About Us
Standing Committee on Freshman Seminars 2008-2009
The Committee on Freshman Seminars meets regularly during the academic year and is responsible for reviewing proposals for Freshman Seminars, Extra-Departmental Courses, and House Seminars.
Evelynn Hammonds (Oversight Dean)
Jay M. Harris (Dean of Undergraduate Education and Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies) (Chair)
Stephanie Kenen (Associate Dean of Harvard College and Administrative Director of the Program in General Education) (Ex Officio)
Sandra Naddaff (Senior Lecturer on Literature, Director of the Freshman Seminar Program) (Ex Officio)
Lawrence Buell (Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature)
Joyce E. Chaplin,(James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History)
Peter T. Ellison (John Cowles Professor of Anthropology)
Jerry R. Green (David A Wells Professor of Political Economy and John Leverett Professor) [on leave in spring term]
J. Woodland Hastings (Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences) [on leave in spring term]
John W. Hutchinson (Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mechanics) (on leave in fall term)
David Rodowick (Professor of Visual and Environmenal Studies)
Stephanie Sandler (Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures)
A Brief History of the Freshman Seminar Program
In the Spring of 1960, the Student Council's Committee on Freshman Seminars reported, "The Freshman Seminar Program came into existence with amazing suddenness. The enthusiasm with which the original idea was brought to a practical realization in the space of a few weeks in the Spring of 1959 is a tribute to the vigor and resourcefulness of Harvard's faculty.... The Program has been urged along by a strong sense that Harvard has a responsibility to provide educational leadership, because of its reputation and resources. The specific grant of money which made the Freshman Seminar Program possible has only intensified this underlying feeling that Harvard must always be searching for ways to improve education here and elsewhere." What actually happened was a little more involved than this citation suggests.
On April 18, 1959, the Harvard Crimson reported that the "CEP May Make Change in First-Year Program" and that discussions of the first-year curriculum had been going on for several weeks. By the Spring of 1959, the members of the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) were asking themselves what could be done for the first-year class. There was agreement that freshmen needed more contact with Faculty members. Dean of the College John Monro suggested that some kind of seminar or tutorial was needed. On May 20, 1959, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, McGeorge Bundy, moved on behalf of the Committee on Educational Policy that the Faculty permit "experiments to intensify the intellectual experience of the freshman year," and the motion was passed for a one-year trial program.
What had happened? In fact, the discussion of the first-year curriculum had been ongoing for several years, and these same years witnessed the reformation and strengthening of the tutorial program of the three upper classes. McGeorge Bundy, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wanted develop a program to enliven the Freshman year.
Dean Bundy's staff came across Edwin H. Land's "Generation of Greatness, the Idea of a University in an Age of Science: The Ninth Annual Arthur Dehon Little Memorial Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology," (May 22, 1957). Land had announced, "I would dream that when a freshman enters the university, he would become at once a member of a small group; perhaps of about ten men. He would be associated ... with a mature, established scholar whose first interest is the education ... of this incoming group.... Let me just refer to (this scholar)... as an usher--someone who leads through the door--and describe him as a scholar who has a warm feeling for teaching.... He would associate (these students) with him as colleagues--junior colleagues, to be sure.... He would help these young colleagues look over the university, talk over the professors, talk over the courses; he would start them reading, and then start them going to some lectures. And he would start each one on a personal research project."
Finding support for the thoughts of the Committee on Educational Policy in Edwin Land's speech, Dean Bundy's staff approached this Harvard alumnus to learn more about his vision. Harvard benefitted not only from more detailed suggestions but also from an anonymous gift for startup expenses (Dr. Land permitted his generosity to be publicized at the time of Harvard's 350th Anniversary).
The 1959-60 trial of the Freshman Seminar Program was somewhat confused because of the late date of its implementation as well as the varied proposals that it tested. However, when McGeorge Bundy proposed the continuation of the experiment for another three years in the Spring of 1960, even the most vociferous critics (the Student Council's Committee on Freshman Seminars) concluded, "The Program has revealed to a good many Professors that students are human beings and worth talking to. The Seminars have rekindled for many a delight in teaching for its own sake. The Program has provided to students an amicable and encouraging atmosphere, in which the personal concern of an instructor has replaced the threat of grades as an incentive to performance. Such achievements warrant continuing support for the Freshman Seminars."
