2019 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Radical Honors: Pedagogical Troublemaking as a Model for Institutional Change

This presidential speech to attendees of the 2019 NCHC annual conference in New Orleans resituates honors education as a site of deeply radical practices and provides a call to action to honors educators both to own the transgressiveness of our pedagogical approaches and to extend that troublemaking project to processes beyond the classroom, processes like honors recruitment and admissions, faculty appointments, co-curricular programming, and assessment, among others. Given the academy’s traditional resistance to change, an opportunity exists for those in the honors community to step forward and radically alter the structures and practices of higher education, all in the service of students and their learning

Honors Housing: Castle or Prison?

In its “Basic Characteristics” of fully developed honors programs and colleges—lists that have become increasingly prescriptive over the years—the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) identifies “best practices that are common to successful” honors programs and colleges (2014a). One of those practices includes the establishing of separate honors residential opportunities for students, despite the fact that such dedicated space is a bad idea in many instances. In light of the old saying that “one man’s castle is another man’s prison,” I will lay out some of the reasons why honors housing is not a good in itself. I hope to complicate the understanding of the benefits and risks of cordoning off honors students from the rest of the campus population in the hopes that programs and colleges considering honors residential arrangements might interrogate their own assumptions about the value of such a move. Doing so will help those groups ask hard though useful questions about student learning and development, the allocation of resources in challenging financial times, and the way in which honors relates to the campus-wide community

Shunning Complaint: A Call for Solutions from the Honors Community

While members of the academy are particularly adept at complaining and poking holes in most proposals that cross their paths, we are less comfortable with offering solutions. This essay asks members of the honors community to consider some of the major challenges facing honors education today and propose solutions that might be adapted on a variety of campuses. Rather than asking respondents to take up rather straightforward issues that commonly face honors program and colleges, this piece urges readers to dig into more intractable problems like access, mental health, innovation, and the position of honors on campus

Honors Colleges in the 21st Century

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction | Richard Badenhausen Part I: Honors College Contexts: Past and Present CHAPTER ONE Oxbridge and Core Curricula: Continuing Conversations with the Past in Honors Colleges | Christopher A. Snyder CHAPTER TWO Characteristics of the 21st-Century Honors College | Andrew J. Cognard-Black and Patricia J. Smith Part II: Transitioning to an Honors College CHAPTER THREE Should We Start an Honors College? An Administrative Playbook for Working Through the Decision | Richard Badenhausen CHAPTER FOUR Beyond the Letterhead: A Tactical Toolbox for Transitioning from Program to College | Sara Hottinger, Megan McIlreavy, Clay Motley, and Louis Keiner Part III: Administrative Leadership CHAPTER FIVE “It Is What You Make It’’: Opportunities Arising from the Unique Roles of Honors College Deans | Jeff Chamberlain, Thomas M. Spencer, and Jefford Vahlbusch CHAPTER SIX The Role of the Honors College Dean in the Future of Honors Education | Peter Parolin, Timothy J. Nichols, Donal C. Skinner, and Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson CHAPTER SEVEN From the Top Down: Implications of Honors College Deans’ Race and Gender | Malin Pereira, Jacqueline Smith-Mason, Karoline Summerville, and Scott Linneman Part IV: Honors College Operations CHAPTER EIGHT Something Borrowed, Something New: Honors College Faculty and the Staffing of Honors Courses | Erin E. Edgington and Linda Frost CHAPTER NINE Telling Your Story: Stewardship and the Honors College | Andrew Martino Part V: Honors Colleges as Leaders in the Work of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access CHAPTER TEN Cultivating Institutional Change: Infusing Principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into Everyday Honors College Practices | Tara M. Tuttle, Julie Stewart, and Kayla Powell CHAPTER ELEVEN Positioning Honors Colleges to Lead Diversity and Inclusion Efforts at Predominantly White Institutions | Susan Dinan, Jason T. Hilton, and Jennifer Willford CHAPTER TWELVE Honors Colleges as Levers of Educational Equity | Teagan Decker, Joshua Kalin Busman, and Michele Fazio CHAPTER THIRTEEN Promoting the Inclusion of LGBTQ+ Students: The Role of the Honors College in Faith-Based Colleges and Universities | Paul E. Prill Part VI: Supporting Students CHAPTER FOURTEEN Who Belongs in Honors? Culturally Responsive Advising and Transformative Diversity | Elizabeth Raisanen CHAPTER FIFTEEN Fostering Student Leadership in Honors Colleges | Jill Nelson Granger Part VII: Honors College Curricular Innovation CHAPTER SIXTEEN Honors Liberal Arts for the 21st Century | John Carrell, Aliza S. Wong, Chad Cain, Carrie J. Preston, and Muhammad H. Zaman CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Honors Colleges, Transdisciplinary Education, and Global Challenges | 423 Paul Knox and Paul Heilker Part VIII: Community Engagement CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Teaching and Learning in the Fourth Space: Preparing Scholars to Engage in Solving Community Problems | Heidi Appel, Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson, Joy Hart, Paul Knox, Andrea Radasanu, Leigh E. Fine, Timothy J. Nichols, Daniel Roberts, Keith Garbutt, William Ziegler, Jonathan Kotinek, Kathy Cooke, Ralph Keen, Mark Andersen, and Jyotsna Kapur CHAPTER NINETEEN Serving Our Communities: Leveraging the Honors College Model at Two-Year Institutions | Eric Hoffman, Victoria M. Bryan, and Dan Flores About the Authors About the NCHC Monograph Serie

