This week, we bring you the perspective of Dr. Margaret Oakes, Professor of English and Chair of Furman’s Humanities Interdisciplinary Minor.

Dr. Oakes mounts a defense of The Pathways Program, arguing that students need the soft skills its curriculum seeks to inculcate, even if they don’t believe that as freshmen. She also responds to common criticisms and lays out some of the benefits she sees students reap from the program.

Tell me about your experience with Pathways.

I taught year-one Pathways for the first time this year, which means this is the first time I’ve had a group of kids. I will continue with my group next year for year-two Pathways. I also do upper-level Pathways with the English Department’s majors. That’s fun, because I’m the only professor who gets to meet all of the English majors, due to the two tracks we have in the department. I also had a little bit to do also with the initial development of the Pathways curriculum.

What is your evaluation of the program as it stands right now?

I recently got a message from somebody who graduated in 2019. This student was not an English major, and not somebody I ever expected to hear from, but he called out of the blue. He said, “I just wanted to call you and your colleague [who was with me on the study away trip that we went on] to apologize because I was kind of an immature person, and you guys gave me so much grace. I’m older and more mature and wiser now, and I would say thanks, and I’m sorry.”

My point here is that our job does not have immediate returns, and you have to sit with that as an educator. So I get phone calls like that. I get emails from people who are about 15 years graduated saying, “Hey, I’d like to have that book list again,” or, “This came up and it reminded me of something we read in class.”

So there’s two sides to this. One is, “I learned things, but I didn’t know how they would be important until later.” And the other one is, “I have become a better and more mature individual.” Both of those are aspects of college education. No one who’s a freshman in college thinks they need Pathways because, like my sister would say, they think they’re a baked cake, but they’re just cake mix right now. All the stuff is there, but it’s not done. If you’re a freshman in college, and you’ve been the cock of the walk last year, you think you’re a grown up. But you’re not. We all hope we’re better people than we were when we were 18.

I think the program’s value is in starting conversations to try and build the soft skills employers like. How do you manage people? How do you manage conversations? When you become a boss or a parent, you understand how important it is to engage in active listening, but when you’re 18, you don’t have enough experience to know that you will need that. So I think most of it is just planting seeds that, frankly, students don’t care about right now, but that’s fine, because they will grow. We also talked about really practical things like time management. But a lot of it is developing soft skills that students may not appreciate now, but that they’ll need later.

Are there any examples of this curriculum having an impact on students in the short term?

We were in a class discussion about how your words can impact other people, and you may not be aware of it. And one student said, “Yeah, I don’t really worry too much about what other people think about what I say.” And I didn’t say anything, but she got real quiet after that. I thought, “Maybe she’s thinking that that’s not the best idea.” These conversations can provide some space to reflect on your own approach to things. Maybe she’ll think about that, and start to think before she opens her mouth in the future. We have to just lay the groundwork, walk away and see where they take it.

Is the soft-skills building mostly discussion based?

It depends on the topic—we do go through some really practical stuff. Like, how to look through course listings and tips and tricks on how to make a good schedule so that the classes aren’t all full when you go to register. We get granular about college management. Much of it falls under “the stuff I wish that somebody had told me.” I would say that’s about half of it. We walk through the way we think about majors and minors at Furman. We’re also trying to alleviate somebody getting midway through junior year and thinking that they can do something, when they’ve actually blocked themselves out of it by not having a prerequisite. It’s an attempt to forestall problems in the future.

The other half is maturity skills. Such a variety of people come in as freshmen. Some students think that you can’t teach them anything, and some are having imposter syndrome and are scared that they shouldn’t be here. Those students are a little bit easier to teach sometimes, but you have to deal with both ends of that spectrum of approach to becoming an adult. “I think I already am, or I feel like I never will be.” I always try to say, “Hey, you’re going to be a boss someday, and you will need to know how to manage people and present ideas in a way that is persuasive.” So some of it’s discussion, some of it is logistical skills.

How much is the quality of the Pathways experience dependent on the quality of the instructor?

No more or less than any other class. There is a high number of staff who teach the program. I would like more faculty to do it. If a faculty member is already dealing with freshmen by teaching an FYW (First Year Writing Seminar) or first-year students in other capacities, that professor may not want to deal with first-year students in an additional capacity. So I totally get that. I do think some of the staff people are just killer at this. They see the students in ways that we don’t, and they know a lot more about their lives than we do.

So I think that’s a good balance, but I will say this about the curriculum itself. If you’ve never taught a class before, the Pathways curriculum has a very full facilitator guide, detailed down to the minute. I was pleased to see they created that mechanism. The curriculum is quite full, and then there’s a slide deck to go with each unit, which we can vary according to what we think is best. Sometimes a peer mentor might say “I don’t think that slide does them any good.” Or we might add something. I tend to downplay the kumbaya stuff a bit. So there’s definitely tweaking you can do yourself, depending on your own style and what you think your group of kids needs.

Are modules that were previously part of FYWs, like library skills and academic honesty, now components of Pathways?

No. There was some discussion when we first developed the FYWs about whether it would serve as an introduction to college. And those of us who were teaching said “No, there’s already too much in here.” That’s now part of what Pathways has become. It functions as a warning to students that they need to step up their game. Some students these days are much more passive than those we’ve had in the past. They think everything is going to be the way it was in high school. And college isn’t like that.

We do talk a little bit about using the library, but not much. It’s mostly just, “This is where the building is, this is what you do, and these are the people who can help you.” We don’t go that in depth on plagiarism. It’s wrapped up in generally being an ethical person. The most important thing I want them to understand is that they need to figure out what their professors’ policies are. That’s like the number one rule.

How do you see students change over the course of Pathways?

