Harvard

Orientation has always been an important part of the college experience. This process has taken a more involved turn in recent years. Just a short time ago the orientation process consisted mostly of class registration and textbook purchases. Also, the parents were not involved much in any of the orientation process, besides buying the necessary material. From my experience as a freshman at the College of Wooster, and as a transfer student here at Wittenberg University, I say that the orientation of previous generations is not adequate.

Orientation should serve as much more than just a registration and book purchase time. It should be a time in which the students are formally invited to campus, engaged with their class, and begin building their social network. Equally, this should be a time in which the parents are assured that their student is moving into a safe environment and that this new chapter in their lives will go as smoothly as possible.

The social network a first-year student builds is crucial to persistence in the first year. Over the years their social bonds will only grow, making them feel more comfortable; but the initial bonds are the most important. The social network they build is like a safety net. When times get tough, that’s what they fall back on and the place this network begins is in orientation. Harvard University gives us a great example of a long extended orientation process. All incoming freshman must participate in one of their five (5) week long pre-orientation programs. These programs are geared toward the student’s main academic interest but the main goal is to form a social bond between the students. (CITE)

For example, if you are an art major, you might enroll in the Freshman Arts Program or FAP. In this program 55 students per section are grouped together and stay together all week. This program includes workshops and classes taught by master art instructors at the university. The end of the week culminates “in a collaborative presentation of all-original student work (fondly known as “The Pageant” – this presentation is never the same twice!).” (Pre-orientation) Other programs include a weeklong wilderness trip in Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont. Students spend the week camping, canoeing, or doing community service. After the pre-orientation week, the students return to campus and go through the regular campus tours, class registration, and textbook purchases.

How successful is this program for Harvard University? Harvard’s retention rate for first year freshman is an astonishing, 98%. This the fifth best retention rate in the country. Only Yale and Columbia University have higher percent’s; Brown, Dartmouth, and California institute of Technology also have 98% retention rates. (USnews) This high retention rate could be a combination of many things; the reputation of the college, high academic requirements for entry, financial obligation, or the prestige the student holds when he/she graduates.

Those could be reasons why their retention rate is so high, but why do these freshman stay in when times get tough? It’s because they are connected to other first year students. They know that they have people to fall back on, who understand what they are going through. They have connections to other students and faculty; people that they became close to over the course of pre-orientation and orientation. Harvard’s programs are there to build that first year community, to keep their students strong when they first start out.

Vince Tinto is a distinguished theorist of sociology at Syracuse University. He is a scholar of higher education, especially in areas concerning student retention and learning communities. Tinto acknowledges this trend of social integration in his 1975 book titled Dropout from higher education he says “..social integration occurs through informal peer group associations, semi-formal extracurricular activities, and interaction with faculty and administrative staff.” He goes on to say that these “successful encounters” are important to “social rewards that become part of the person’s generalized evaluation of the costs and benefits of college attendance.”

Furthermore, “social integration should increase the likelihood that the person will remain in college” (pg. 107) This directly relates retention rates to social programs, especially in the first year when there may be no form of pre-college social connections among students. Another need for good orientation programs or summer programs, relates to graduation rates. Generally the student attrition rate is greatest in the first year, then subsequent years the attrition rate falls by almost half per year. By decreasing the attrition rate in the first year you can greatly increase your graduation rate over four years. (promising practices, pg. 37)

Not all colleges have the luxury to send their students on weeklong orientation trips, but there are other ways to get to the end result. For many small colleges, private and public, the orientation process consists of a few days on campus, general workshops, activities, and parent activities. In my experience at the College of Wooster, we met with our RA’s as we moved in, then were greeted with many icebreakers and fun floor activities. This helped us get to know the people we were going to be living with, but also kept things fun. After that the workshops began.

There were many different workshops ranging from necessity of sleep to sexual assault. These workshops were not meant to bring us together as a class like the floor games, but they purpose served to show us that college life is much different. Following the workshops were nightly activities and on our final day we came together as a class. We took our class picture, had a paint fight, and made a huge human chair circle. This stuff may seem kind of ridiculous but it worked just like Harvard’s pre-orientation programs and shows the principle behind Tinto’s theory. Everyone became more comfortable with their floor, their class, and the staff/faculty around them. This success is reflected in Wooster’s freshman retention rate, 89%. (USnews)

My experience at Wittenberg was quite different. The orientation process was short and not very socially engaging. After move in we had a floor meeting where our RA went over the various items we were not allowed to have in our rooms and some of the other big rules across campus. The next day consisted of a few workshops and a tug-o-war between another halls. After that we purchased our books and began classes. There were no full class icebreakers, no floor verse floor competitions, no parent programs, and no formal tour/welcome to campus.