The experiment was continued for an additional three years, funded again by Edwin Land. A massive review and evaluation of the Program in the Spring of 1963, led to its permanent establishment in the Faculty of Arts of Sciences. Both faculty and student comments from 1959 to 1996, testify to the value of the Program for all participants. Beginning in 1995-96, funds from the Roger Annenberg Seminar Program were made available to increase the possibilities inherent in the program.
In 2000-2001, Dean of the Faculty Jeremy Knowles and Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan Pedersen initiated discussion on expansion of the Freshman Seminar Program among the faculty. They were able to convince instructional departments to increase their support of the program and to consider counting freshman seminars towards concentration requirements. The Program has grown from 30 seminars in 2000-2001 to over 120 seminars in 2006-2007.
Financial Support for the Freshman Seminar Program
The first four years of the Freshman Seminar Program were made possible by a generous anonymous gift from an alumni who supported the Program as something that would have enriched his Harvard experience. At the celebration of Harvard's 350th Anniversary, Edwin Land dropped the requirement that the gift be listed as anonymous and admitted his role in the funding of the early, formative years of the Program.
Between 1963 and 1994, the bulk of the funding for the Freshman Seminar Program has come from the unrestricted funds controlled by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. This support has been supplemented since 1994-95 by funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Annenberg in memory of their son Roger who praised small group instruction while he was at Harvard. The funds are provided through the Roger Annenberg Seminar Program. This fund supports Freshman and House Seminars in excess of the number of seminars offered in 1994-95, or other expenses not usually supported by the Faculty of Arts in 1994-95. It also will provide extra funds to all seminars to provide for set-up costs, trips, and refreshments for participants.
Generous funds are also provided through the gift of the directors of the J.M.R. Barker Foundation to establish the Robert R. Barker Fund for Small-Group Instruction in Honor of Jeremy R. Knowles (Amory Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences). The fund is to be used to support small-group instruction in the College, and thus to encourage close and early contact between undergraduates and members of the faculty.
In 2008-2009 the the Roger Annenberg Seminar Program supported:
Paulo Barrozo (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies)
39l: Punishing Cruelly: The Jurisprudence of Crime, Punishment, Cruelty and Mercy
Peter Becker (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
38i: Literatures of Historical Guilt
Stefan Bird-Pollan (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies)
42t: The Age of Reason
Karen Bishop (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
33n: Literary Afterlives of the Body
Michel Canfield (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
21q: Biological Impostors: Mimicry and Camouflage in Nature
Judith Chapman (Department of Anthropology)
44q: Evolution and Human Behavior
Noah Dauber (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies)
48i: States, Cities, and Tribes: Varieties of Political Organization
Nenita Ponce de León Elphick (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
31s: Heist: The Culture and Politics of Art Theft, Grave Robbery, and Looting
Jacob Emery (Department of Literature and Comparative Literature)
34n: Cruelty to Animals: Art, Innocence, Suffering
Rena Fonseca (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
44p: Contemporary India: Fact and Fiction
Deborah Foster (Department of Folklore and Mythology>
32v: The Art of Storytelling
Hallie Franks (Department of Classics)
34l: Cultural Outsiders in the Ancient World
Charles Freilich (Harvard Kennedy School)
42n: Comparative National Security of Middle Eastern Countries
Katherine Healan Gaston (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies)
43i: Secularism: Religion’s Rival or Democracy’s Religion?
