As our students take exams and finish final projects to wrap up the fall semester, we in the Dean’s Office are also putting final touches on big projects. This has been an exciting semester as we start to roll out programs several months in the making.
In the September edition of this newsletter, I shared with you the three pillars of our strategic vision for the School of Liberal Arts. These priorities—advancing a more global liberal arts education; embracing and our dual identity as a world-class research university and liberal arts college; and deepening our engagement with New Orleans and the Gulf South—guide a wide range of initiatives and investments as we build Tulane for the next generation of leadership.
Beginning in the fall 2020 semester, we’ll launch a new sophomore-year experience, which will bring together faculty and students in small, team-taught seminars and individual tutorials. This new initiative will address the second pillar by offering an exciting opportunity for students to forge close intellectual partnerships with our world-class research faculty early in their careers at Tulane.
Students will join professors selected from our research faculty in a co-taught, interdisciplinary seminar on a special topic. Seminars bring approaches from the humanities and social sciences to bear on issues of broad importance with local or regional resonances.
The experience will prepare sophomores for original research in the humanities and social sciences, which they then carry into the spring semester in independent tutorials with a faculty member of their choice. Each student will have a research budget to assist their inquiries; their work may result in written papers or creative work.
This program is one we’ve been working on since the summer, and we’re excited to launch it in the spring. Expect formal announcements and applications for students in the coming weeks.
This experience is but one of several new initiatives that I look forward to sharing with you in coming installments of this newsletter. These are exciting times in the School of Liberal Arts! In the meantime, I wish you and yours a peaceful, joyous holiday season.
Published in the School of Liberal Arts December 12, 2019 Newsletter.