The social connections and bonding was not forced upon us by the college, rather just left for us to do on our own. This lack of social bonder pressure is reflected in Wittenberg’s freshman retention rate. Only 76% of Wittenberg’s freshmen stay at the college. There is not much difference between Wittenberg and Wooster. Bother are private liberal arts college, financially close Wittenberg $38,000/year, Wooster $39,000/year, student enrollment Wittenberg 1,900, Wooster 2,000, and both colleges are well known for their programs. What is the difference? Student orientation.

As you can see, orientation is a very important part of the first year experience. It is vital to student success and graduation rates. Also the more socially structured orientations provide the best outcome. Here at Wittenberg, we need to make some changes. Wittenberg’s orientation program needs to be longer, more interactive between halls, floors, and faculty. By adding just a few icebreakers, and fun competition, we can increase the amount of freshmen that stay after their first year. This would be an easy change that will help improve the college overall.

Works Cited

1. Vincent, Tinto. Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research. American Education Research Association, 1975. Print
2. DeWitz, Joseph, Lynn Woosley, Bruce Walsh. College Student Retention: an Exploration of the relationship between self-efficacy beliefs and purpose in life among college students. 2009. Print.
3. Gaither, Gerald. Promsing Practices in Recruitment, Remediation, and Retention. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999. Print.
4. USnews, Freshman Retention Rate. 2012. Web. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/freshmen-least-most-likely-return
5. Usnews, Freshman Retention Rate. 2012. Web. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges/freshmen-least-most-likely-return/spp%2B50/page+2
6. Usnews, Freshman Retention Rate. 2012. Web. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges/freshmen-least-most-likely-return/spp%2B50/page+4

Harvard s development over 350 years has been enormously rich andcomplex–full of interest for social and intellectual history, for the history ofscholarship, science, pedagogy, and politics. We know something, statistically, about the social sources and destinies of the graduates over the existence, but littleof the later generations. Harvard s benefactors are no less interesting a group, andtheir contributors made all else possible. The debate over the character ofHarvard s founding, its essential character, purpose, and style, began withinseventy years of the founding. Harvard College was little more than a theologicalseminary, thrust into existence by a desire for trained ministerial leadership insociety, wherein the clergy held a position of paramount importance in matters ofcivil as well as spiritual.

Harvard was founded as an institution from which theleadership of church, state, and trade was expected to emerge, and that leadership, like the community as a whole, was expected to remain deeply and correctlyChristian (Bailyn 8). Though Harvard University was originally founded as aPuritan school of theology, it evolved into a university that had a more traditionalliberal arts program that produced well-rounded scholars in various fields of study.

Harvard was founded by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and named for its first donor, the Reverend JohnHarvard, who left his personal library and half his estate to the new institution, Harvard College was born into the Puritan tradition. Puritan Calvinistsbegan the university in 1636 because they recognized the necessity for training upa clergy if the new Bible commonwealth was to flourish in the wilderness. Since1620, some 17,000 Puritans had migrated to New England, and they wantedministers who were able to expound the Scriptures from the original Hebrew andGreek, as well as be familiar with what the church fathers, scholastic philosophersand reformists had written in Greek and Latin.

The study of theologypreeminently under the covenants of works and of grace was central to thefounding of what would become Harvard University, the school of the prophets. John Leverett the first president of Harvard insisted that Harvard had beenfounded as a College of Divines. Congregationalist insisted that Harvard hadbeen founded as a theological institution devoted to perpetuating the Puritans distinctive form of Protestant Christianity. Liberal Unitarians, who controlled theCollege after 1805, thought differently, and leapt upon evidence that stated theHarvard had broadly liberal origins. Some said that it was to provide a broadliberal education for young gentlemen and scholars, but not a divinity school or aseminary for the propagation of Puritan theology (Bailyn 8-10).

