Defining Honors Culture

Most of us in honors have a general sense of what the phrase “honors culture” might mean but would be hard-pressed to define it. Those who have been involved in honors education for any length of time realize that this thing we call “honors” varies widely across institutions. We also know that the components of honors culture at even a single institution include multiple and transient populations of administrators, staff, faculty, and students. Many of the recent writings on college culture by columnists like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman focus solely on undergraduate students, but a culture, if there is one, includes all participants and is shaped by relationships among members of successive generations that change over time

Is Student Participation in an Honors Program Related to Retention and Graduation Rates?

Do students who participate in an honors program have higher retention and graduation rates in comparison to otherwise similar nonparticipants? This is the question we address, and we do so within the context of the Honors College at the University of Maine. We present our investigation both as a contribution to the limited research in this area and as an illustration of the practical challenges one faces in doing applied work of this sort. Regarding the latter, one must be careful when comparing the retention and graduation rates of honors and nonhonors students because of differences between these two groups at the outset—especially differences in academic ability, for instance, that arguably are related to subsequent retention and graduation rates (e.g., Murtaugh, Burns, & Schuster, 1999). How, then, does one go about making such comparisons? We present our comparisons in several stages, differing in sophistication, thus showing how our results changed and, further, how these changes shaped our understanding of the relationship between honors participation at UMaine and retention and graduation rates

Honors Thesis Rubrics: A Step toward More Consistent and Valid Assessment in Honors

Several recent issues of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council have devoted considerable space to questions of grading and assessing honors student work: the 2006 Forum on “Outcomes Assessment, Accountability, and Honors” (Frost et al.), the 2007 Forum on “Grades, Scores, and Honors” (Andrews et al.), and Greg Lanier’s expansive piece in 2008, “Towards Reliable Honors Assessment.” One target of assessment is the honors thesis, which is either a required or optional component of many honors programs and colleges and which poses a myriad of assessment challenges. What follows is a description and analysis of the attempt at the University of Maine Honors College to improve communication and assessment throughout the thesis process and to support both honors thesis students and the faculty members who work with them. As is often the case in honors, this initiative had an informal beginning: a chat between a professor of educational psychology, who was advising his first honors thesis student, and the dean of the honors college. THESES AND THE HONORS COLLEGE The first four UMaine honors theses were written in 1937. The honors program began as a small endeavor among liberal arts faculty members but became a university-wide initiative in 1962 and then an honors college in 2002. Even in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of honors theses was typically on the order of twenty or so, but numbers have steadily increased over the past decade; now at least seventy, and in some years more than eighty, students write theses annually. This dramatic growth has meant an expansion in the variety of theses, the breadth of disciplines in which theses are written, and the number of individuals involved as advisors or committee members. These increases have prompted the honors college community to consider questions of expectations and performance from a global perspective. Each student has a thesis advisor who chairs a committee of five, selected by the student in consultation with the advisor. Nearly all advisors and most committee members are UMaine faculty members; other committee members (who, for convenience, will all be referred to as faculty members) include scientific staff, faculty members at other institutions or laboratories, local professionals in private or governmental positions, and doctoral students. Following a two-hour oral defense, the committee determines the degree of honors awarded to the student: no honors, honors, high honors, or highest honors. This decision is based on the written thesis, the student’s oral presentation of the thesis, the discussion between the student and the committee about the thesis, an annotated reading list of twelve to fifteen texts significant to the student’s academic career, and discussion of the reading list

The Genesis of an Honors Faculty: Collective Reflections on a Process of Change

In the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson introduced the concept of “preceptors” at Princeton University (Office of the Dean of the College). At the University of Maine a century later, we have adapted Wilson’s concept by hiring faculty members who lead small-group discussions in our interdisciplinary, two-year, four-course core Civilizations sequence, which is a requirement for all first- and second-year honors students. Like Wilson, we hope to “import into the great university the methods and personal contact between teacher and pupil which are characteristic of the small college, and so gain the advantages of both” (Leitch). During the 2010–2011 academic year, the University of Maine Honors College tripled its number of salaried preceptors, expanding from two to six. With that expansion came new challenges: an innovative, albeit periodically strained, collaboration with the UMaine College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and four of its departments; an experimental and precarious foray into non-tenure-track interdisciplinary academia with fresh consideration for undergraduate research; and an evolving sense of what it means to be honors faculty members—or, more broadly, academics—at a twenty-first-century university rife with change. Various perspectives illustrate the difficulties and possibilities endemic to this faculty formation and collectively belie the assumption that faculty members necessarily best cohere around a single discipline and familiar professional constructs. We suggest that a university today, as it has done in the past, can and should coalesce around and be invigorated by untried models and pioneering colleges whose faculty members are willing and eager to take risks. Administrators and search committees at other institutions, as well as prospective honors faculty members, may be able to learn from our experience at the University of Maine. To this end, we share multiple perspectives on our new preceptor positions by the dean of the UMaine Honors College (Charlie Slavin); two honors faculty members (Mark Haggerty & Mimi Killinger) who served on the search committees; and the four new hires (Rob Glover, Sarah Harlan-Haughey, Jordan LaBouff, and Justin Martin). Our seven personal narratives each engage thematically with several central issues: newness and institutional resistance, identity formation, interdisciplinarity, and faculty retention. We try to be as honest as possible as we present our individual assessments of the initiative so far. We believe that a discussion of such thorny issues as nontenure- track appointments and the creation ex nihilo of a new kind of position will enable other institutions to make informed decisions as they consider implementing such a model