On Thursday, Sept. 22, a board of faculty will vote on whether to enact a proposal that would shorten the length and alter the format of what has become known as August Term.
Five years ago, Transylvania University started a five-year pilot program to enhance the first year experience. First Engagements, or August Term as it has been dubbed by students and faculty, is a month-long course for first year students that earns them a full course credit before entering fall term. After the five-year pilot run, the time has come for faculty to reevaluate the program, and to make adjustments as needed.
August Term was created as a part of accreditation requirements for the university. One of these requirements is a quality enhancement plan (QEP) that occurs every ten years. At the time, it was decided that enhancing the first year experience was the priority for the QEP.
Melissa Fortner served as Director of First Engagements during the last two years of the pilot period and is the lead reviewer of the program as it pertains to its reevaluation. However, the entire faculty is involved with the decision making process, and will vote on what to do with the program moving forward. The vote has been made that transforming the program will definitely occur, but the exact specifications for the new program have not been voted on yet.
After examining the first year programs at other universities, the current August Term proposal is modeled in similar fashion where it takes place over the course of a week.
“We are planning to provide a shorter, more condensed version of what we do now, that is more in line with our resources,” said Fortner.
A major change with the current proposal that involves a weeklong term is that it will no longer count as a full credit course. It will only count for .25 credits. This also makes it so the course does not count as one of the faculty member’s seven courses that they teach throughout the year. It is something extra that they will have an obligation to fulfill every few years.
“It’s not going to look like First Engagements. The proposal on the table now with the most faculty support is for a seminar the week before classes start, focused around one broad theme. It will no longer be a common experience. Faculty members may overlap their classes, but they create their own course plan under the theme,” said Fortner.
We are planning to provide a shorter, more condensed version of what we do now, that is more in line with our resources.
While the academic orientation will still be maintained and students will still be introduced to the college level of thinking, the format will change. The vote on this proposal occurs Thursday. If it is passed, then there will be a committee formed to enact the program. If it does not pass, then the faculty will go back to the drawing board. The seminar program, if passed, will be reevaluated after it runs for a few years, just as August Term was reviewed.
“Had we felt that we had the resources, we might have pushed for August Term in its old form for a little bit longer and to do it in the way that we really wanted to. That is my opinion, however faculty are pretty split on what would have been best for the students. Both plans will serve the purpose that it needs to serve,” said Fortner.
While the faculty decided at the end of the five-year trial run to reform the program, there were definitely some positives of the program that Fortner and the faculty want to uphold.
“There are a lot of things about it that went really well and it seemed pretty clear that the social transition was very successful,” said Fortner. “We thought the orientation activities were more successful before the start of the school year and allowed the first year class to develop an identity together, and we felt like there was value in the academic experience.”
While there were definite positives to the program, financially it was not very affordable for the university. Students did not have to pay for August Term and Transy was providing the meals for each student during this three week period. To offset the costs of this, Transy provided one less May Term, and if students wanted to take a fourth May Term, they would need to pay extra.
Almost universally, students and faculty disliked the cost of the fourth May Term.
“At all levels it was felt that it was a pretty big cost to pay, so in the new proposal we made the change to allow four May Terms, students just need to pay for a meal plan if they wish to use the services,” said Fortner.
While the May Term issue has been resolved, there are still a lot of details that need to be worked out as it pertains to the financial issues of August Term.
“It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of people, a lot of time, and a lot of money to run August term the way that we were doing it,” said Fortner. “There is a lot of preparation involved in order to provide a common experience. It is more difficult and more intense than if individual faculty members developed a class on their own. It is a completely different process, and their needs to be very systematic preparation done ahead of time. It does cost money to have the RAs come back, and it costs money to provide August Term Scholars.”
We were not sure that we were able to do a great job with the resources that we had. We were doing a good job, but we wanted to do a great job.
With such tremendous efforts being put into the program, it was deemed not financially reasonable, especially when it came to faculty members organizing their classes for the rest of the year.
“As a faculty we are pretty lean. We were finding that programs were not being able to offer classes that they needed, or that it was costing money, or that we had to hire adjuncts, or had to decide not to offer particular courses at all,” said Fortner. “A lot of the issue was resources. Can we sustain the program with the resources that we have? The fact that we are running at a deficit came into play here.”
In order to have an immensely successful program that involved all of the successful elements of the program, more resources were needed.
“We were not sure that we were able to do a great job with the resources that we had. We were doing a good job, but we wanted to do a great job, so there were aspects of the academic component that needed to be strengthened, and in order to do that we needed more time, and in order to do that we needed to pay the faculty more. To balance all that out we were not getting those resources, so we have to do something different,” said Fortner.
An update on the results of the vote will be released as soon as information is available.
Transy used to let students smoke on campus. Here’s why they should again.
Until last year, Transy provided a space on campus for student to smoke. The smoking circle (or smircle-seriously) was located at the back of Forrer; it was a small space, probably no more than 100 square feet. By the start of this academic year, however, Transy had eliminated the space and declared the entirety of campus smoking-free. This is a poor decision on Transy’s part.
