Access, not Exclusion: Honors at a Public Institution

I tend to joke with our Dean of the Honors College, Ken Blemings, that his main goal is to work himself out of a job. Sorry, Ken. After all, it is in our nature as agents of higher education to recruit, retain, and graduate the best and brightest talent available. In other words, every student walking onto our campus ought to be honors caliber. Likewise, the overall college experience for every student ought to be honors quality. I have been around the block for the last thirty-plus years serving as president of five major institutions in the United States, and I can affirm that the increased value placed on an honors education is enriching entire universities and how they operate. We are witnessing a shift in the way we prepare the next great generation of thinkers and doers, thanks to the high standards that the Honors College at West Virginia University and at other campuses across the nation have established

Commencement Address

Commencement address given by Elwood Gordon Gee, President of The Ohio State University, to the Autumn 1997 graduating class of The Ohio State University, St. John Arena, Columbus, Ohio, December 12, 1997

Six Strategic Goals for Making the Coming Years Ohio State's Time

This documents lists President Gordon Gee's six goals to make the Ohio State University better. The goals are the following: forge one Ohio State University, put students first, focus on faculty success, recast our research agenda, commit to our communities, and simplify university systems and structures

Reading from nowhere: assessed literary response, Practical Criticism and situated cultural literacy

School examinations of student responses to literature often present poetry blind or “unseen”, inviting decontextualised close reading consistent with the orientation-to-text associated with Practical Criticism (originating in the UK) and New Criticism (originating in the USA). The approach survives in the UK after curricular reforms and government have promulgated cultural literacy as foundational for learning. How is cultural literacy manifest in student responses to literature? To what extent can it be reconciled with Practical Criticism where the place of background knowledge in literary reading is negligible? This article explores their uneasy relationship in pedagogy, curricula and assessment for literary study, discussing classroom interactions in England and Northern Ireland where senior students (aged 16–17) of English Literature consider Yeats’ “culture-making” poem “Easter, 1916”. Using methods where teachers withhold contextual information as they elicit students’ responses, the divergent responses of each class appear to arise from differing access to background knowledge according to local though superficially congruent British cultures. The author proposes “situated cultural literacy” to advance the limited application of Practical Criticism in unseen tasks, acknowledge Richards’ original intent, and support the coherence of assessment with curricular arrangements invoking cultural literacy as a unifying principle