The College of the Holy Cross - First Year Program

The following article is taken directly from Change Magazine, May/June 1998.

Connecting the Academic and Social Lives of Students
The Holy Cross First-Year Program

BY ROYCE A. SINGLETON, JR.,
ROBERT H. GARVEY, & GARY A. PHILLIPS

Academic reform is seldom bold or daring; it rarely entails radical change. Yet, in spite of itself, the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit liberal arts college in central Massachusetts, seems to have planted the seeds of revolution among its students and faculty. Consider these observations:

Friday night in the residence hall, a member of the dorm staff encounters a group of first-year students sitting in the corridor engaged in animated discussion. She's surprised that, on a weekend night, they aren't in their rooms or at an off-campus party.
At halftime of a basketball game, with his team well ahead. a first-year African-American athlete asks his coach for permission to leave the bench to attend his class's evening seminar. Four years later, he is pursuing graduate studies in law and pastoral ministry.
A Vietnamese-American student, described by her first-year instructor as petrified of mathematics, repeatedly seeks to withdraw but is helped and remains in the yearlong course. She later takes an additional math course, is selected for the college's honors program, and graduates as an economics major.
A bathroom sink in one of the residence halls has been damaged. Unless the guilty party comes forward, assessments for such damage are to be divided equally among all residents. In an unprecedented move, a first-year student admits to the associate dean of students personal responsibility for damages.
In a first-year seminar, an associate professor teaches not only mathematics but also texts outside her discipline and discusses issues central to student life. Transformed by this experience, she adopts collaborative-learning techniques in her other math courses and co-authors a calculus text with a collaborative-learning approach.
In the second semester of their yearlong courses, an untenured classics instructor and a tenured religious studies professor each restructure their courses by giving students primary responsibility for planning and leading daily class discussions.
Over 100 first-year students and nine faculty members engage in a frank, sometimes heated, three-hour discussion about the effects of alcohol on the community. A student who admits to daily "blackout" drinking claims this drinking affects him and no one else. Contesting this view, another student rejoins that his behavior does affect others---she knows about his drinking and worries constantly about his well-being. A faculty member challenges the student to reflect on how the whole class suffers from his inability to contribute when he comes to class unprepared and hungover.
On a bright, sunny day, 165 students from the same residence hall work together on a banner commemorating their first year of college.

These observations come from our study of an innovative program for first-year students implemented six years ago at Holy Cross. The program was a response to distinctive internal forces and to more general symptoms across higher education.

BEGINNINGS

The program came at the end of an intense, decade-long self-examination. In the 1960s and 1970s, Holy Cross had experienced fundamental changes, including a shift to coeducation, a sharp decline in the number of Jesuit faculty, and an increasingly research-oriented faculty. Given these transformations, in the 1980s the college crafted a mission statement that sought to identify common ground for a predominantly lay and largely non-Catholic faculty, an overwhelmingly Catholic student body, and an institution with a strong Jesuit tradition. According to that statement:

...To participate in the life of Holy Cross is to accept an invitation to join in dialogue about basic human questions: What is the moral character of learning and teaching? How do we find meaning in life and history? What are our obligations to one another? What is our special responsibility to the world's poor and powerless?
...The College is dedicated to forming a community which supports the intellectual growth of all its members while offering them opportunities for spiritual and moral development.
...Holy Cross endeavors to create an environment in which integrated learning is a shared responsibility, pursued in classroom and laboratory, studio and theater, residence and chapel.

     Soon after the mission statement was drafted, two committee reports, one examining student life, the other the overall curriculum, were prepared for the college's 10-year reaccreditation visit. Although focused on seemingly disparate issues, the reports articulated similar themes and had a common recommendation.
     The student life report concluded that student social life outside the classroom revolved around alcohol consumption. Moreover, this aspect of peer culture was largely unaffected by other dimensions of students' lives--not by their academic experiences, their formal ex-tracurricular activities, or their religious beliefs and activities. The curriculum report found that students' learning lacked integration, not only among their courses but also between those courses and students' lives outside the classroom. In short, both reports implied that the campus lacked a serious intellectual community. The intellectual life of most students began and ended within the classroom.
     Both reports, then, looked to create more integrated, intellectually oriented forms of campus life. The student life committee envisioned a community with more meaningful ties among faculty, students, and student affairs staff, and a student culture supportive of the intellectual, extracurricular, and religious life of the college.
     The curriculum committee envisioned an education directed at the whole student and designed to have a formative influence on the values of students. Both committees called upon the faculty to become more knowledgeable about student life; and both committees endorsed the idea of a first-year program.
     These conclusions were not startling revelations, to be sure; nor are they unique to Holy Cross. A major theme of Ernest Boyer's 1987 Carnegie report, College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, was the disconnectedness of college education. Boyer noted, for example, that "what students do in the dining halls, on the playing fields, and in the rathskeller late at night all combine to influence the outcome of the college education...the challenge...is to extend resources for learning...and to see academic and non-academic life as interlocked." One way to "convince students that they are part of an intellectually vital, caring community," Boyer argued, was to create a first-year program.
     More recently, William Willimon and Thomas Naylor (The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education) identified substance abuse as a visible symptom of crisis in higher education. Underlying this crisis, they concluded, were three fundamental problems: meaninglessness, fragmentation of a student's life into unrelated components, and the absence of community.
     Willimon was the driving force behind recent changes at Duke University that seek to promote campus intellectual life. To insulate first-year students from the traditional Duke social scene, for example, they now live in separate, first-year residence halls.
      The "malaise" identified by Boyer, Willimon, and Naylor partly explains today's proliferation of first-year programs. Holy Cross finally adopted its program in 1990, following years of debate in which many alternatives were rejected. This debate established the boundaries of the first-year program:

Interdisciplinarity would be sacrificed, to the extent that faculty would teach in their own areas of expertise.
Students would have common intellectual experiences to encourage the development of an intellectual community.
The curriculum would be integrated with extracurricular events to promote an intellectual life outside the classroom.
Classes would be small to facilitate interaction among students and faculty.
The program would help sustain the Jesuit tradition, with its emphases on social justice and the connections between intellectual and moral life.

The program ultimately adopted would be offered to 20 to 25 percent of each incoming class for a period of five years, beginning in fall 1992. The trial period acknowledged the program's experimental character, and it was believed that the college could support this fraction of each class without putting too much strain on its resources. Still, it was hoped that, even scaled down, the program would have a significant, positive impact on the wider student culture.

Royce A. Singleton, Jr., is Professor of Sociology: Robert H. Garvey is Associate Professor of Physics; and Gary A. Phillips is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. Garvey and Phillips served as the first and second directors, respectively, of the Holy Cross First-Year Program, and Singleton taught in the Program in its second year. The authors thank their colleagues Dave Hummon, Jim Kee, Dave Damiano, and Frank Vellaccio, for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

The First-Year Program at Holy Cross is built around a central theme, which takes the form of a question adapted from Tolstoy's A Confession: "How then shall we live?"

Each semester, FYP sponsors 10 to 12 co-curricular events tied to a theme and a related core question. This year, students and faculty visited one of the two remaining 19th-century working factories in Lowell Mass. They then traveled to Newport, R.I., pictured, and Ellis Island to further explore the semester's question: "How then shall we live in a world of contradiction?"

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