AU’s Honors Program has long aspired to create a sense of community among its members, and recently that priority has become quite clear.
Since 2010, the program has been self-contained in Hughes Hall, which holds the administrative offices and nearly all on-campus residences of honors students. This shared physical experience may now be joined by a greater shared academic experience should administrators implement proposals to reduce the number of honors students and form a new core curriculum.
The desire to form a bond among honors students is more than understandable, and it is an admirable goal. However, the Honors Program must recognize that it pursues this sense of community with the risk of isolating itself from the larger University.
First, the reduction of the program’s size, while certainly making it more exclusive and likely prestigious, is a change that should not be underestimated. Currently, each incoming freshman class typically includes around 200 honors students. In the future, this number would be reduced to about 80.
Not only would there be fewer honors students, but their curriculum would reinforce this sense of Honors unity. The Honors Curriculum Task Force has proposed a core curriculum consisting of two writing and two research-based courses that would be taken during students’ freshman and sophomore years.
A sense of community is important, there’s no arguing that. And academic prestige is something that should always be associated with an Honors Program.
But in search of the two, the task force cannot lose sight of the fact that part of the overall college experience is social. Living and taking classes with the same handful of students increases the possibility that these honors students might become separated from the other 6,000 AU undergraduates.
Beyond this, these changes don’t fully address one of the Honors Program’s more significant problems: the lack of course options for non-SIS/non-SPA majors. As it stands, students with less popular majors must supplement the majority of their honors courses if they are to receive honors credit. Unfortunately, the task force does not seem to recommend the expansion of honors classes in a variety of majors.
Administrators may contend that the research and writing courses were established to address exactly that: to create a multidisciplinary environment for honors students of all majors. However, it is likely that students of AU’s most popular programs, SIS and SPA, would still dominate these courses, increasing the possibility that course content will eschew other students.
One of the selling points of the Honors Program has always been that it opens more possibilities to it members. Yet by requiring set courses for all students without convincingly addressing the lack of course diversity, administrators are giving the impressing that Honors is restricting academic possibilities. Current honors students would say this isn’t the case, and we hope this doesn’t become the case in future.
Clearly, the effects of any change in the Honors Program will be extensive. Therefore, as always, The Eagle stresses the need for student input.
Yes, these changes did originate from an Honors focus group made of both students and staff. However, administrators should gauge reaction from all students by establishing an open comment period. That way, before any rules are changed, their lasting effects can be fully understood. ? E
