May 14 -- While colleges may be scaling back "remedial education" for freshmen, they’re expanding the number of courses that give credit for non-academic work—the so-called basket-weaving courses, many of which increasingly teach political correctness. 

     Today, almost 1,000 colleges in the United States offer "extended orientation programs" for freshmen. While such programs started in the 1980s, there are more and more of them today. At least 20 Massachusetts colleges, for instance, now have "extended orientation" programs. Nationwide, 88% of the courses in these programs carry academic credit. And about 50% of these give credit toward general education or "core" requirements. 

     The most popular freshman orientation program is promoted by the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience at the University of South Carolina. (This program was formerly called "Freshman Year Experience.") The Center has hosted more than 40 conferences since the early 1980s, and these have been attended by more than 15,000 college personnel from across the country. The Center publishes a journal and a newsletter, and sells books and videotapes to develop freshman orientation programs. 

     Some of the courses in these programs are academic, covering basics like "time management" and "note-taking" and class attendance. Yet many of the courses fall into categories that are trendy and politically correct. Boston College, for example, offers a three-credit "Courage to Know" course. This is billed as "an introduction to college life, with readings and discussions to investigate personal and social development in the college years." 

     The programs, or "seminars," apply most of the nostrums of the "progressive" education of high school to college—particularly the displacement of academic goals by social ones. The pedagogical theory of "collaborative learning," for instance, is favored by "Freshman Year Experience" promoters. This type of learning, according to instructional pamphlets published by the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience, is "a radical departure from contemporary practices in post-secondary education" with "a new and different value system, one that regards team-work, cooperation and community as just as important as academic achievement." 

     In large part, these seminars promote the university’s agenda on racism, sexism, and homophobia. Other instructional materials published by the Center, for example, call for "remedial education courses, programs for minority and gay students, diversity programs, and systematic and intrusive education on health issues." 

     In addition, these orientation programs have grown into a big academic business as colleges struggle to admit and retain students who can pay tuition but aren’t prepared for college-level work. The people who designed one of the most popular orientation programs said in a 1989 book, The Freshman Year Experience, that their courses are used by colleges who admit unprepared students because "it would probably be too much to ask institutions with lower probability of freshman success to be honest with prospective freshmen." 

     The chief guru of the "Freshman Year Experience" movement, John Gardner, explained its purpose as follows: "[We’re trying to] reverse an 800-year old tradition that the entering college student has no dignity. They were not worthy of respect and so they had to be put through a series of ritualistic practices that humiliated them. The thesis behind this was that if you take a group of new arrivals and oppress them, you generate cohesiveness and espirit de corps. The problem is that if we take these students and hassle them, they’ll go somewhere else, and most colleges can no longer afford to lose their students." 

    Yet there are some who are suspicious of this booming academic business. A similar expansion of orientation programs in the 1930s petered out due to faculty uneasiness about offering academic credit for "life experience." Gardner warns that a similar resistance may impede today’s programs, "as faculty become more concerned about academic standards in an attempt to achieve academic excellence." 

-- Paul Moreno 
 

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