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Orientation for Professors is an idea which has been developing. Wheaton College in Massachusetts has expanded from one day to a semester long in a seminar designed to immerse them in their campus' history, philosophy, and culture. The provost has reduced the new faculty members' teaching load for the first semester so they can keep up. To get them thinking about how students experience college, the seminar participants read Rebekah Nathan's undercover exploration of student life, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (Cornell University Press, 2005). In a more scholarly vein, the syllabus also includes a monograph on the history of Wheaton College from it founding, in 1834, to 1957. It's required reading for the session in which the faculty members take a walking tour of the campus, and learn of the co-ed college's origins as a women's seminary..

Discipled into the history, philosophy, and culture of one's campus? Can be helpful when giving framework to one's identity as one leaves the past, entering the future. One on-line history regarding the college noted, in order to avoid confusion: This article is about the college in Norton, Massachusetts. For the Christian school, see Wheaton College, Illinois.