A Furman Professor's Honest Assessment of the Pathways Program

“Since we are a university and not a business, we should be explicitly encouraging a wider perspective," says Dr. Helen Lee Turner, former Pathways Advisor.

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

We hope you enjoy the insight.

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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.

Since we are a university and not a business, we should be explicitly encouraging a wider perspective.

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.