Most first-year seminars exist to ensure that incoming students achieve what is commonly described as "academic success." While definitions of this term vary widely, it most often means socializing students into an academic culture so that they will remain at the institution, achieve a strong GPA, and graduate on time. Most first-year seminars focus on skills that either help students prepare for performing academic tasks or help students engage in academic tasks. This article introduces an alternative framework that moves beyond academic task training and advances the idea that a first-year seminar should provide a foundation for the cultivation of critical intellectual agency. This article calls this framework critical inquiry. It defines critical inquiry as the interrogation of the disciplinary cultures and practices where knowledge is produced and the pedagogical and curricular architectures where it is reproduced. As a conceptual core for first-year seminars, critical inquiry unpacks the learning environment for students, making its hidden expectations, cultures, and structures of power and privilege visible to students. In doing so, it prepares them to critically engage with and harness the educational environment in the development of their own identities as intellectual agents.