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Home > Honors Program > Vision Statement

Current Status of the Program

The University Honors Program exists to serve students as they progress toward the goals outlined in the University System of Georgia Vision Statement: to enable students to "master . . . skills of critical reasoning, independent thinking, computation, communication, collaboration, and creativity, . . . to pursue lifelong learning, and to exercise leadership as contributing citizens. . . ." Toward that end, the Honors Program embraces chiefly points eight, nine, and ten from the University System of Georgia Guiding Principles for Strategic Action, points which fundamentally emphasize support for strong undergraduate education, pathbreaking research and creativity, and innovative teaching strategies that encourage collaborative learning and mentoring relationships between students and faculty.

The Honors Program currently offers twenty-five courses spanning sixteen different disciplines, and is supported by faculty from four of the five colleges at VSU. As presently configured, the focus of the Honors Program is on freshmen and sophomores, servicing approximately fifty to ninety underclassmen each quarter, although the Program has a broader direct contact through newsletters and advising with over 400 students, who at some point in their academic careers have made some progress toward completion of an Honors Program certificate. All regularly offered Honors courses are enhanced versions of core curriculum courses, which out of necessity will be geared primarily toward freshmen, sophomores, and some transfer students. The Honors Program also offers interdisciplinary and innovative seminars on a wide range of topics, both at the freshman and junior levels. Students are required to take one seminar at each level. Some of the seminars offered in the past have included: Myth, Mandela, and Freedom; Native American Religions; Cosmology; Contemporary Views of Mankind; Ecology; Women in the Arts; The Role and Function of a University; Modernism, Society, and the Individual; and Moving Beyond Hatred: Conflict and Resolution.

The Honors Program is also engaged in encouraging students in activities related to the classroom environment and beyond. These activities range from independent research to presentations of research at regional conferences, as well as to attending colloquia and forums that are of scholarly and popular interest.

The Future of the Program

The Honors Program clearly needs to move into the upper curriculum and also needs to offer more incentives to students to enter and stay in the program. More courses in the upper curriculum will mean that Honors courses will count toward completion of a student's major, as well as will encourage work of greater depth, and work that will be professionally useful to students as they prepare for graduate school and other post-baccalaureate opportunities. Part of this effort, then, entails working with all five colleges and their departments to begin development of an Honors presence in the upper curriculum. The particulars of these developments would be worked out within the various departments through the efforts of Honors Development Committees in liaison with the Honors Program director. However, some common qualities would be expected, such as an emphasis on independent research, interdisciplinary approaches, completion of an Honors Thesis, and presentation of research at national and regional professional meetings.

Another curricular incentive for the Honors Program would be the construction of truly accelerated courses, patterned after the Honors Spanish courses (SPA 195 and 196), that would offer more credit than would the typical standard, non-Honors versions, thereby allowing sufficiently motivated students to move quickly through core curriculum requirements. These courses may be interdisciplinary in nature, actually combining two or even three disciplines (e.g., English, history, and philosophy) in such a way that the subject matter is extended and reinforced, rather than being merely compressed. Such a track of courses could be expanded to allow students to finish a BA or BS in three years rather than four.

Along interdisciplinary lines, the Honors Program should also be instrumental in setting up mechanisms allowing sufficiently motivated and focused students to work closely with several departments in the development of individualized and interdisciplinary major programs of study that are not addressed by the traditional configuration of majors.

Increasing curricular incentives is crucial, but in a climate where other institutions across the state offer substantial monetary and material benefits to their students enrolled in Honors Programs, we at VSU must give serious consideration to investing in our superior students in the same ways other special population groups have received attention and support. Without the development of and an increase in more tangible incentives, interest in the Honors Program will never achieve the levels that are desired.

Assessment

Assessment of Honors courses currently comes through the individual sponsoring departments, as well as through extensive questionnaires and surveys administered by the Honors Program. However, guidelines still need to be created that articulate and demarcate some of the aspects that make Honors courses different from non-Honors courses, attributes such as active learning, interdisciplinary explorations, independent research and other student-centered pedagogy. One aspect of assessment must involve retention studies. We must track better the higher-end students, those who have scored high on the SAT and who have received Odum and Whitehead scholarships, as well as other prestigious scholarships. Studies need to be done to determine the number of our students going on to graduate school and to which schools, the number of our students vying for and winning prestigious post-baccalaureate scholarships such as the Marshall, Mellon, Rhodes, and Fulbright, and the number of our students entering and winning prestigious national competitions, such as the Elie Wiesel Ethics Contest.

Closing Statement

The University Honors Program should continue to develop so that it becomes an attractor, a magnet, for students capable of doing advanced and enriched work on the undergraduate level. As this number of students increases, and as their level of involvement increases, a certain critical mass will accrue that will have an effect on the campus as a whole. The Honors Program should be perceived by faculty and administrators as a place of excellence in teaching, and a place about which faculty are enthusiastic, one that rewards them for their commitment to strong undergraduate teaching (all the more important as VSU further establishes itself as a university and develops a tradition and reward structure that has a greater emphasis on research and publication). The Honors Program should be a place that allows for pedagogical experiments, engaging faculty and students in new methodologies (e.g., the Internet), or in revisiting old ones (e.g., Great Books, the Socratic method). The Honors Program should offer support and a place for those students who would rather read a book or listen to a symphony during their free time than engage in other activities.

In the final analysis, the Honors Program is a value-added component in the college curriculum, developing a sense of community for students, offering at the least a wider view, affording some opportunity for creative work and flexibility in helping students meet their educational goals. These are some of the directions in which the Honors Program should continue to progress over the next five years.

Brian U. Adler, Director
University Honors Program
July 25, 1995