In all its forms Freshman Studies has had three primary goals: (1) to awaken students to the excitement of intellectual life; (2) to foster within the Lawrence community a culture of shared intellectual commitment and curiosity; and (3) to improve students’ skills in critical reading, analytical writing, and reasoned discourse.
Primary “works” (textual, musical, and visual) form the nucleus of the course. Though topics such as the nature of knowledge are implicit in Freshman Studies, all efforts to define a single, overarching theme or to survey the entirety of Western Civilization have been consistently avoided. The faculty has done so in a deliberate attempt to keep a certain openness in the course, one that seems conducive to intellectual exploration and discovery. Put another way, Freshman Studies is not a course in which the faculty imparts accepted knowledge to students so much as one in which instructors show students how to confront ideas in educated ways.
The course requirements for the first term are as follows: three short papers (1-2 pages), two longer papers (3-5 pages), at least one revision, a midterm exam, and a final exam. The course requirements for second term are somewhat different: two 3-5 page papers, one 5-7 page paper, a midterm, and a final. Every instructor must give all of these assignments, though individuals are free to decide how each one figures into a student’s final grade.
