected workshop in creative art. Thus, the demands upon the time of both students and faculty (in an era when most departments consisted of just one or two members) were obviously very large. But the success of the course in meeting many, if not all, of its aims, established it as the curricular centerpiece of the Lawrence experience.
Over the years, the course has gone through a somewhat circular process of change, in part because higher education itself has been changing, and in part because of the need to mitigate some of the course's heavy demands on student and faculty time. The creative workshop vanished in 1952. The lecture series, the writing requirement, and the oral presentation aspect were all gradually brought into line with realistic expectations and time constraints. Still, by the middle of the 1960s, in reaction to the growth of disciplinary specialization and its demands upon student and faculty time, many instructors began to express dissatisfaction with the course and its achievements. In 1969, responding to a wide-ranging re-evaluation of the Lawrence curriculum, the faculty reduced Freshman Studies to a single term course, supplemented by a term of discipline-oriented courses called Topics of Inquiry, and, in 1974, Freshman Studies actually disappeared for a while, replaced by a series of Topics-style courses called Freshman Seminars.
Under the guise of offering Freshman Seminars, however, some faculty members continued to teach courses like the old Freshman Studies and to argue for its values and benefits. These arguments prevailed. In 1978 the faculty reversed course and created a program consisting of a term of Freshman Studies and a term of Freshman Seminar. Then, in 1986, as a result of the re-emergence of interest in the broad principles of liberal education, the faculty completed the circle of change by re-establishing the Freshman Studies program in its current two-term form. A decade later, a faculty review of the program completed the circle of change by re-affirming the broad principles of the course and, with some alterations in format and assignments, endorsing the course as it exists today.