First-year students are very different people in the first semester than in the second, because they’ve gotten those grades that maybe they didn’t like, and when they come back second semester they find the content much more interesting because they realize they need it. First semester they’re all just trying to impress each other. They giggle after class and I just think, “Oh, you’re so 18.” But that’s fine. That’s all they’re supposed to be. They’re doing what they need to do. Everybody’s awkward at 14, and everybody’s awkward at 18 in a different kind of way.

Come second semester, they’ve settled down and bonded a little bit. They eventually stop seeing their teachers as the adults in the peanuts cartoons because they’re interacting with us so much over the course of their four years. And I think that makes Furman graduates better able to deal with adults after college, because you’re used to adult interaction.

Do you think Pathways has significantly improved freshman advising?

Oh yeah. Just because we’re with them all the time. I’m with them every week. When there are kids who are slowly slipping, but won’t show it on the outside, it’s harder for that to go unnoticed. It’s a safety net in the best sense of the word, in that nobody suddenly disappears. We can be more on top of that sort of thing and catch problems earlier and hopefully more successfully.

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The most consistent critique I hear from students is that the program takes too much time. Are you sympathetic to that?

You can’t come in and tell me you spent five hours binge watching some show last night and then complain about a class that takes an hour a week. Then maybe you spend about 30 minutes to 45 minutes doing a little write up. It literally does not take that much time. It takes a lot more time for me, because of all the prep and engagement it requires. Anything you don’t want to do takes up too much time in your life. I think that’s the answer there.

Another criticism is that the program is insufficiently rigorous to receive academic credit. How do you respond to that?

This is the same thing we struggle with for things like internship classes. When I used to teach those internship classes I made sure there was some academic content to them. I think I will say this: Because the students do spend, at minimum, two hours a week doing this, I don’t really have a problem with one hour of academic credit, which is all they get. They can fail it, by the way—if people don’t show up or turn in their stuff, they can fail. I think the credit provides some incentive, but it’s absolutely not worth any more than what it gets.

I think in a larger scope of things, I don’t have a problem with it because of the psychological implications of a zero-credit class: zero credit means zero work. And I’d be thinking that too as a student. In fact, I tried making upper-level Pathways [what juniors and seniors take] pass/fail, and that didn’t work. I’m going back to giving an actual grade in there, because people respond to that letter grade more than anything else.

I make my upper-level Pathways students do a research project on the industry they’re interested in going into, and the relevant issues in the field. They have to do a bunch of reading and give a presentation on it. They’re asking questions like, “What is AI doing in my industry right now?” And to me, that is academic content.

What are some of Pathways’s other benefits?

I think it can provide a low-pressure environment for them to test the waters in small ways.

I had an instance where a student turned in a final reflection that was clearly written by AI. I had to turn it over to the dean. That student has to go have a conversation about cheating on the Pathways final reflection and I’m like “Really? You want to gamble the farm on that? You’re going to have an AI-plagiarism violation on your record!” But at the same time, since they did that for this class, that’s an almost no-cost life lesson.

We also try to work through scenarios ahead of time that are likely in life. When we talk about active listening, we’ll go through things like, if you have a friend who’s in some sort of problem, how helpful is it for you to say “Well, at least it’s not [fill in the blank]?” And so we’ll go through things that people often say to each other that are really not helpful, and talk about things you actually can say to your friend or, one day, your employee or patient.

So that gets back to the soft skills, but we introduce these real-world scenarios in very unweighted ways, so that maybe the next time your roommate has a problem, you’ll think instead of saying the first thing that comes into your mind. That’s step one in maturity. Pathways is a way to think about those things—about real-life ethics and real-life plagiarism—and their consequences in an environment that has no serious repercussions, so they can work through it some.

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Welcome to Perspectives on Pathways — a compilation of interviews intended to make public a wide array of viewpoints on Furman’s two-year advising initiative.

This week, we bring you the perspective of Carter Ozburn, a junior Politics and Business major, and former Editor in Chief of The Paladin, Furman’s student newspaper.

Ozburn evaluates different elements of The Pathways Program, including the CliftonStrengths test, career preparation, and academic rigor. While he finds some parts of the program useful, he generally thinks it ought to serve as an optional “college 101,” rather than a mandatory class. Ozburn also questions the effectiveness of the University’s data collection on the program.

Read Ozburn’s full interview below.

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What do you think of Pathways?

I think it’s college 101, it should be one semester, and it should be optional. The curriculum is beneficial, I think, to first-generation students who don’t come from a collegiate background or international students who might be at a cultural disadvantage, but forcing every student to go through it for two years is just a ploy to game the U.S. News and World Report rankings. I just don’t think it’s that beneficial.

I also don’t think it makes sense that the mandatory second year is career focused. It’s not a bad thing in itself, but those resources are available through the Malone Center or the Cothran Center; students just have to actively seek them out, instead of being forced to seek them out. I think that you can provide the necessary information in a mandatory session or two freshman year, and it doesn’t need to be a two year class.

Recently, Jeff Selingo published a book called Dream School, in which he specifically praised Pathways. Why do outside observers evaluate Pathways so highly, when significant numbers of students seem to disapprove of the program?

I have no idea. I think it contributes to the perception we try to cultivate—we’re an innovative college, we’re very sustainable, our campus is gorgeous, etc. I also think they view it as the stepping stone to internships, study away, and certain career objectives. They see it as college 101 and then a launching pad for a career—who wouldn’t want that? In reality though, it should be college 101 for those who need it, and that career advising should be left to those who do it professionally, through the resources which have always been available to students.

What has The Paladin’s reporting on Pathways uncovered in the last year?

We reported on it a lot like when they made the program mandatory. There were tons of “I hate Pathways” op-eds. Eventually we had to be like, “ok, let’s not write the same article every semester.” We did include it in Clay Wallace’s 2025 Administration Approval Survey, which came out two semesters ago. [Quote from survey: “A large, 46% plurality of students expressed disapproving of how the administration managed academic affairs this year. Among the small number of respondents who addressed this issue in the explanation of their responses, Pathways was commonly criticised as negatively affecting academic life.”]

