Author: Ryan Strong
Occidental is set to implement a new mandatory mentoring program for incoming first-year students next Fall. The First-Year Residential Experience (FYRE) is designed to immerse new students in the Occidental community more quickly and effectively while enhancing students’ critical thinking skills so they will understand how to better align their values with their decisions, realize the importance of diversity and commit to personal well-being, according to the program overview. Discussions on these topics will be led by upperclassmen FYRE fellows selected by the administration.
“This program aims to foster a sense of belonging, promote engagement in the curricular and co-curricular life of the college, articulate to students the expectations of the college, help students develop and apply critical thinking skills and help students continue to clarify their purpose, meaning and direction,” the program overview said.
The college is currently in the process of selecting its FYRE fellows who will serve as the first-years students’ mentors, leading open-ended discussions on a range of topics under three themes: value congruence and ethical behavior, diversity and difference and personal wellness. The application process has not been opened to the general student population. Students have been invited to apply after being recommended through administrative channels. The program will have approximately 60 FYRE fellows, each of whom will be trained and assigned a professional staff advisor that he or she will have to meet with on a regular basis, according to the program overview.
Incoming first-years will attend weekly meetings with the FYRE fellows throughout fall semester for discussions on these topics but will not receive academic credit. Yet, students who choose not to attend will have the opportunity to make it up their spring semester, according to Assistant Dean of Students Tim Chang. If a student fails to do that, he or she will be barred from registering for classes for sophomore year, effectively expelling the student from the college.
“Hopefully there will not be that many students who don’t take the program seriously,” Chang said.
President Jonathan Veitch initially presented the idea of having a discussion-based program, and Dean of Students Barbara Avery, along with Chang, has been instrumental in designing the details of the program. Oxy FYRE will rely on the Socratic Method and the posing of ‘Big Questions,’ according to the overview.
“Disproportionately, the country’s leaders come from liberal arts colleges and universities that give students the ability to think critically about information,” Chang said. “This [FYRE] stems from a couple of studies and articles.”
These articles suggest that employers are looking for colleges to place more emphasis on certain areas, termed “essential learning outcomes.” While many of the learning outcomes suggested in the study have already been formalized into the Occidental curriculum, some have not. 75 percent of employers, for example, wanted colleges to better emphasize “ethical decision making,” a focus of the FYRE program that has not been universally or uniformly taught through the CSP program or other sources.
Furthermore, the college sees the FYRE program as an extension of orientation.
“We long heard people say that orientation is great, but there is so much information that I really forget a lot of it,” Chang said. The FYRE program is designed to account for this. FYRE fellows are expected to introduce “first-year students to on-campus programs, services and activities . . . assisting them to become connected to the campus,” the FYRE fellow job description states.
Chang noted that informally upperclassmen constantly help first-years, and this program aims to formalize this support and ensure that it happens across the board.
“A lot of our upperclassmen students already do this kind of mentorship,” Chang said. “They care about the first-year students coming in.”
The college examined similar programs at a number of colleges across the country as they designed “Oxy FYRE.” Many colleges have instituted some type of mandatory mentoring program, such as Brigham Young University. Most of them have gone off without a problem, with only a couple causing outrage.
At the University of Delaware, stakeholders across the community condemned a program described by administrators as a “treatment,” while civil liberties organizations deemed it a fundamental violation of freedom of conscience due to the program’s goal of ideologically re-educating students.
Among many controversial pieces of its curriculum, the program defined a racist by stating “the term applies to all white people living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists . . .”
Training materials at the University of Delaware also stated, “Have you ever heard a well-meaning white person say, ‘I’m not a member of any race except the human race?’ What she usually means by this statement is that she doesn’t want to perpetuate racial categories by acknowledging that she is white. This is an evasion of responsibility for her participation in a system based on the supremacy for white people.”
The University of Delaware program also required students to describe the time “when they discovered their sexual identity” in front of their RA.
Many disagreed vehemently with the general concept of mandating all students believe these teachings. Following the uproar, the University of Delaware has largely redesigned their program to better balance the need to instill diversity and ethical behavior with the need to allow students to freely think for themselves without being required to believe certain things.
Chang insists that Occidental will steer clear of freedom of conscience issues by refraining from lecturing students and will instead present open-ended questions.
“There are no right or wrong answers,” Chang said, noting that the idea is to open up and “help each other out.” He also guaranteed that students will only be required to share as much as they feel comfortable sharing.
Chang outlined the first two weeks of discussion, stating that the first week will likely be a basic introduction and the second week will be a discussion on “Why we chose Oxy.”
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