Katrina Hagen (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
35l: War, Violence and Memory in 20th Century Europe
Lori Harrison-Kahan (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
30e: Rewriting America: Race, Feminism, and Classic Narratives
Joshua Humphreys (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
35q: Dilemmas of the Public Intellectual in the 20th Century
Damon Krukowski (Department of Visual and Environmental Studies)
36m: Noisy Art
Max Likin (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
47v: Understanding Capitalism Through 20th-Century History
Ofrit Liviatan (Department of Government)
42k: Comparative Law and Religion
Sally Allen Livingston (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
37i: Love, Medieval Style
Theodore Macdonald (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies)
41g: The Faces of Human Rights in Latin America: Anthropological Perspectives
James Murphy (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
31w: A Question of Taste
Rani Neutill (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
41l: Race and Psychoanalysis
John Ondrovcik (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
47i: Violence in 20th-Century Europe
Gregg Peeples (Department of Government)
42u: The Laws of War and the War on Terrorism
Laura Schlosberg (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures)
42x: Leisure, Play, and Idleness in Russian Literature
Daniel Shore (Department of English and American Literature and Language)
31x: Epic Warfare From Homer to Milton
Scott Sowerby (Committee on Degrees in History and Literature)
31z: Sex and Scandal in Early Modern England
Katherine Stanton (Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality)
45f: American Splendor: Alternative American Comics
Kevin Verstrepen (Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology)
22o: Principles of Industrial Fermentation: Beer, Wine, Bioethanol and Beyond
In 2008-2009 the Barker-Knowles Fund supported:
Sacvan Bercovitch (Department of English and American Literature and Language)
37m: American Dissent
Jacqueline Bhabha (Harvard Law School and Committee on Degrees in Social Studies) and
Jennifer Leaning (Harvard School of Public Health)
46p: Human Rights in Peace and War
Arthur Dempster (Department of Statistics)
23f: Uncertainty, Probability, and Climate Change
Alan Dershowitz (Harvard Law School)
43y: What are the Origins of Morality, Rights, and Law?
Marla Eby (Harvard Medical School)
49n: Measurements of the Mind: The Creation and Critique of the Psychological Test
Catherine Z. Elgin (Graduate School of Education)
31j: Skepticism and Knowledge
Myron Essex (Harvard School of Public Health) and
Tun-Hou Lee (Harvard School of Public Health)
25t: AIDS in Africa
25v: Avian Influenza: Emerging Infectious Disease
Richard H. Fallon, Jr. (Harvard Law School)
40i: The Supreme Court in U.S. History
Donald Alan Goldmann (Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health)
25g: Impact of Infectious Diseases on History and Society
Jerome Elliot Groopman (Harvard Medical School)
23k Insights from Narratives of Illness
Dudley Herschbach (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology)
22e: Molecular Motors: Wizards of the Nanoworld
David H. Hubel (Harvard Medical School)
21o: Neurophysiology of Visual Perception
Maxine Isaacs (Harvard Kennedy School)
41p: American Presidential Campaigns and Elections 1960-2008
Michael Kahn (Harvard Medical School)
26u: What Is Mental Illness?
Shahram Khoshbin (Harvard Medical School)
23l: Medicine, Law, and Ethics: An Introduction
William Klemperer (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology)
22j: Seeing by Spectroscopy
Roberto Kolter (Harvard Medical School)
23z: Short History of DNA
Jonathan Levy (School of Public Health)
44v: Urban Environmental Health
Richard Light (Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Kennedy School)
44x: Tackling the Toughest Challenges for Modern American Higher Education
Clifford Lo (School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School)
23m: Nutrition and Public Health
Kevin Madigan Harvard Divinity School)
49g: The Holocaust: History, Representation, and Reaction
Phillip R. Malone (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Harvard Law School)
43q: Cyberspace in Court: Law of the Internet
Stephen Marks (Harvard School of Public Health)
42v: Human Rights Between Rhetoric and Reality
Everett Mendelsohn (Department of the History of Science)
44t: The Atomic Bomb in History and Culture
Karin Michels (Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health)
25k You Are What You Eat
Charles Nelson (Harvard Medical School)
26m Human Development: Early Experience and Developmental Programming
Judith Palfrey (Harvard Medical School)
24n: Child Health in America
Samantha Power (Harvard Kennedy School) and
Cass Sunstein (Harvard Law School)
48l Extremism: Causes, Consequences, Cures
Nancy Rappaport (Harvard Medical School)
25n Understanding Psychological Development, Disorder and Treatment: Learning through Literature and Research
David Scadden (Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology)
26v: Blood: Blood: From Gory to Glory
Ronald Schouten (Harvard Medical School)
25w Responsibility, the Brain, and Behavior
Richard Wilson (Department of Physics)
22z: Quantitative Methods in Public Policy Decisions