The earliest visible Harvard, despite almost a century of previous existenceunder the close scrutiny of the clergy and magistrates of the Bay Colony, is aneighteenth-century institution. In the College Yard stand Harvard’s oldestbuildings, plain and in the best sense homely with their brick exteriors,straightforward appearance, and unassuming design. Harvard Hall stands on thesite of a seventeenth-century building of the same name. It burned down onewintry night in 1764, destroying the 5,000-volume college library, the largest in North America at that time, and the scientific laboratory and apparatus.

For its first 230 years of existence Harvard was relatively small, proudlyprovincial, ambitiously intellectual, but still a college with a conservative, setcurriculum emphasizing rhetorical principles, rote learning, and constant drilling. It was founded in the 17th century supported, as a college of English universitystandards for liberal education of the young men of New England, under strict religious discipline (Bailyn 6).

Harvard College retained its old framework as anEnglish college, modeled on Oxford and Cambridge, though with somedevelopments of its own, but consistent with the prevailing Puritan philosophy ofthe first colonists. Although many of its early graduates became ministersin Puritan congregations throughout New England, the college never formallyaffiliated with a specific religious denomination. Secular knowledge was valued and assumed to be necessary for men of all modes of life. But in the end it was anintensely religious, ascetic Puritan culture that created this institution and thatcarried it through precarious years into the stability of the 18th century.

Secularization of the American university begin with the takeover of Harvard by the Unitarians in 1805. Actually, the Unitarian takeover was precededby a protracted struggle between orthodoxy and liberalism, which began in 1701when Increase Mather stepped down from the presidency. The liberals, who hadobtained a definite majority in the governing Corporation, elected John Leverett aspresident of Harvard College.

Leverett, a religious liberal and a layman, set thecollege on its course away from Puritanism towards intellectual independence. The founders of Harvard were educational conservatives who were notattempting to create new forms of education. As the College grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, the curriculum was broadened, particularly in the sciences, and theCollege produced or attracted a long list of famous scholars, including HenryWadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, William James, the elder OliverWendell Holmes, and Louis Agassiz.

One of the most important developments was the establishment ofprofessorships in the undergraduate department, which was an innovation on the English idea of a college. The greatest departure from the English precedents, anda long step towards the foundation of a real university, was the establishment ofthe three professional schools of Divinity, Medicine, and Law. Medical studiesbegan in 1782, and law and divinity became graduate departments in 1816 and1817, respectively. Even so, the College did not start to take on the aspect of a trueuniversity until mid-century, when a library building, an observatory, a scientificschool, a chemistry laboratory, and a natural history museum were built.

From 1820 until 1872 the University consisted of the College and the three professionalschools, with the later additions of the Dental School, the Scientific School, andthe Bussey School of Agriculture. Harvard gradually acquired considerable autonomy and private financialsupport, becoming a chartered university in 1780. The pattern they extemporizedproved to be permanent, and model for American institution of higher education. For over a century there was no uncertainty on the popular name or thecharacterization of the institution created in 1636. From its earliest day Harvardestablished and maintained a tradition of academic excellence and the training ofcitizens for natural public service. Today it has the largest private endowment ofany university in the world.

Watch Steven Spielberg’s Harvard University 2016 Commencement address and read the transcript below (or read a list of ).

Thank you, thank you, President Faust, and Paul Choi, thank you so much.

It’s an honor and a thrill to address this group of distinguished alumni and supportive friends and kvelling parents. We’ve all gathered to share in the joy of this day, so please join me in congratulating Harvard’s Class of 2016.

I can remember my own college graduation, which is easy, since it was only 14 years ago. How many of you took 37 years to graduate? Because, like most of you, I began college in my teens, but sophomore year, I was offered my dream job at Universal Studios, so I dropped out. I told my parents if my movie career didn’t go well, I’d re-enroll.

It went all right.

But eventually, I returned for one big reason. Most people go to college for an education, and some go for their parents, but I went for my kids. I’m the father of seven, and I kept insisting on the importance of going to college, but I hadn’t walked the walk. So, in my fifties, I re-enrolled at Cal State — Long Beach, and I earned my degree.

I just have to add: It helped that they gave me course credit in paleontology for the work I did on Jurassic Park. That’s three units for Jurassic Park, thank you.

Well I left college because I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and some of you know, too — but some of you don’t. Or maybe you thought you knew but are now questioning that choice. Maybe you’re sitting there trying to figure out how to tell your parents that you want to be a doctor and not a comedy writer.

Well, what you choose to do next is what we call in the movies the ‘character-defining moment.’ Now, these are moments you’re very familiar with, like in the last Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when Rey realizes the force is with her. Or Indiana Jones choosing mission over fear by jumping over a pile of snakes.

