My class this semester has been sequestered by a First-Year Interest Group, or FIG, a group of students with similar interests or majors who take several classes together. According to the FIG office, the purpose of these groups is:

* to help students connect with each other, advisors, faculty and ultimately, to help them feel connected to the institution
* to help students make the transition from being a high school learner to a university learner
* to introduce students to resources that can support their academic work at UT and other services that can give them assistance
* to provide students a positive role model in the peer mentor whose knowledge and perspective they will respect
* to be a forum where students can explore their intellectual interests

Certainly, it seems, much good can result from these FIGs. They offer (presumably intimidated or underconfident) students the chance to "connect." "Connect" seems the verb that contains all the purposes listed above, for each bullet exists as a function of the connectivity of the FIG. The students who join the group benefit, not unlike members of a sorority or fraternity, from the ability to connect with others.

Yet my experience thus far with the FIG has provided ample evidence not only that the drawbacks to the FIG vastly outweigh its potential benefits but also that the supposed benefits above don't exactly come about.

First, there are practical problems: because the FIG students take the same classes, their uniform availability outside class causes logistical woes. In my particular case, I found out only last week that the reason no one had visited my office hours is that they all have the same class at that time. What's more, the students are available at the same times every week, and thus I can't accommodate all students who want a conference.

Second, there are social problems. Because the students are "connected," they're very comfortable with each other. This comfort does not, in itself, discommode me. The students feel at ease speaking in class, and they get along well. The problem is that they are too comfortable. They cultivated with dismaying rapidity an attitude toward college not unlike one a teenager brings to summer camp. They naturally and easily (and despite my continual efforts) digress from any attempt at intellectual rigor (e.g., the student who, in the middle of a five minute oral presentation, stopped for two minutes to tell a story about how she walked to the wrong floor in her dormitory). It's like we're in high school again, or perhaps like we never left: they're cliquish, show little respect toward me or other students (a problem I've never, ever encountered in my classes before), and don't seem to register any real difference between what they knew and what they know now. It makes me wonder whether the situation these FIGs are designed to avoid is actually a positive, productive experience: the social, intellectual, and emotional discomfort non-FIG students must overcome in their first semester may ultimately produce better college students.

Third, there are pedagogical (lacking a better term) problems, many of which result from the social problems. The best explanation is an anecdote: after I passed back essays earlier this week, the FIG students immediately shared grades with their fellow FIGsters, while the three non-FIG students in class (who, incidentally, got some of the best grades in the class) immediately took time to read and, I assume, think about my comments. Within 24 hours, three FIG students had contacted me to complain that they thought their essays were graded unfairly compared to other students' essays. More generally, the connectedness of the students has worked against, not in favor, of the "exploration of intellectual interests."

I mean this not as a horror story, but as a speculation that these FIGs don't do what they say they do, that in fact they do the opposite. Could there be some good in unconnectedness?