That survey wasn’t focused on Pathways though. It packaged the program along with a wide variety of issues related to the administration. Of course, many students disapproved of the program, but we haven’t done express reporting on it, just out of fear of being redundant.

Pathways’s curriculum makes use of the CliftonStrengths test. What is your appraisal of the test?

I think CliftonStrengths are helpful to a point. My strengths were entirely strategic thinking and interpersonal skills, which is good to know. It’s also good to know that I don’t have a single executive leadership strength. The actual reports from Gallup about one’s strengths are very helpful because they generate potential career options and ways that one should market oneself. I feel like I had no concept of how to do that until very recently. It’s also nice to have words and reports to back up what you’re saying in an interview, so you don’t feel like you’re overselling yourself or giving a biased report of your own ability.

I’ve heard that students sometimes treat their results as binding identifiers, rather than as tools for self-knowledge and improvement. Is that kind of thinking common?

I certainly think it’s common. It seems like a locus of control kind of thing—all of the circumstances around me, all my natural strengths, dictate that I should go here and do this. I should never compensate. But actually, you can change and improve. You should look at your weaknesses. I think that can differ from student to student, but I think that is certainly a pitfall of CliftonStrengths. The idea that you should never go for any leadership positions because the test didn’t assign you any leadership strengths isn’t necessarily true. You just might not be as naturally able to lead as others.

What do you want to see Pathways incorporate more of?

In my own personal experience, I’d like more alumni engagement. We were required to do an informational interview with an alum, and that was great. But there are so many Furman alumni that love Furman and want to pour into students, and I think it would be great if students were pushed to interact with them more.

I also think certain things like writing cover letters and resumes, no matter how much you try and tune that stuff out, is really important. It also gives workers at The Malone Center or The Cothran Center a bit of a break, if you can build a foundation in students early. Instead of starting from scratch junior year, they’ll have drafts they want to cater. Your career can take so much time, and it’s just hard to nail all that down. So I think any emphasis on pre-professional prep could only benefit students.

Do you have any sense of the survey and data-acquisition methods that the university uses to gauge student opinion about Pathways?

I believe that most of it comes from “snap evaluations” at the end of each Pathway session. Students aren’t allowed to leave until they do the survey. It’s usually three required questions and then two optional, free-response questions. Things like “Did you learn anything?” “What went well, what didn’t go well?” Usually students leave the free-response blank and just do the three required ones as quickly as possible. And that’s just not sound data collection. At least for the Gallup surveys [which is another way the university evaluates the program], students are positively incentivised. They push those surveys really hard, and a lot of students do them. I think the data collection should just be more comprehensive. The snap evaluation method is really bad. It’s hard to trust answers that were demanded in exchange for leaving during your lunch block.

How would you rate Pathways’s academic rigor?

It varies so much from instructor to instructor. I had an instructor who was really awesome and very much cared about Pathways and the students. That made it much a better experience. I hated the assignments and didn’t see the point of them, but I still did them and tried to do them well because I really loved my instructor, and I knew that she would be disappointed if I didn’t. So that can change a lot. But the rigor is nothing crazy. It’s mostly free responses, and how much you have to write varies. I know people who wrote bullet points instead of full sentences, and they still got 100s. I think that’s a problem.

Do you agree with the claim that Pathways is necessary to level the playing field for Furman students who are disadvantaged in one way or another?

I think it’s true that there are a number of Furman students that don’t get the Furman experience, whatever that may be—internships, study away, great student involvement, etc. I think student involvement revolves around the same kind of types of students, as sad as that is. The people getting the full Furman experience tend to be the same as the ones doing study away getting internships, and those are also the same folks that are club presidents and student leadership.

It’s really hard to say what causes that. I think Pathways attempts to make the full Furman experience available and push students towards it. But also, I think for some students it’s an effort issue. For other students I think it’s truly external, like in the case of an international student. I think Pathways is beneficial for them. But I also think, at the end of the day, students themselves have to put in a lot of effort, and that just doesn’t always happen.

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Stay tuned! We will publish another perspective from a Furman community member periodically through the coming weeks!

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

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This week, we bring you the perspective of Nathan Johnson, a junior Politics and History major.

Johnson reflects on where he thinks Pathways falls short, arguing that the program functions as a safety net for unmotivated students while not serving the majority of the student body. For reform, he suggests shortening the program to two semesters and focusing more on career-related skills rather than personal values and vocation.

Read Johnson’s full interview below.

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What was your experience in Pathways? Did it benefit you?

I think the first month or two was beneficial in that it forced me to get around campus. There was an assignment where I had to take a picture at a bunch of different buildings to prove I knew where they were. It helped me to get oriented, which was really great. But beyond that, I didn’t benefit much. It just felt kind of useless. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t really see why I had to do it. I think a big benefit of a freshman seminar of any sort, educationally speaking, is having a cohort of students that you go through life and classes with, but there’s no really communal aspect to Pathways.

In terms of the information that they give you, it seems like they’re trying to tell you how to be a good person, and you can’t really teach someone how to do that in a class. There’s a lot of stuff about discovering your vocation and having respectful conversations, which just aren’t going to be taught in a decentralized curriculum once a week.

I can see how some students would benefit from Pathways, but we’re probably talking about the bottom quintile. Making a LinkedIn or a resume are things that most students will figure out how to do by the time that they need to do them. Pathways just functions as a safety net for the students that wouldn’t be motivated to figure things out themselves. Then all the other students are forced to do the same program, because the students that aren’t motivated to learn those skills aren’t going to be the ones to volunteer for a remedial life-practices course.

Do you know any students who view Pathways positively?

No, I do not. I don’t know any students that like it, and I haven’t talked to any peer mentors that seem to believe in it either. The peer mentors tend to like it because it pays well, and some think they might be able to make it better. I can’t say with certainty that no students enjoy it, but I’ve yet to encounter a student or a peer mentor that does.

