The University Common Ground requirement
While our other first-year experience programs are college-specific, this university-wide requirement brings first-year and transfer students from all programs into conversation through UNIV 101: Common Ground, a one-credit, seminar-style class that meets weekly during the spring semester. In small sections led by a faculty/staff facilitator, students with diverse academic interests, backgrounds, and beliefs have the kinds of discussions that we see as essential to a university education -- about what’s going on in the world, what kind of community we want to create, and how to have civil discourse across ideological boundaries.
Students in the Common Ground program will:
- Hear the stories of their peers from different backgrounds;
- Interrogate their assumptions about other people or places;
- Get more comfortable talking about sensitive topics like race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class;
- Articulate and commit to the values that they will live by as citizens of the Alfred University community;
- Get the message that they matter, that their perspectives matter, and that they will be listened to with respect;
- Develop communication and leadership skills that will empower them in their personal, academic, social, and professional lives.