Trinity is widely recognized for providing students with superb opportunities to work closely with their professors. For example, over 40 percent of Trinity's students regularly perform collaborative research with faculty, which often leads to jointly authored publications or presentations. The new Tutorial College offers students an exciting new opportunity for close, mutually sustaining intellectual relationship in a program that immerses students in their learning and transcends the boundaries of classroom and academic discipline.

Launched in the fall of 2000, this exciting "college within the College" is open to qualified sophomores. The directors of the program look for students who want to work in an academically rigorous environment emphasizing individual initiative and responsibility -- students who expect their ideas to be taken seriously, who want to engage in a sustained dialogue with professors and other students, and who are eager to pursue their intellectual curiosity wherever it leads.

The Tutorial College at Trinity features one-on-one and small-group tutorials. The five professors in the Tutorial College come from very different fields -- chemistry, English, legal and public policy studies, philosophy, and psychology. And everyone in the Tutorial College works in all of these and many other fields, seeking to discover --together-- how the world looks from various perspectives and trying to understand how each perspective reveals something new about the others.    While innovative, the coursework in the Tutorial College is firmly grounded in the best traditions of classical liberal arts education.

The professors in the Tutorial College are excited about this new program.   The close working relationships and the wide variety of topics provide students with the fundamentals of a liberal education in an extraordinary way.  And the multidisciplinary perspectives of the Tutorial College help students to see more of the wide educational landscape, allowing them to make immediate connections to wider issues. This program creates a small, intensive community of learning that is ideal for students whose minds burn with imagination in the arts and in the sciences, and everywhere else.

Early in their academic careers students are able to explore subjects in the depth more customary only during the junior and senior years. The Tutorial College provides students with an ‘intellectual home’ in which they investigate a number of disciplines while delving into their particular academic interest. This, and the close, mentor-like relationships with professors, generates uncommon academic experiences.

Just the Facts
Open to no more than 60 sophomores, the Tutorial College began in the fall of 2000. Students accepted into the program earn five course credits for their Tutorial College studies.  Students also take four regular courses during the year, bringing their total course load to nine, which is standard for sophomores (this allows students who participate in one of Trinity’s special academic programs for freshman and sophomore years -- Guided Studies, Interdisciplinary Science, Cities, or InterArts -- also to take part in the Tutorial College).  Successful completion of the Tutorial College program will satisfy the College’s distribution requirements.

For more information, contact Professor Richard Lee, director of the Tutorial College. His postal address is Trinity College, 300 Summit Street, Hartford, CT 06106; his e-mail address is <rtlee@trincoll.edu> ; and his phone number is (860) 297-2418.  You may also contact Louise Fisher at <Louise.Fisher@trincoll.edu> .

Words from the director

A sampling from our reading

Questions and answers

Faculty participants
Professor of Philosophy Richard Lee, director of the program

Professor of Psychology George Higgins

Associate Professor of Legal and Policy Studies Adrienne Fulco

Professor of English Dirk Kuyk

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Thomas Mitzel