Curriculum Gone Bad: The Case against Honors Contracts

This volume offers a timely and much-needed discussion, for in spite of their apparent ubiquity across the honors landscape, contracts are not a feature of honors education that has received much attention. For example, the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (NCHC) “Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program” and its companion statement on honors colleges—documents meant to guide colleges and universities in curricular innovation, engaged pedagogy, and intentional learning—make no mention of contracts. Additionally, NCHC’s 2016 Census of U.S. Honors Programs and Colleges, which captured qualities of 408 responding member institutions, asked over a dozen questions about curricular features of honors programs and colleges, including queries about online education, distance learning, internships, study abroad, and service learning (Scott, Smith, and Cognard-Black). While the instrument also questioned programs about their use of contracts, the summary data originally posted on the NCHC members’ site omits any information about contracts, a curious lacuna. As for scholarship on honors contracts, the offerings are meager: up until 2020, NCHC’s monograph series and journals have published only two essays on the topic, a mere twenty pages across two issues of Honors in Practice. One piece takes readers through the process of trying to improve the contract system at Texas Tech (Bolch), while the other is a short case study reviewing the value of extending a contracted course’s work beyond a single semester at Penn State Brandywine (DiLauro, Meyers, and Guertin). In our guiding documents, data instruments, and publications, the issue of contracts is virtually invisible

Breaking Barriers in Teaching and Learning - Foreword

When I first stumbled upon honors education over two decades ago while team-teaching a seminar called “Poetry and the Condition of Music,” it was the freedom inside and outside the classroom that most caught my attention. Sprung from the shackles of my usual British Literature survey, one in which students trudged through a rigid chronology of canonical authors, I was free to design a course with the university’s choral director that put ancient oral poets in dialogue with rap musicians; that explored the collaboration between W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten; that set Langston Hughes against crucial jazz influences. Additionally, as someone who was (and is!) deeply resistant to authority in any form, I loved the idea of turning over control of a classroom discussion to students: doing so with a partner in team-teaching arrangements encouraged us to step off the teaching stage and clear space for the talented undergraduates in the seminar

Making Honors Success Scripts Available to Students from Diverse Backgrounds

In her lead forum essay, Naomi Yavneh Klos thoughtfully encourages us to reexamine our admissions practices in honors. She argues, We need a more nuanced reevaluation of standards that recognizes the role of systemic bias in traditional metrics of academic excellence and that holistically evaluates each student’s strengths and challenges in the context of individual and cultural experience. Such practices strengthen honors by identifying a diverse spectrum of students who both benefit from and enrich our honors community. (8) I would like to take that call for reevaluation one step further by asking members of the honors community to interrogate the way we narratively frame honors experiences so that these constructs are as inclusive as possible. Employing admissions practices that do not disadvantage students from underrepresented backgrounds is crucial, but also essential is that we do not unintentionally turn away such students even before they might consider applying to honors. The way we discuss honors and the stories we tell about it can signal to underrepresented students that they do not belong. One way to think about this issue is to pose a question, with apologies to Raymond Carver: What do we talk about when we talk about honors? Ultimately, I want to think about how success narratives are structured in honors education; ask how open or available these narratives are to students from underrepresented backgrounds; and make sure we are not simply reinforcing privilege when our narratives make promises to students about what it means to join the honors community

Honors Housing: Castle or Prison?

In its “Basic Characteristics” of fully developed honors programs and colleges—lists that have become increasingly prescriptive over the years—the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) identifies “best practices that are common to successful” honors programs and colleges (2014a). One of those practices includes the establishing of separate honors residential opportunities for students, despite the fact that such dedicated space is a bad idea in many instances. In light of the old saying that “one man’s castle is another man’s prison,” I will lay out some of the reasons why honors housing is not a good in itself. I hope to complicate the understanding of the benefits and risks of cordoning off honors students from the rest of the campus population in the hopes that programs and colleges considering honors residential arrangements might interrogate their own assumptions about the value of such a move. Doing so will help those groups ask hard though useful questions about student learning and development, the allocation of resources in challenging financial times, and the way in which honors relates to the campus-wide community