Does Pathways have positive components?

Having to interview someone with a career I was interested in was really good. Being forced to give a speech about something in my personal life with my classmates was good practice. All of these are things which should be done earlier in the curriculum though. We did the speech on the last day of my class, and until then, I had not been close with a single other person or really talked with anyone in my class; after that, we all had things to talk about with each other and felt more companionship and common ground.

I will also say, one benefit of Clifton Strengths [a sort of personality test] is that they give you a structure and vocabulary for explaining your strengths and weaknesses in job interviews, though obviously not using the words that they give you. But if you read the description and reword it, that can help in articulating soft skills.

How could Furman make Pathways more substantial?

One thing they could do would be to lean more into the sorts of things they do at the beginning—generally orienting students to campus and introducing freshmen to the resources available to them. Then I would recommend gutting a lot of the personal values and vocation stuff, because I’ve yet to meet someone who has really benefited from those practices. I would also want to see a shift into how to do classes and academics, in addition to preparation for job and career.

I also think a lot of the things they do sophomore year should be done freshman year. You don’t need to wait till you’re a sophomore to talk to someone about a career or to put together a resume and LinkedIn. A lot of freshmen apply to internships for the summer, so why not cover those things sooner? Also learning how to comport yourself and brand yourself for an interview. Those seem like things aren’t going to come up necessarily in required academic classes, but they’re still good things to know how to do pretty early on. That’s why I think a two semester program, instead of a two year program, would be appropriate.

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Stay tuned! We will publish another perspective from a Furman community member every other Wednesday!

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

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This week, we focus on the perspective of Dr. Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion and former Pathways Advisor.

We hope you enjoy the insight.

Tell me about your experience with Pathways.

In the beginning I did not pay much attention to Pathways. The program’s earliest iterations were voluntary and designed for students who desired some extra help in adjusting to college. I took more notice when the vision expanded to requiring a two-year course that would receive one academic credit each semester, especially when the program’s main focus after the first few weeks of college-adjustment modules seemed to be preparing students for the job market.

Don’t get me wrong—I believe we really did need to increase what we were doing to prepare students for the workplace. We also needed to help students be more aware of and make better use of the resources we already had on campus. Doing these things better was important for our current students and for recruiting new students, especially in a world where college value is identified with a quantifiable return on investment.

But when job preparation seemed to be the primary focus of the course—and as Pathways increasingly appeared to be advertised as our signature program—I wanted to know more. That was when I decided to teach Pathways.

What did you learn from that experience?

First, let me say that I have always enjoyed advising new students, and I did that for over 35 years. I think having faculty or a staff person meet with new students regularly, especially in the first semester, is a great idea. I think it was helpful to students, and I loved the opportunity to get to know them. I was able to help with significant bumps in the road that some of them encountered.

As time went on, however, I felt there were too many meetings given the content we were working with. I also was concerned about the legitimacy of giving academic credit for the experience. Students were assigned nothing of any significance to read or do to prepare for the classes. Understandably, there was concern about Pathways work detracting from the students’ regular classes, and technically the one credit does give them an overload. I do get that concern about maintaining balance, but assigning no real academic work for a course receiving academic credit was, and is, a concern for me. I keep thinking about the elective course in Religion (or in another department) that seniors often find meaningful and now won’t be taking because Pathways credits provide the equivalent of a full course.

How would you suggest changing Pathways to be more robust?

In the first semester, I would like to see very short, quality readings that would help students understand what it means to be a college student. There are some good, brief, well-researched and interesting pieces by experts on study skills, notetaking, and the like that could lead to good conversations. There are also some wonderful op-eds that address the value of learning. Having such short readings as a starting point would give students experience in how to engage in discussion without requiring them to talk about their personal experiences, which is difficult for a small group of students who do not know each other early on.

After a few sessions that include not only the basics of college life at Furman but also the tools needed for advanced learning (learning management systems, electronic library usage, the use of AI, etc.), Pathways could move toward helping students learn the meaning of a liberal arts education. Initially, we need to put aside the assumption that students need only to reflect on their self-understanding in order to find their “right” major and their own pathway.

Students need to broaden the horizons they developed in high school. That should begin with a better understanding of what it might mean to be broadly educated and how the various disciplinary methodologies open up new worlds—and pathways—for all of us. This cannot be done by reading a single article about a liberal arts education, but short academic pieces, podcasts, and op-eds could kindle discussions about the work of different disciplines. One way to do this would be to consider the nature of memory and story as these are studied and utilized in different academic fields. Attention to what science and social sciences are telling us about how we make and retain memories—and why some things are forgotten and some things are remembered—could be a good introduction to these methodologies.

From there, a look at how historians, writers of literature, politicians, religious teachers, educators, and communicators of all kinds tell stories could spark meaningful conversation among students about the nature of different disciplines. These discussions might also help students understand themselves. How and why do we tell our personal story, our university’s story, our company’s story, the story of our research, and all the other stories that form our lives? Discussing these ideas in a basic way will prepare students to understand the General Education Requirements (GERs) not as mere hoops to jump through but as important ways to understand the world, which is what GERs at Furman were designed to do.

Were there particular things in the first year that concerned you?

The main module that concerned me addressed issues of identity and included an exercise which I chose not to do with my class, partly because my students were very hesitant to talk about personal subjects. I will note that this exercise has been removed. Pathways’s designers have provided opportunities for instructor feedback, though that particular change was not the result of my direct feedback. I do think we need more input from more faculty, and I’m happy to say that our faculty governance is currently providing more opportunity for that.

Aside from that exercise, I did not find the topics problematic in themselves. I think, for example, the class that deals with how to have conversation across difference fits well with the new “On Discourse” program, though such an exercise might be improved by beginning with a good short article that focused on academic studies of something like the value of kindness.

