Each year in this document we report on the long-standing and highly successful Freshman Seminar Program. Year after year we emphasize how important it is for the first-year students to be welcomed into the intellectual community of the university, and how well the seminars function in this regard. We have also reported how much the faculty members enjoy teaching freshman seminars; just like the students, they value the opportunity to interact on an intellectual basis in a small-group setting. In fact, the only problem that has plagued our Freshman Seminar Program is that we have never quite been able to offer enough seminars to seat every first-year student, and in fact almost every year our number of seminars has declined slightly from the previous year. In 1998-99 we solved this, the only difficult obstacle faced by the Freshman Seminar Program. Thanks to a generous research grant program instituted by the Chancellor, we offered a record number of seminars in 1998-99, a record that is likely to be matched again in 1999-00 and 2000-01, the second and third years of the Chancellor’s three-year commitment. Under this initiative, ladder-rank faculty members who teach a seminar as an overload (i.e. in addition to their regular teaching assignment) are given a $2,000 grant, which can be used for any research- or teaching-related expenditures.

Here are the statistics for the Freshman Seminar Program for the last five years:

	94-95	95-96	96-97	97-98	98-99
Enrollments	1903	1752	2028	1925	3359
Average class size	16.1	17.5	16.6	16.6	14.8
Seminars offered	118	100	122	116	226
Participating depts.	52	38	49	43	63

The reader will note the phenomenal 74% increase in enrollments and 95% increase in the number of seminars offered, as contrasted with the prior year. Our previous record (184 seminars with 2,696 enrollments) had been set in the pilot year of the Freshman Seminar Program, 1992-93. In 1998-99 we beat the previous record by 23% (number of seminars) and 25% (number of enrollments). In the pilot year, departments were required to participate; ever since that time participation has been voluntary. Clearly our dedicated faculty is capable of staffing a very substantial program even on a volunteer basis, but with the added incentive of the research grant we were able to mount a large enough program to serve 90% of our entering freshman class in fall 1998 (3734 new freshmen). (This does not include the spring freshman admits, who numbered 861 in spring 1999.)