Now in a two-hour movie, you get a handful of character-defining moments, but in real life, you face them every day. Life is one strong, long string of character-defining moments. And I was lucky that at 18 I knew what I exactly wanted to do. But I didn’t know who I was. How could I? And how could any of us? Because for the first 25 years of our lives, we are trained to listen to voices that are not our own. Parents and professors fill our heads with wisdom and information, and then employers and mentors take their place and explain how this world really works.

And usually these voices of authority make sense, but sometimes, doubt starts to creep into our heads and into our hearts. And even when we think, ‘that’s not quite how I see the world,’ it’s kind of easier to just to nod in agreement and go along, and for a while, I let that going along define my character. Because I was repressing my own point of view, because like in that Nilsson song, ‘Everybody was talkin’ at me, so I couldn’t hear the echoes of my mind.’

And at first, the internal voice I needed to listen to was hardly audible, and it was hardly noticeable — kind of like me in high school. But then I started paying more attention, and my intuition kicked in.

And I want to be clear that your intuition is different from your conscience. They work in tandem, but here’s the distinction: Your conscience shouts, ‘here’s what you should do,’ while your intuition whispers, ‘here’s what you could do.’ Listen to that voice that tells you what you could do. Nothing will define your character more than that.

Because once I turned to my intuition, and I tuned into it, certain projects began to pull me into them, and others, I turned away from.

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And up until the 1980s, my movies were mostly, I guess what you could call ‘escapist.’ And I don’t dismiss any of these movies — not even 1941. Not even that one. And many of these early films reflected the values that I cared deeply about, and I still do. But I was in a celluloid bubble, because I’d cut my education short, my worldview was limited to what I could dream up in my head, not what the world could teach me.

But then I directed The Color Purple. And this one film opened my eyes to experiences that I never could have imagined, and yet were all too real. This story was filled with deep pain and deeper truths, like when Shug Avery says, ‘Everything wants to be loved.’ My gut, which was my intuition, told me that more people needed to meet these characters and experience these truths. And while making that film, I realized that a movie could also be a mission.

I hope all of you find that sense of mission. Don’t turn away from what’s painful. Examine it. Challenge it.

My job is to create a world that lasts two hours. Your job is to create a world that lasts forever. You are the future innovators, motivators, leaders and caretakers.

And the way you create a better future is by studying the past. Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton, who graduated from both this college and this medical school, liked to quote a favorite professor of his who said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree. So history majors: Good choice, you’re in great shape…Not in the job market, but culturally.

The rest of us have to make a little effort. Social media that we’re inundated and swarmed with is about the here and now. But I’ve been fighting and fighting inside my own family to get all my kids to look behind them, to look at what already has happened. Because to understand who they are is to understand who were were, and who their grandparents were, and then, what this country was like when they emigrated here. We are a nation of immigrants — at least for now.

So to me, this means we all have to tell our own stories. We have so many stories to tell. Talk to your parents and your grandparents, if you can, and ask them about their stories. And I promise you, like I have promised my kids, you will not be bored.

And that’s why I so often make movies based on real-life events. I look to history not to be didactic, ‘cause that’s just a bonus, but I look because the past is filled with the greatest stories that have ever been told. Heroes and villains are not literary constructs, but they’re at the heart of all history.

And again, this is why it’s so important to listen to your internal whisper. It’s the same one that compelled Abraham Lincoln and Oskar Schindler to make the correct moral choices. In your defining moments, do not let your morals be swayed by convenience or expediency. Sticking to your character requires a lot of courage. And to be courageous, you’re going to need a lot of support.

And if you’re lucky, you have parents like mine. I consider my mom my lucky charm. And when I was 12 years old, my father handed me a movie camera, the tool that allowed me to make sense of this world. And I am so grateful to him for that. And I am grateful that he’s here at Harvard, sitting right down there.

My dad is 99 years old, which means he’s only one year younger than Widener Library. But unlike Widener, he’s had zero cosmetic work. And dad, there’s a lady behind you, also 99, and I’ll introduce you after this is over, okay?