But my biggest concern about the program is the perspective on values that I believe the program is unintentionally projecting. And here I am not referring to any political or social system that we hear about in the daily news.

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What are the values that concern you?

I fear that the main values students absorb through the Pathways Program is job preparedness and career success. While I do not think the creators of Pathways intend that, and there are other values presented, I think they are drowned out by our larger culture. Even at places like Harvard—partly because A’s are so common—students feel that they can distinguish themselves in the job market only by spending more time on extracurricular activities like internships; the result is less concern for the courses they take.

The second year of Pathways, which consists of career shadowing, writing resumes, and internships, becomes the Furman Pathway to that big goal: the job. Those things are and should be very exciting; there is nothing wrong with wanting a good job. But there are some shortcomings that come from making that vision central.

I fear that the job preparedness focus of Pathways could encourage students to engage too much in the branding mentality that makes us all entrepreneurs of ourselves. Certainly young people need to practice identifying and developing their strengths, but I think we also need to do more to help students see the value in community and civic responsibility.

You mentioned that Pathways does teach other values. What are some examples?

The current program has a couple of short modules explicitly addressing values. Early on, students are asked to choose their values from words on a stack of cards that includes everything from faith to fashion. Another exercise asks them to think about what kind of job they want—one that pays a lot but requires many hours of work away from home, a job that pays less but allows more freedom, or something in between. Certainly important questions, but I think it is a very meager beginning. Pathways should encourage students to consider a wider list of values beyond “self-care,” which is included as an important part of the program and the path to a good job.

Students take the Clifton Strengths test, which provides positive statements of what it describes as talents and ways of engaging with the world. Everyone enjoys getting their results, and thinking and talking about them can be a positive and inspiring experience. Despite that, it bothers me to see the strengths so often listed in students’ email signature line. Even if these tests provide a scientifically credible understanding of our strengths, which many question, I think it is the task of a university like Furman to more explicitly encourage students to find other ways to define themselves—things like character and their appreciation of the world as seekers of knowledge and persons who seek to develop new strengths.

If Pathways is to be the center of Furman’s branding and recruiting message, then it should encourage students to consider more explicitly “what really matters,” historically an important part of Furman’s traditional ethos. Yes, jobs matter a lot. But most of us know that a job alone will not make us happy—much less help us know how to live a meaningful life not only in times of joy and success but also in times of sorrow or failure. Everyone has values, things that they care about, but students need not only to identify them but also to appraise them. A worthwhile first-year experience should challenge students to begin to move beyond identifying values to cultivating character, an educational journey more important than even a job.

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Stay tuned! Moving forward, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member every other Wednesday!

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

This week, we focus on the perspective of Dr. Beth Pontari, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost; Professor of Psychology

We hope you enjoy the insight.

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Tell me about yourself and your role at Furman.

I have been at Furman since 2001 when I started on faculty in psychology. I was the department chair from 2013 to 2017. During that time I had the opportunity to participate in a resiliency study that was conducted across the four Duke Endowment campuses (Furman, Duke, Davidson, and Johnson C. Smith). That study in many ways launched me on the trajectory of being in administration and also connects to both Pathways and The Furman Advantage (which I’ll come back to later).

From 2017 to 2022 I was the Associate Provost for Engaged Learning. Then, when our provost went back to the faculty, I took the interim role for two years, and am now in my second year in the official role. Furman was my first job out of my PhD at University of Florida—I’ve been here my entire career, and that’s intentional. I really believe in and am very passionate about what we do. I believe in the mission, and I want to help continue to move that mission forward.

Can you give me an overview of The Furman Advantage?

When Elizabeth Davis arrived at Furman and took stock of the school, she quickly identified our many strengths, including our rigorous academics, faculty engagement, undergraduate research, student internships, and robust study-away program. She observed the powerful connections between faculty and students.

At the same time, she also noticed that not all students were having the same experience. There were some that, for whatever reason, were not getting the transformative experience that we really wanted for all of our students. So that’s where The Furman Advantage started and why it was so successful. It spoke to and leveraged the things that we were already really good at, and tried to make good on the every-student promise; to figure out how to get all students engaged at that level.

Another area where students told us we could improve—a finding repeated in our own internal assessment and eventually through a Gallup assessment—was first year advising. Students also said we needed to do more by way of professional development, especially for graduates looking to get jobs rather than advanced degrees after Furman. We needed to figure out how to both improve our advising and mentoring and do a better job of preparing students for life after Furman.

Underlying a lot of that was the question, “How do we get students to reflect more?” We know we have a student body that’s very motivated and very high achieving. They go and go and go, but they don’t always stop and reflect on what they’re doing and perhaps be more intentional about the choices they’re making. Figuring out how to do that was another piece of the puzzle. The resiliency study also showed that our students were experiencing a lot of academic stress. We needed a way to intervene and support students with time-management and study skills.

When we were first launching The Furman Advantage, we needed to know what the barriers to the full Furman experience were. The primary one, of course, was financial. If we really wanted students to do full-time summer experiences, whether research or internships, we needed to make those opportunities available to all students, not just the ones who could afford to not get paid in the summer. The other thing that was really loud and clear was that students would often say, “I just figured all this out way too late. I didn’t have the right advising and support.” So it was an information, access, preparation, and scaffolding question. That’s where Pathways really started to take form.

Tell me more about Pathways.

Pathways was designed to make sure that we are providing people with the information and basic skills, like creating a resume or sitting through an interview, that students need to be professionally equipped. Back in 2016 or ‘17 there were different committees working to launch all the pieces of The Furman Advantage. They were thinking about engaged learning and about advising over the course of a four year pathway. The committees independently came to the conclusion that Furman needed to do something differently in years one and two.

