First Year Seminar 2025

I want to welcome you all to Bard College and to your first year as undergraduates. Each of the four years at Bard is marked by a distinctive curricular feature. The first year is distinguished by the Language and Thinking Program, Citizen Science, and above all, the First Year Seminar, or FYSEM.

FYSEM holds a special place for me. I’ve taught it for all the years I have worked at the college, alongside wonderful colleagues, many of whom are still teaching it. The syllabus of FYSEM changes periodically. We are currently in the second year of a new cycle. The purpose of FYSEM, the one year-long seminar course required of all first-year students, is to help students strengthen their skills in reading, interpretation and writing. To be able to read analytically, to fashion interpretations based on texts and to express one’s ideas through speech and writing have been central goals of a university education for centuries. These skills are crucial to the attributes of freedom of thought and expression, self-confidence and the formulation of lifetime ambitions. They foster the experience of serious joy in life, and enable an inquisitive sense of wonderment about the world around us.

These fundamental and traditional skills have been challenged throughout history by the advent of new technologies. The FYSEM syllabus begins with Plato and The Republic. These readings and others from antiquity evoke an age in which oral argument and dialogue were the central uses of language. The concept of writing prose, not just the language of oral expression, but written language as its own means of communication, transformed language and the conduct of philosophy. The dissemination of writing and written knowledge through printing and photographic reproduction democratized literacy and consequently teaching and learning. More modern technologies such as the radio and television heralded a new era for the reproduction and spread of information and beliefs without texts. And during our lifetime, perhaps the most momentous transformation of all has occurred through computation, the internet and now AI, that some believe has rendered traditions of reading and writing obsolete.

We think the opposite is true. The premise of the First Year Seminar is that thinking for oneself, commanding language and communicating persuasively with others are indispensable. They constitute a thrilling albeit serious enterprise that leads us to discover what, why and how we think, transforming our capacity to create meaning in the experience of life. The blunt fact is learning how to command language has remained very much the same challenge, despite all the advances in technology. AI is therefore neither to be feared nor glorified. The ease of its use, its seductive accessibility and its veneer of sophistication only remind us of how ingenious the human imagination can be. In the context of the First Year Seminar, AI is irrelevant, pointless and possibly counterproductive. In order to use AI productively and responsibly where it represents a positive advance in research, one must first master the fundamentals of thinking, with language, for oneself, without AI. FYSEM provides every student with a chance to learn how to think independently for oneself with power and effectiveness. What this course hopes to achieve might be compared to learning to play a musical instrument or a sport, activities in which no machine or technology can take your place.

The overarching goal of the FYSEM course is to foster an open, probing, participatory and candid exploration of politics and society, and in particular, the ideas of freedom, truth and justice. We live in a moment of history in the United States and throughout the world, where there are sharp disagreements about the use of power, the virtues and shortcomings of democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, fairness, equality and the exact nature and character of law, particularly the meaning and consequences of the US Constitution. Furthermore, the modern technology of communication has fostered the capacity to manipulate and falsify; it has helped undermine distinctions between truth and falsehood, certainty and uncertainty, and challenged the rules of evidence and the verifiable procedures of science. Our inability to agree on what is or may be true has diminished our capacity to question beliefs and absolutist claims that contradict one another or even agree to disagree. The exchange of ideas has become fraught and difficult, and many have responded by a retreat into silence, embracing detachment (limiting their exposure to people and ideas that seem different) and self-censorship. Universities and colleges are committed to the opposite, to open exploration, debate, criticism, skepticism and ultimately to a shared common ground that permits us to pursue scholarship, research and the exchange of ideas, using language and not violence as our means of interaction.

The syllabus of this course is designed to help each and every one of you engage the life of the mind, past and present, using many genres of expression, including poetry, prose, fiction and non-fiction. The command of language, as the primary instrument of human communication and an indispensable witness of civilizations, is important to every individual scientist, scholar, engineer, artist, musician, mathematician, economist, doctor, entrepreneur, designer, architect and innovator. No matter what your major will be, this course can help you. For those of us who teach FYSEM, nothing could be more important than encouraging writing, close reading, and critical thinking, and therefore the exercise of curiosity. These habits will lend meaning, purpose and joy to the rest of your life.


Welcome to your first year at Bard.