Freshman Studies is the starting point for Lawrence's liberal arts curriculum. The course was designed in the winter of 1945 under the leadership of Lawrence’s president Nathan Pusey as an alternative to a more traditional Freshman English requirement.
Most Freshman English programs emphasize 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 generally subordinated to the pragmatics of the writing assignments. In contrast to such an approach, Freshman Studies has always centered on the study of whole “works”—challenging 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 offer practice in the basic skills of reading, writing, and oral discourse as a by-product of an intellectual adventure rather than as an end in itself.
Initially, the course was a two-term sequence, taught in sections of no more than fifteen 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 of the regular class hours, and students were required to write two 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.
The course has gone through a somewhat circular process of change over the years, in part because higher education itself has been changing as new disciplines and greater specialization have been added to the curriculum, and in part because of the need to mitigate some of its excessive 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 1960's, 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. Before long, 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, and 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. Finally, in 1997, the faculty formally re-affirmed its commitment to Freshman Studies and re-emphasized its central purposes of introducing students to the liberal arts tradition and building skills in reading, writing, and speaking.