To explain why, it may be helpful to establish a few facts on the ground. The first thing we need to establish is how many people at Transy actually smoke; unfortunately, there is no readily available Transy-specific data to answer that question (at least at this time). However, according to the most recent available Gallup data, Kentucky is the national leader in the number of people who smoke. Nearly a third of Kentuckians smoke. Considering that the population of Transy is predominantly drawn from Kentucky itself, it seems reasonable to say that, in the absence of hard data available to students, there are probably more than a few smokers in the student population. It is almost certainly true that among faculty, administration, and staff, who are by definition part of Kentucky’s population, there are more than a few smokers.
The second thing we need to establish is what exactly Transy wants to accomplish by making the entire campus smoke-free. Absent a definitive statement from the administration (that I’m aware of at this time), it seems fair to say that Transy is seeking to improve the public health of the Transy community. It’s reasonable to assume that this measure is more-or-less targeted most heavily at the student population that lives here. In other words, we can assume with a high degree of confidence that Transy wants to discourage Transy students from smoking, and wants to do so by making it inconvenient to do so while at Transy.
Accomplishing this goal could, I think, take two forms. The first is that, by making the campus smoke-free, Transy wants to discourage prospective students who smoke from coming to campus in the first place, and by discouraging current students who smoke from continuing to do so. And here is where we see how Transy has made a poor decision.
First, the prospective students. As many of you know, the current first-year class numbers under the enrollment targets Transy sought to hit last enrollment season. That is to say, Transy is not in a position to discourage many students from applying. Beggars (or heavily-leveraged universities) cannot be choosers. Transy has, for little gain, handicapped itself in the search for students.
We can say this because we know that it’s very hard to quit smoking. Most smokers want to quit; all smokers, by definition, have not quit. So we know a large percentage wants to quit but doesn’t. There is a massive difference from wanting to quit and actually trying out methods that can make this possible. If you feel that a certain approach will work best for you, why not give it a go. For example, some people who are on this journey have looked into using vaping devices. As there are many to choose from like the Flowermate or the PAX, for a beginner it may be difficult to decide on which one to go for, which is why doing your research is beneficial. It is not impossible to quit. You just need to be motivated enough to do it and once you are, just go for it. It shouldn’t just be cigarette smokers looking to cut down on their tobacco intake. Weed users may want to consider using a vaporizer instead of the traditional methods of inhalation. A popular vape battery is the 510 batteries. This is definitely worth considering for any smokers out there.
From this we can conclude that there is a significant addictive drive for smokers to continue smoking. And on this basis we can further conclude that, given that the Transy campus is fairly small, most current students who smoke will not be too likely to quit smoking over the issue of walking a half-block or so. So simply on the basis that Transy is unlikely to get current students to quit, we can say that Transy is not making a particularly good decision by removing a space on campus for students to smoke. But is it a bad one?
In a word, yes. Because while students are unlikely to be deterred from smoking by walking that half-block, that doesn’t mean that forcing students off-campus to smoke doesn’t have significant effects. By doing so, Transy removes some of the protections it offers to students when they are on-campus. Campus is well-lit, it is patrolled by its own policing force-any point of trouble can be quickly met and resolved. Further, though there are no physical boundaries around campus, it is not for nothing that we call it the “bubble”; the general public does not make a habit of traipsing about the plaza or green space. Consider that many smokers will take their last cigarette shortly before turning in for the night; for many college students that’s quite a late hour. And, of course, the night is generally when most muggings and so forth take place. It’s not ridiculous to say that there exists a lower risk of physical violence occurring on-campus as opposed to off-campus.
Further, by removing any space for students to smoke, Transy is quite literally telling those students that they are not welcome to both smoke and be at Transy. It seems to me that this is very likely to create a stigmatizing effect. And since we’ve established that most smokers are unlikely to quit, this stigmatizing serves no practical purpose. A considerable portion of a liberal arts education is encouraging students to explore and make decisions for themselves; stigmatizing some of those decisions seems, to me at least, to be unfairly nudging the scales, even if the decision you’re nudging against is bad for someone’s health. It’s a needless negative effect of Transy’s decision.
Now, it’s possible to consider another rationale for making the campus smoke-free: Transy may consider the secondhand smoke effect on nonsmoking students a sufficient threat to Transy students that it wants to remove it. However, if that is the case I would remind you that nearly a third of Kentuckians smoke, and they breathe the same air that circulates on Transy’s campus. Further, since Transy’s previous policy placed all smokers outside, it seems a little silly to maintain that the open air would become uniquely deadened and immobile just where the smokers gathered. In short, any secondhand smoke effect is likely to be so negligible as to be nonexistent.
In a bid to make the air clearer, at least on campus (despite the counteractive impact of the hundreds of thousands of people smoking in the Kentucky area), Transy could’ve taken the option of promoting e-cigarettes to their students; a much cleaner and safer option than tobacco. This would have a positive impact on the environment on campus and would also promote a healthier lifestyle for students. Showing them pages from CigBuyer would’ve been a much better approach in their campaign, instead of banning smoking altogether.
So, let’s recap. Transy’ new policy of a smoke-free campus is not likely to cut the number of smoking students down significantly, is more likely to expose students to off-campus dangers, is likely to stigmatize smoking students, and is not likely to affect non-smoking students’ health in a serious way. The new policy, in other words, doesn’t accomplish what it seems designed to, and comes with serious downsides. It is a poor decision, and Transy should thus return to the previous policy allowing a space on campus for students to smoke.
Author’s Note: I do not myself smoke. I understand it’s quite bad for you.