By the fall of 2017 we were ready to execute on a pilot program. We soft-launched the Pathways Program for what was supposed to be five-ish years. Covid happened in the middle of that, so it got extended. Each year we took a sample of about 120 incoming freshmen and randomly assigned them into cohorts. We also had a comparison group of non-Pathways students and would assess both on the outcomes that we were looking for: Are students taking advantage of more engaged learning? Are they reporting positive advising experiences? Are they learning to reflect? These are the kinds of outcomes we were hoping for, and we could actually compare the treatment group and the control group.

I will tell you that that type of assessment is very rare in higher education. It was a quasi-experiment that had random group assignment (in that incoming students were randomly selected to participate in the pilot or comparison group). And the data from the pilot was compelling! We saw an increased sense of belonging in the Pathways group, along with more satisfaction with advising. There was definitely more early connection with the Career Center. In the end—which is right now—we’re actually showing better retention.

In order for the Pathways Program to become part of the curriculum and a graduation requirement, it had to go through the faculty for an official vote. We went through that process, presented the data that we had collected over the years, and got it approved by the faculty with the caveat that at year six, which will be next year, it would come back up for a vote. We’ve continued to do a lot of assessments, including the same ones we did during the soft launch. The difference now is we’re really looking at correlation over time. For example, sense of belonging seems to have continued to increase over time. Is that due to Pathways? Not necessarily. But I think the combination of that pilot data and the current data gives us confidence that Pathways is certainly playing a role.

Were the original pilot groups self-selecting?

No. We contacted 150 incoming students and said “you’ve been selected for this program.” Now, did all of them agree to do it? Not necessarily. Some people dropped out. Some said the time commitment was too much, some said they didn’t need the program, and then some left Furman, so there’s not much you can do there. But yes, they were random. Imagine it this way: we take 600 incoming students, pull out 150 names, randomly put them into cohorts, and then pull out the students from the remaining 450 that best matched the Pathways population for the comparison.

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What kind of assessments do you conduct now?

Our assessments now are fairly robust. The students provide feedback through “snap evaluations” after each module or course. They also complete course evaluations at the end of each semester like they would for any Furman course. What will be interesting now is that our current seniors are the first class to go all the way through the program. It will be really useful to get their mature reflections on the program, since, as is often the case, you can look back and understand some of the things you had to do as a student better than you did at the time. I think we’re probably going to see some of that in our feedback.

We’re also still working with Gallup. Gallup assesses our students and employees once a year, and our alumni every five years. So that’s another big basis for some of our evaluation of Pathways. We also do an assessment (The National Survey of Student Engagement) every three years that looks at things like mentoring, access to high-impact practices, etc. We also create a Pathways Report every year.

We do these sorts of evaluations because we urgently want The Furman Advantage to be successful and to actually live up to our guarantees. Our assessments initially showed us that we were going to have to provide a bit more scaffolding on the front end. When we looked at what our barriers were we saw that this was an opportunity. Students were saying that freshmen advising was kind of luck of the draw—whether they got a good advisor or not. We’re hopeful that Pathways will solve some of that, because the training that’s involved with being a Pathways advisor is pretty heavy in terms of understanding the curriculum, learning how to interact with students, etc.

The other piece that I think is really important about the program is that students see their advisor and peer mentor once a week, which is on average far more than students used to see their first year advisors. The peer mentor piece has been super powerful for the program, for the students and the peer mentors alike. A lot of our peer mentors will say it’s like one of the best things that they’ve done in terms of an engaged learning experience.

I think it’s also good for students who, say, come midterms get Bs and Cs when they’re used to that. They can find camaraderie amongst their Pathways class and realize that they’re among many others who are having these sorts of new experiences. These experiences can be stressful and anxiety provoking, but I think it lowers the temperature a little bit when you see them as what everyone’s going through.

This goes back to the resiliency project that’s meant to help students understand the things they’re experiencing—setbacks, failures, challenges, roommate conflicts—and help them develop skills to work through and learn from these experiences. Pathways is aimed to increase resiliency. And the pilot showed Pathways students self-reported more resiliency than the control group.

What has student and faculty feedback looked like?

It depends. When you’re talking about feedback on the outcomes of the program—like students’ reported level of belonging and things like that—those are in line with what we would expect. Are there students that dislike Pathways? Yes. Are there students that really think Pathways is great? Yes. It’s like anything else; there’s a mixed bag. I don’t think the majority of students think Pathways isn’t useful, which is what our assessments have shown so far. There are challenges—not all the students complete the surveys. That’s just part of doing surveys, right? But the majority overall are still finding it useful. They might find some of the content less useful, and some of the students really do push back on it, and those are all things that we try to listen to, gather, and address.

The advising committee is responsible for taking all that feedback every year and making changes to the program and curriculum. They look at what students are saying—what they find not useful or don’t like. I will say that if a minority of students raise something we might not make the change right away, because those students might be really well prepared for college while others are less so, but we at least try to take that feedback into consideration. The great thing about the program is that because it’s modular, we can make adjustments and evolve really easily. And the committee’s job is to do that every year.

We have gotten some faculty feedback recently. Only 100 faculty responded, and the big divide about Pathways is whether the faculty member taught the class. Faculty who have been a Pathways advisor definitely have a more positive view than those who haven’t taught in it. That’s an interesting data point.

I mentioned we have a vote coming up in the 2027-28 academic year. We’re going to make changes to the program before then based on all this feedback. What those changes will look like is mostly up to faculty governance, advising committees, and faculty who weigh in on what those changes should look like. Pathways isn’t a stagnant thing. It’s a living thing, and we’re going to have to make adjustments to respond to the faculty who have issues with it. The goal is not to get rid of it. I think it’s really useful.

We see retention going up—very few schools have gone back to pre-Covid retention between freshman and sophomore year—and we think that’s really important. We have to really think about what’s best for the students over time. We’re also seeing higher rates of use of the Center for Academic Success. We’re seeing students going earlier to the Malone Center for Career Engagement. It seems very likely that Pathways is benefiting students in the end. They have a resume and they have done an interview. I do think the original need is still there, and we need to make sure that we’re providing students with all the information and support they need to be successful.

