The Intensive Freshman Seminar was established at IU in 1990 as part of a range of initiatives to improve student retention. By 2001, the Time Magazine reported, initiatives to which IFS was central had increased the number of returning freshmen from 80% to 85%. Most dramatically, retention of African-American and Latinx students had leaped from 64% to 82%. This makes perfect sense, if know IFS -- a unique program where students go from having no college experience to presenting their original research at the student fair in just three weeks. IFS offered a smooth transition to college led by dedicated faculty who volunteer to teach in the summer, who must be approved to teach it, and must take a yearly training in the Spring. No other IU class asks so much of its faculty, but then no other class has such a life changing impact on students, especially on first-generation students and students from low-income backgrounds. Coming from such a background myself, I felt honored to teach IFS for most Summers since 2008.
On September 27th, Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Vasti Torres attended a debrief meeting in which the IFS faculty looked at this years' evaluations (which were excellent) and started planning for next year. At this meeting, Torres started describing IFS as too expensive, and she talked about difficult decisions. To make sure I understood, I asked directly if she was closing IFS. She answered with one word: yes. I asked if the cancellation was effective immediately. She answered with one word: yes.
The justification given was that IFS was serving only 9% of incoming students, so Torres chose to serve 0% instead. We were told that a task force had been working on a pilot program that would help transition students to college; however, no IFS faculty were aware of this project, let alone invited to participate. If Torres cared about helping students transition to college, she would have recruited IFS faculty first. She would not have disregarded decades of collective experience in the very thing that her task force is trying to build from scratch. Apparently, members of this task force were not told that the new First Year Program was meant to replace IFS. They probably assumed that it would complement IFS, as it could indeed do. No one is more passionate about incoming first-year students than IFS faculty, and many, including myself, would have been happy to help create a system where students can choose between IFS or another First Year Program. Alternately, we could have helped figure out how to trim down IFS to make it scalable to 100% of incoming students. Again, none of this was not done. The result is the destruction of a program that has historically served our most vulnerable students.
IFS faculty were understandably upset when they were told that IFS had been closed so abruptly and unilaterally. Frustrated by this reaction, Torres ended the meeting by saying dismissively "Stakeholders always want to hold on to what they have". But IFS faculty are not stakeholders -- they are passionate educators. And we don't have IFS. We serve IFS.