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Kathleen Littleton '09 (Above in her "Remaking Nature" class) "My mom keeps telling me to be patient, but it's hard."

Interdisciplinary, inquiry-driven courses—Hiley's class is categorized as a philosophy offering—aren't new to the university, but the fact that freshmen are sitting in them is. Hiley is among those educators who say that we grossly underestimate freshmen. That the hierarchical stereotype of yesteryear—fumbling, confused, can't find T-Hall—is no longer applicable. They are, as a group, more serious, more determined, and, perhaps, more capable. They are a generation removed from the Boomers and all our baggage. Three generations from the days when Durham newbies were required to wear freshman beanies and "greet upperclassmen with a cheery hiyuh." A national survey of freshmen found that 70 percent disagreed when told that "an individual can do little to bring about changes in society.'"

"We've learned that there is a window when students first arrive on campus when they are eager to learn and not yet cynical," says Hiley, "so we're taking advantage of that and really pushing them."

HILEY'S "REMAKING NATURE" IS part of a new "Discovery" curriculum geared toward freshmen. And while there is some grumbling around campus that every class at a university should be stirring, provocative and oozing with gravitas, the point is that for the first time freshmen are being addressed with tailor-made courses meant to get them up and running. The courses at UNH and other major research universities stem from a ground-breaking national study called the Boyer Report, which found freshmen were being herded into too many lecture halls and not enough small, innovative interdisciplinary courses.

At UNH there are a half dozen such offerings, to be increased gradually until there are enough for every freshman to take one. A course fetchingly titled the "Secret Lives of Words" asks students to probe the architecture, evolution and mechanics of language, delving into "the ways in which new words are coined, how they become established or die, and how they change over their natural lives." Professor Rochelle Lieber's class may be the only one in existence that routinely asks students to pucker their lips, jockey their tongue and engage their uvula to make syllabic noises. "I told you we'd be making odd noises in this class," she says. Distorted faces and barnyard sounds predominate. On another day, a different variety of howls erupts when Lieber disassembles the wonderful world of slang and its infinite originality when it concerns the human body.

The Discovery, or "inquiry," classes, are a work in progress, but one unassailable plus to such courses is that freshmen don't feel like freshmen. "If college really works for you, you learn not to be embarrassed to ask dumb questions," says Judy Spiller, associate provost of academic achievement and support. "The last thing a freshman wants to do is stand out by asking a dumb question. Inquiry-driven courses make it OK to ask anything."

Ideally, students feel like fully functioning, decision-making members of the UNH community, no strings attached. George Bell fits that description. He unabashedly loves Hiley's "Remaking Nature" class and has been an enthusiastic participant in class and out, posting regularly on the class's Blackboard Web site. He's careful not to get personal, but he's not afraid to say he gets riled up sometimes.

While the majority of UNH students are undeclared and wish to live in housing with a roommate or two, Bell says he wants to be what he's always wanted to be, a reef biologist. In true contrarian form, he elected a single room in Hall House, an outdoor-education-theme mini dorm. "I'm not going to lie and say it isn't isolated," says Bell, who found himself on the southernmost edge of campus. "But I wanted to get settled and do well before I started messin' around."

He says he's getting what he wanted from college: a lively exchange of ideas and exposure to new things. In his first three months he will argue on the behalf of government-regulated stem-cell research, downhill ski for the first time, and organize and lead a group of his mini dorm cohorts on a trip to the Boston Aquarium. "I know I'm going to fall a lot," he says, when we talk about one of those first-time experiences, "but I'm OK with that."

Up until this point, both public and private colleges in the United States had largely followed the European tradition of educating upper-class young men for the clergy or the professions. In the mid-1800s there was a growing national movement to incorporate science into the curriculum and open access to "the industrial classes." Even spiritual leaders like Boston's most prominent minister, William Ellery Channing, preached the gospel of agricultural education. Thompson clearly had been following the national debate, reading political tracts in his armchair, and forming his own opinions.

OF COURSE, THE CURRICULUM offerings are only a small part of the first-year experience, though administrators are trying hard to make it a bigger part. There are questions of where to eat, Friday night parties, primo work-study jobs, knowing somebody at the Gables—and there are hiccups. There are goodbyes to parents, hellos to roommates, freedom, freedom, freedom. Decisions that get made aren't always good. In the first month at UNH last fall, 110 students were arrested, mostly for underage possession of alcohol, or, for students 21 and older, violation of the open-container law. Five freshmen were booted out during that same time period.

Scott Chesney, associate vice president for student affairs and director of residential life, says that in his 20-year experience these numbers are commensurate with most schools UNH's size and aren't out of the ordinary. He adds, somewhat unnecessarily I think, that the freshman misdeeds from my era were much more pathological. "This is a good time," he says, "but now as then it's all about choices."

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