But look, if your family’s not always available, there’s backup. Near the end of It’s a Wonderful Life — you remember that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life? Clarence the Angel inscribes a book with this: “No man is a failure who has friends.” And I hope you hang on to the friendships you’ve made here at Harvard. And among your friends, I hope you find someone you want to share your life with. I imagine some of you in this yard may be a tad cynical, but I want to be unapologetically sentimental. I spoke about the importance of intuition and how there’s no greater voice to follow. That is, until you meet the love of your life. And this is what happened when I met and married Kate, and that became the greatest character-defining moment of my life.

Love, support, courage, intuition. All of these things are in your hero’s quiver, but still, a hero needs one more thing: A hero needs a villain to vanquish. And you’re all in luck. This world is full of monsters. And there’s racism, homophobia, ethnic hatred, class hatred, there’s political hatred, and there’s religious hatred.

As a kid, I was bullied — for being Jewish. This was upsetting, but compared to what my parents and grandparents had faced, it felt tame. Because we truly believed that anti-Semitism was fading. And we were wrong. Over the last two years, nearly 20,000 Jews have left Europe to find higher ground. And earlier this year, I was at the Israeli embassy when President Obama stated the sad truth. He said: ‘We must confront the reality that around the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise. We cannot deny it.’

My own desire to confront that reality compelled me to start, in 1994, the Shoah Foundation. And since then, we’ve spoken to over 53,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses in 63 countries and taken all their video testimonies. And we’re now gathering testimonies from genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia and Nanking. Because we must never forget that the inconceivable doesn’t happen — it happens frequently. Atrocities are happening right now. And so we wonder not just, ‘When will this hatred end?’ but, ‘How did it begin?’

Now, I don’t have to tell a crowd of Red Sox fans that we are wired for tribalism. But beyond rooting for the home team, tribalism has a much darker side. Instinctively and maybe even genetically, we divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ So the burning question must be: How do all of us together find the ‘we?’ How do we do that? There’s still so much work to be done, and sometimes I feel the work hasn’t even begun. And it’s not just anti-Semitism that’s surging — Islamophobia’s on the rise, too. Because there’s no difference between anyone who is discriminated against, whether it’s the Muslims, or the Jews, or minorities on the border states, or the LGBT community — it is all big one hate.

And to me, and, I think, to all of you, the only answer to more hate is more humanity. We gotta repair — we have to replace fear with curiosity. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ — we’ll find the ‘we’ by connecting with each other. And by believing that we’re members of the same tribe. And by feeling empathy for every soul — even Yalies.

My son graduated from Yale, thank you …

But make sure this empathy isn’t just something that you feel. Make it something you act upon. That means vote. Peaceably protest. Speak up for those who can’t and speak up for those who may be shouting but aren’t being hard. Let your conscience shout as loud as it wants if you’re using it in the service of others.

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And as an example of action in service of others, you need to look no further than this Hollywood-worthy backdrop of Memorial Church. Its south wall bears the names of Harvard alumni — like President Faust has already mentioned — students and faculty members, who gave their lives in World War II. All told, 697 souls, who once tread the ground where stand now, were lost. And at a service in this church in late 1945, Harvard President James Conant — which President Faust also mentioned — honored the brave and called upon the community to ‘reflect the radiance of their deeds.’

Seventy years later, this message still holds true. Because their sacrifice is not a debt that can be repaid in a single generation. It must be repaid with every generation. Just as we must never forget the atrocities, we must never forget those who fought for freedom. So as you leave this college and head out into the world, continue please to ‘reflect the radiance of their deeds,’ or as Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan would say, “Earn this.”

And please stay connected. Please never lose eye contact. This may not be a lesson you want to hear from a person who creates media, but we are spending more time looking down at our devices than we are looking in each other’s eyes. So, forgive me, but let’s start right now. Everyone here, please find someone’s eyes to look into. Students, and alumni and you too, President Faust, all of you, turn to someone you don’t know or don’t know very well. They may be standing behind you, or a couple of rows ahead. Just let your eyes meet. That’s it. That emotion you’re feeling is our shared humanity mixed in with a little social discomfort.

But, if you remember nothing else from today, I hope you remember this moment of human connection. And I hope you all had a lot of that over the past four years. Because today you start down the path of becoming the generation on which the next generation stands. And I’ve imagined many possible futures in my films, but you will determine the actual future. And I hope that it’s filled with justice and peace.

And finally, I wish you all a true, Hollywood-style happy ending. I hope you outrun the T. rex, catch the criminal and for your parents’ sake, maybe every now and then, just like E.T.: Go home. Thank you.