The 1990s and 2000s saw continued change in Interim. As the Cold War ended and Wofford’s programs abroad offerings increased, faculty and students began to travel to more places outside of Western Europe and the Caribbean. In the early 1990s, travels to Russia and Eastern Europe became easier – though students had traveled to Czechoslovakia as early as 1969 – and trips to locations in Asia and Africa became more common. At the same time, internships and service learning opportunities grew considerably. While pre-medical, pre-law, and accounting internships had early starts, pre-veterinary, pre-dental, congressional, and other pre-professional Interims became popular. Service-learning Interims also became increasingly popular. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, several Wofford students and faculty did relief work in Mississippi.
Perhaps the biggest change in Interim hasn’t been the increased travel opportunities or the diverse places students and faculty can travel, or the greater opportunities to see what a career in law, medicine, the ministry, accounting, or in a non-profit might be like. The on-campus projects themselves have changed. While offerings in earlier decades focused on reading great books, studying issues, focusing on particular events, or investigating a topic in the professor’s discipline, more recent projects have been more interdisciplinary.
While film interims were popular fairly early, the rise of the VCR and the DVD, and now other streaming video sources, have made them much easier to put together. The 1990s and early 2000s saw a surge in Interim projects that looked at films. Lest you think that spending a month watching movies is easy, imagine having to watch and analyze films as texts. There’s a lot more to teaching and learning with films than eating popcorn.
A number of Interims gave students new experiences and skills, such as welding, cooking, various computer programming projects, digital photography, web design, and quilting. These projects all had academic and practical components. One group around 2008 studied the world of professional wrestling, even sponsoring their own January Smackdown! I witnessed this one myself.
Through the last 45 years, Interim has become one of Wofford’s hallmarks, and students and faculty often talk throughout the fall about what they are going to do in January. Alumni still talk about things they did in each of their Interims. I remember studying the Federalist Papers and the Presidents through Biographers’ Eyes. I took part in a college bowl Interim, where we worked on our own skills, but also sponsored a campus-wide tournament. Most memorable was my own congressional internship in January 1993 in Sen. Strom Thurmond’s office, where I got to do everything from watch a Supreme Court oral argument, see a president of the United States inaugurated in person, watch Senate committee hearings, and sit in the Senate staff gallery and watch the president’s cabinet confirmed on a voice vote. Along with those special moments, I also got to spend a month as a Washington commuter, found all sorts of things to do, and learned that living for a while in a big city was kind of fun.
Interim shows that learning happens in classrooms and labs, on tour buses, in internship settings, and in independent research into a topic of student interest. While calls come periodically for a re-evaluation of the program, and even in the 1970s people wanted to “tighten up” the requirements, the basic structure of the program remains as it was envisioned in 1968. The types of projects may be very different today (well, except for the perpetual courses on fencing, debating, personal income tax preparation, and theatre performances), but the experience remains much the same.
