New courses will be offered in spring 2025

The university has released the publication course offering for spring 2025 on Thursday, introducing 179 new offerings, for a total of 1,455 courses as of Oct. 31, when spring courses ended. The Daily Princetonian examined trends in course offerings from spring 2024 to spring 2025, revealing notable shifts across departments.

Freshman Seminars continue to dominate the new course landscape, maintaining the highest number of new offerings for both Fall 2024 and Spring 2025. However, there has been a decline in the number of these seminars, from 22 new courses in Spring 2024 to 16 for Spring 2025.

The School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) saw a reduction in the number of new courses this upcoming semester, a break from the significant increase seen the previous spring. Four of the six new SPIA offerings focus on topics in the environmental and health sciences, such as SPI 407: Conserving Global Forests, which discusses “whether the world should use more or less wood and carefully evaluate various public and private policies. ”

Conversely, departments such as History, Visual Arts and especially English have experienced a sharp increase in the number of new courses since spring 2024. The Visual Arts department consistently has almost all its course places filledand students believe that classes are difficult to access. Of the 29 visual arts classes students will have to choose from next semester, about 20 percent are new.

The English department in particular has seen a notable increase in the number of 300-level courses, in line with a broader trend observed between spring 2023 and spring 2024, with upper-level courses emerging as the most common new offering – apart from seminars for first-year students.

The literature and arts (LA) distribution requirement is met by 237 of the total 767 courses for the spring semester. Conversely, the distribution requirements for Science and Engineering with Lab (SEL) and Epistemology and Cognition (EC) are met by only 36 and 39 new courses, respectively.

In the past, student groups such as Princeton Caribbean Connection (PCC) and Princeton residentshave asked for greater representation in the study choice.

“Many lessons focus on the historicization of the Caribbean. You wouldn’t see frameworks of modern society like you see in SPIA,” says Kimberly Cross ’25, marketing and publicity chair of the PCC, about the lack of representation of parts of the Caribbean in academia.

“You wouldn’t take the attitudes of Caribbean men as an anthropology lesson,” Cross continued. “It kind of puts the Caribbean in a stagnant space where you can only view it from this antique avenue,” she said.

According to Cross and Mya Ramhi ’26, co-president of PCC, a new Haitian Creole class is being created for the fall 2025 semester.

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“This is something that has gotten PCC quite excited and encouraged to continue doing the work that they are doing on campus,” Ramhi said.

Another new offering for spring 2025 is AMS 262: Race, Indigeneity, and Environment, a course that explores the environment as a catalyst for social action. This course examines how ecological change affects and is affected by the structures of race and indigenous people. Through a mix of historical and contemporary examples, students will examine the “intersections of race and indigeneity in the context of ecological transformation in the United States, especially as experienced by indigenous peoples.”

Princeton now offers a 200-level African American Studies Class titled “This is Critical Race Theory.” The course description highlights how its purpose is to teach students the factual framework of the theory, especially in the context of the civil rights movement. The course explores how “antipathy toward Critical Race Theory has led policymakers to restrict curriculum, ban books, and even fire teachers.”

None of the new courses offered are within the South Asian Studies department, and less than one percent of the new offerings focus on South Asia. Students have expressed their wish for the South Asian Studies department to develop a more robust curriculum, similar to other regional studies at Princeton.

A complete list of course offerings can be found in the Registrar’s office website.

Chima Oparaji is a data writer for the ‘Prince’.

Contributions Data writer Hassan Khan contributed to the reporting.

Send any corrections to corrections(at)dailyprincetonian.com.