For Winder McConnell, freshman seminars are a chance to explore some of the mysteries of human existence — such as love.

“It’s important to think critically — not just about how our world is but about history when it comes to issues such as romantic love and how it shapes our lives,” says McConnell, chair of the Department of German and Russian.

It’s this philosophy of the power of ideas that inspired McConnell and other UC Davis faculty to develop courses for the UC Davis Freshman Seminar Program. Titled “The Origins of Romantic Love: Knights, Ladies, Sex and Sinners in the Middle Ages,” McConnell’s course is one of 55 freshman seminars offered this term through the Teaching Resources Center — twice the number of seminars from last term. Almost 800 freshmen are enrolled in the one- and two-unit courses.

Freshman seminars are as much a learning experience for faculty as for students. One reason is that they provide freshmen the opportunity to have candid and open discussions with faculty in smaller, more personal settings.

That’s all the better for McConnell to keep tabs on what students are thinking these days. “Attitudes about love change and priorities shift through the generations,” said McConnell. “Young people these days think differently about issues like marriage and love than they did in the more liberal periods of the 1960s and 1970s. Generally, there’s more financial pressure on families today, and so younger people think about what attributes a partner brings in the way of education and upward mobility.”

Romantic love is defined in layman’s terms as “falling in love” and all the excitement and risk that go with it. It’s very different from marriage or sheer physical desire, McConnell says, though many marriages begin with a burst of romantic love. He gently reminds his younger audience, studies show that the ecstatic feeling of “falling in love” may last no more than a year or so at the most — a finding that may not surprise his more love-worn students.

“One has to differentiate between ‘being in love’ and loving someone in a long-term relationship,” he tells his students.

First-year student Joe Gegan said: “Love is a very basic part of human existence, and I’m into Medieval art and history – that’s why I’m taking this class.”

But freshman Celina Monique Oliveri thought the first day of class seemed like a bucket of cold water. “It’s kind of disappointing to find out that romantic love lasts only a little while.”

McConnell’s students will examine the roots of romantic love with the rise of the troubadours in the 12th and 13th centuries and consider what the emergence of this phenomenon meant to a highly stratified society based on class structure and the dogma of the Church. Marriages among the European aristocracy were arranged by parents. Thus, the idea of romantic love represented one of the revolutionary ideals in the rise of freedom and equality in Western civilization, McConnell says.

“In Medieval society, romantic love gives power to the individual and takes it away from authoritative institutions that would otherwise determine the fate of people through pre-ordained arrangements,” says McConnell, who has published extensively in the area of Germanic heroic epic and courtly romance, and is particularly interested in the application of Jungian psychology to literary analysis.

Timely topics

UC Davis has offered freshman seminars since 1988. The current crop of freshman seminars cover a wide spectrum of issues, including viral diseases, airplane flight, the nuclear age, negotiation and leadership, American teenagers, economic policies, and insect communications, to name a few.

Some are especially timely, such as Marc Blanchard’s “Cultures of Terrorism” and Almerindo Ojeda’s “The Miseries of War (Art Holds a Mirror to War).” In the latter, Ojeda‘s students will read and discuss the ethical issues of war from the days of the Trojan War through the Vietnam conflict.

Getting attached

Patricia Turner, vice provost for undergraduate studies, notes that the heaviest demand for seminars is in the fall quarter. She encourages faculty members who are considering submitting proposals for the 2003-2004 academic year to offer them in the fall.

Many faculty members become quickly attached to the freshman seminar experience, she added. “It is usually the case that once a faculty member has taught one, she or he is hooked on the experience,” Turner said.

This spring, she said, an unprecedented number of administrators are involved. Deans Elizabeth Langland, Enrique Lavernia and Peter Rock are teaching as are Provost Virginia Hinshaw, Vice Chancellor Barry Klein and Vice Provost John Bruno.

Faculty members who are interested in the program can call the Teaching Resource Center at (530) 752-6050 or go online at http:// trc.ucdavis.edu/TRC/frosh/FRSdetails.html.

Ellen Sutter, the director of the Teaching Resource Center, said freshman seminars emphasize student participation and intellectual exchanges among students and between student and teacher. In many majors at UC Davis, students don’t have small classes until they take upper division courses.

“We’re getting better at spreading the word to faculty about the importance of the freshman seminars,” says Sutter. “We had a major increase in the number of courses this term, and one reason is the stipend that is now available to faculty teaching these seminars.”

Faculty can receive $1,500 for teaching the one-unit courses and $2,000 for the two-unit courses, Sutter said.

She said the seminars give both instructors and students the flexibility to delve into some issues outside the more traditional areas of academic and degree-oriented curricula. “They can just be a lot of fun,” she said, noting that the campus is willing to host just as many seminars as there are faculty members willing to teach them.