Thanks to Lee for forwarding me this interesting story about Temple's new freshman texts [1] shows that UT isn't the only one interested in creating a freshperson/first-year discourse community. The text sounds really interesting ("West of Kabul, East of New York," Tamim Ansary's memoir of life in Afghanistan and the United States), but I'm more interested in what might be a "trend" toward uniting a community of first-year students under a "text." It's also interesting that those texts are tending to be contemporary - and (possibly) perceived to be more relevant to students' lives.

I'll be expanding on my paper on the UT first-year forum text in a class called "Writing the History of English" studies, and stories like this show me that there may in fact be a trend at work. More to come on this...