What are some of the changes the advisory committee overseeing the Pathways’s curriculum has made based on student or faculty feedback?

They make curricular changes. Things like doing this but not that module or taking into account that something might become less relevant based on what’s happening at Furman and in the world. Honestly, I can’t give you examples of the specifics because I’m not that far in the weeds, but they’re adjusting the curriculum based on what’s working and what’s not working. They’re not making big changes. The big changes are going to come—if we make those—as we go closer to the vote. Could you go from a two year program to one year? We could think about that. I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing, but the idea is—in great Furman fashion— that we’re innovators, right? We’re going to come together and think about how to make this program really good, and continue to evolve and move it forward.

To give you examples of recent faculty discussion, there were two open forums in the fall for faculty to come and give feedback on Pathways and have in-person conversation. There are also always opportunities to give written feedback. So that conversation is happening. One of the conversations we’re having simultaneously is about the liberal arts. What’s the future of the liberal arts? How does Furman define the liberal arts? I think it will be great if those conversations start to come together. We’re going to continue to do the traditional liberal arts and embrace the strengths we have in that space, but like any other school, we need to think about what’s next, what’s new, and what’s important for students to have in their curriculum. So I could see those two conversations feeding off of one another as we move closer to making any changes to the program in the next couple years.

What is the relationship of the Duke Endowment to Pathways?

The Duke Endowment supported The Furman Advantage, and not just Pathways. The more costly parts of The Furman Advantage were making sure that we have stipends for all summer internships and research. A lot of the Duke Endowment funds have gone to making sure students get a $3,500 stipend to do research and internships. Now, that’s not all Duke Endowment funds. We have our own Furman funds, we have grant funds, and we have restricted funds, but that’s a big lift every year. We also invested in the Malone Center. We have invested in positions to try and execute the 100% guarantee to engaged learning. So Pathways is part of many things that get funded.

The rough cost of Pathways is about a half-million dollars per year. When you compare that to a lot of the other things we do, Pathways is relatively cost-efficient. Contrast that with the study away budget, which is close to $4 million a year. So, yes, some of the Duke Endowment funds are supporting Pathways, but they’re also supporting a lot of the other elements of The Furman Advantage. And I would say many of those are more costly than Pathways.

How has Furman improved since you came on board? Are there any ways where you feel like we’ve declined?

I’ve been here 25 years, and like I said earlier, I was convinced from the beginning of what an amazing place Furman is, and that has not wavered. Our strengths are still our tremendous faculty that prioritize our students. I’m biased when thinking about improvements because I think I’ve been a part of the most recent improvements through The Furman Advantage. But I think that through The Furman Advantage people really became aware of what we were doing and became better able to talk about it, which was something new for me in my 25 year span. Students say “The Furman Advantage,” and though they might not completely understand what that means, they at least had some language for the things they did while at Furman.

I have always thought the challenge for me at Furman is, how do we differentiate ourselves? Because I do think we do things better. I think we do things more intentionally. I think more students get more experiences. One of the things we’ve seen is about a 15 to 20% increase in students who have two engaged learning experiences. So 60% of students are doing two internships, two research experiences, or one of each. That is a huge differentiator, even compared to our liberal arts competitors.

I also think it’s just clear that we have improved our advising and mentoring. I think we have definitely improved on career prep in terms of students understanding where and how to get help. One of the things we learned early on through the Gallup data was that we were failing the students after graduation who weren’t going to grad school, med school, or law school. Pathways is part of addressing that. It makes them think about what skills employers and graduate schools want. It teaches how to get those skills in sophomore year.

For years three and four we created the Purposeful Pathways Program. The Pathways Program is the first two years. Purposeful Pathways is years three and four, where every academic department now has a faculty member whose job it is to think about discipline-specific types of professional-development activities, opportunities, and skills that students in the department need. They partner with the Malone Center, help students with internships, and bring programming to the department for students to engage in. That has been wildly successful.

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Where do you see Furman going in the next 20 years?

The higher-ed landscape right now is really challenging. The liberal-arts landscape is incredibly challenging. The enrollment landscape is like the wild wild west. And so we’ve got things we really have to take head on. We need to keep evolving the transformative student experience that we have created. And honestly in higher ed, people point to us as the exemplar. You know, we just appeared in Dream Schools. But how do we keep evolving with it? That’s the question about the evolution of liberal arts. What engaged learning opportunities do we need to think of that maybe are more relevant now than they were five or ten years ago? We still need to evolve and do better.

For example, we’re looking to do more industry-specific career coaching. The Malone Center recently hired a finance/business consultant to help students interested in those fields. The idea is that as soon as a student expresses interest in finance/business as their career trajectory, there is a person that they can go to that has all the specialized knowledge, contact with alums and corporations, and know-how to help them find internships and eventually jobs. Over time, we want to create more advising positions for more industries. We chose finance as a pilot because, if you don’t already know that’s what you want to do and have solid direction by the time you’re a sophomore, you lose out on opportunities. And students were telling us that we needed to do better in this particular area.

How are you looking to grow academically?

For one example, this past fall, the faculty approved a new Finance major. We’re also looking at some data-science opportunities. We have the Data Analytics minor that has been wildly popular. We’ve been thinking about how we can build that out into computer science or applied math. We’re also rebuilding our Physics department a bit, and have a new chair. He’s hopefully recruiting two new faculty right now. One of the things we’re trying to address is students who say, “I think I’m interested in engineering, and though I don’t really know what that means, I certainly am not going to Furman because they don’t have anything in that field.” Well, I would disagree. What we’re hearing from people looking to hire engineers or bring them into their master’s programs is that they want engineers with liberal arts skills! Applied physics is an area that speaks to some engineering possibilities, while still allowing students to study in a liberal-arts context.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I really feel that out of 25 years, the last five to ten have seen serious change. The higher-ed environment is difficult. Enrollment is changing. But I really believe that Furman is having a moment. There’s a lot of good things in alignment right now. We have worked really hard to figure out what our future is, and we know what we have to do. We know what the challenges are and we have a plan to address them.

