The First-Year Seminar introduces students to the disciplined thinking a liberal arts education requires, enhances a student's speaking and writing skills, and assures a small-class experience in the first year. The instructor of the student's First-Year Seminar serves as academic adviser until the student declares a major. Seminars offered in 2008-2009 include:
- Personal Identity and Immortality (Fall)
- Science As a Human Enterprise (Fall)
- The Politics of Style: Fashion, Etiquette, and American Identity (Fall)
- Ideographs and Ideologies in the Confucian Tradition (Spring)
- Mathematics: Form and Function (Fall)
- How Democratic Is America? (Fall)
- Hispanic Caribbean Culture in New York City (Fall)
- On Being Human: A Convergence of Psychological Perspectives (Fall)
- How the Media Shapes Our Perceptions of Crime and Violence (Fall)
- Amélie Goes to Hollywood (Spring)
- Archaeology and Sustainability: Searching the Past for Planning our Future (Fall)
- Immigration and the Nation (Fall)
- Climate Change: How Bad? How Soon? (Fall)
- African-American Drama and Performance (Fall)
- Contemporary American Poetry (Fall)
- Special Relativity (Fall)
- Warfare, Morality, and Religion: Just War Ethics (Fall)
- Music in the Kitchen: From John Cage to Laurie Anderson (Fall)
- “The Play’s the Thing:” Shakespeare in Performance (Fall)
- Plagues and Peoples (Fall)
- Hurricane Katrina and the Crescent City: The cultural ecology of an American catastrophe (Fall)
- Africa and the West: From Monologue to Dialogue (Fall)
- Ain’t Gonna Study War No More: War resistance, Pacifism, and Nonviolence (Fall)
- Red Stars, Russians and Hollywood (Fall)