Each subsequent week, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member, including interviews from:

• Professor Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion

• Nathan Johnson, Junior, Politics and History Major

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

This week, we focus on the perspective of Tyler Tewell ‘25, a former Pathways Peer Mentor.

We hope you enjoy the insight.

Tell me about your experience with Pathways.

My experience was fairly standard, as far as I can tell. When I was in the program myself, I opted to stay in for the full two years (Pathways was optional at that time). As a peer mentor, I worked with the incoming freshman class for the entire year. The workload was minimal for both students and mentors, though mentoring was a bit more involved. I taught classes alongside the professors and enjoyed the one-on-ones I got to have with students across semesters.

What are Pathway’s positive characteristics?

Pathways has some definite pros. It levels the playing field by promoting access to student resources and teaching soft skills like study habits, active listening, and school/life balance. It also provides students with people in their corner who can directly support them on an individualized basis.

What are the program’s flaws?

Unfortunately, the program’s flaws can stem directly from its benefits, because the program isn’t optional. When students already know what they’re being taught, assignments often wind up being more busywork than beneficial. Also, the Pathways class itself often interrupts or halts student activities and planning throughout the week.

There is a general sense that very few students like Pathways. Why do you think that is?

Simply put, the course is primed to get on students’ nerves. Most Furman students enter their first year already prepared and ready for majors, social life, and the college experience as a whole.

As I mentioned above, students were permitted to opt out when I took part in the program. I didn’t stay because it benefitted me, I stayed because it was easy. I imagine being forced to stay is what made Pathways into the inconvenience many students see it as. That and the fact that it’s two years instead of one.

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Are there ways that Furman could improve the program?

Reducing the time it takes is the most common suggestion I hear for improving Pathways—taking the essential information in the curriculum and condensing it into the first year experience. Alternatively, creating a point at which the program can be opted out of, either by choice or through proven knowledge, might give students a greater sense of agency within a system that is intended to benefit them.

Is there anything else you want to say about Pathways?

I’m not actively against the program, but even after experiencing it as both a student and a peer mentor over three years, I’m not in support of it either. I think that’s significant, and it makes me want to see Pathways improve.

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Each subsequent week, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member, including interviews from:

• Provost Beth Pontari, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost

• Professor Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion

• Nathan Johnson, Junior, Politics and History Major

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

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The administration presents Pathways as their attempt to “[ensure that] every student maximizes their college experience.” The program claims to connect students “with dedicated advisors, trained peer mentors, and a comprehensive support network that guides [students] through every step of [their] academic and professional development.” During weekly classes through the first two years of college, students receive guidance in building resumes, having conversation across differences in belief, and other necessary elements of college and career preparation.

What’s not to like? Well, those familiar with Pathways’s on-the-ground execution have long perceived a wide gulf between the Program’s promise and the Program’s reality. Students and professors alike doubt its utility and are frustrated by its requirements. These, of course, are not universal sentiments, but they are wide-spread.

It was this disparity between administrative rhetoric and feedback from students and professors which led the Furman Free Speech Alliance (FFSA) to begin investigating the Pathways Program more seriously.

We have conducted interviews with faculty, students, and administrators, both on and off the record, in an attempt to comprehend why the program has created discontent among so many of its participants. The result is Perspectives on Pathways, a compilation of interviews intended to make public a wide array of viewpoints on the program. This project is not a campus-wide survey and it is not intended to give any systematic indication of Pathways’s popularity. Instead, it aims to give voice to Pathways’s defenders and detractors alike, to better inform the broader Furman community about what is happening on campus.

In addition to the interviews, we want to offer some reflection on what we’ve learned over the course of FFSA’s investigation. We recognize—as I think any fair reader of the interviews will—that some of the program’s goals are laudable. It is good to provide systematic instruction in academic integrity and connect students early with career-preparation resources, for example. At the same time, we have come away with some serious concerns.

The Pathways Program, while not a serious academic endeavor, awards students four academic credits over the course of two years. We think this practice fails to meet the high standard of academic excellence Furman has traditionally modeled. Additionally, students tend to view aspects of the Program which don’t deal substantially with college or career preparation—such as reflection exercises, “storytelling” modules, and conversations about personality tests—as wastes of time. We think this is seriously damaging to the university’s ethos and share the concerns of many students about how effective a required, once-weekly class can be at prompting serious and productive reflection.

If Furman’s administration is going to advertise Pathways as one of the university’s flagship initiatives, then they should strive to make it excellent. Right now the program is mediocre at best. Successful reform of the program could take different shapes: Furman could fortify the curriculum to make it more worthy of academic credit, as Dr. Turner suggested in her interview, or they could strip out the parts not substantially related to college and career skills, as several students suggested in their interviews. Whatever direction they choose, it is clear that the Program needs reform.

Ultimately, the nature of that reform—and whether the Program continues in existence at all—will be decided by a faculty vote. This is fitting: Furman’s faculty are its sentinels standing guard against encroachments of academic rigor. They are best fit to judge and reform the program. We call on Furman’s faculty to consider the issues carefully and to exercise their power with wisdom and faithfulness to their office.

The project’s interviewees speak for themselves. They do not represent or endorse the views of FFSA, or of any other interviewee.

We will publish our first interview featuring Tyler Tewell ‘25, a former Pathways Peer Mentor, next Wednesday (March 4). Each subsequent week, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member, including interviews from:

• Provost Beth Pontari, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost

• Professor Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion

• Nathan Johnson, Junior, Politics and History Major

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

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