One of the consistent premises that emerge from the ICSS newsletter is the recognition that the wide diversity of honors programs appropriately reflects the diversity of institutional cultures and their varying stages of readiness for an honors approach. At the same time, however, the ICSS through this publicity organ advises certain desiderata—in evolving versions—of a “full” honors program. These desiderata are, of course, the forerunners of today’s “basic characteristics” of honors programs and colleges promoted by the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), the organization that succeeded the ICSS. This balance between tolerance of diversity and the upholding of ideals or standards seems the most salient aspect of the wisdom of our honors elders.

This essay offers first a descriptive analysis of the periodical and its development for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with it. (See Appendix for a partial list of holdings for this periodical.) The second section evokes the historical context for the ICSS and its newsletter by drawing on statements appearing in the newsletter itself. The following and main section analyzes the key themes of the articles. Only a few of today’s issues are absent from these early honors discussions—for example, computer technology, alumni relations, and fundraising. That the following themes were discussed at the outset of the honors revival may seem surprising: international honors, advising, selection of students for creativity and motivation, honors in the visual and performing arts, gender, talented Black students, and even accreditation of honors. The analytical section includes discussion of various start-up issues faced by new programs and of what later would become the “basic characteristics.” In the process, a number of eloquent arguments and nuggets of wisdom will emerge that may prove useful to current honors leaders as they make their case for an honors education.

Defining and understanding the roles of honors directors is becoming ever more important as honors programs and colleges increase in size, number, and visibility. As K. Celeste Campbell discussed in her article on honors assessment, honors is increasingly seen as a tool to recruit and retain top students and faculty, attract interest from donors, fight “brain drains” in certain states, and facilitate the success of excellent students (96–97). Len Zane stated that, in the 1990s, “institutions began to recognize the value of honors as an institutional image enhancer” (58). As a result, honors directors are being asked to serve increasingly complicated roles (Andrews 33) and are becoming more visible and more active in higher education administration (Zane 58, Fox 38, Portnoy 56). Much has been written over the years about the role of the honors director, but the focus has often been the philosophy of honors, as in Angela Salas’s interesting musings in “An Honors Director’s Credo” (153–158). The topic also has been discussed at many NCHC conference sessions over the years. At the 2010 NCHC Annual Conference in Kansas City, Kate Bruce and Ada Long presided over a “Best Practices in Honors” session on “The Many Hats of Honors Administrators.” Other sessions touching on the role of honors directors included “When the Winds of Change Shift” and “Honors Director as Bridge Builder” (NCHC 2010 Annual Conference Program). One of the best resources describing the specific roles of honors directors with quantitative data has been the 1995 NCHC monograph by Ada Long, A Handbook for Honors Administrators, which included information about her 1992 survey of 136 honors administrators.

Honors directors need data that describe their roles, help determine what resources they need to perform their jobs effectively, and provide rationales for those resources. This topic demands further investigation and discussion, but little empirical work has been done on the typical roles and activities of honors directors since Ada Long’s 1992 survey. In an effort to better describe what honors directors are doing, how they are doing it, how those activities might differ between different institution types, and what constitute the rewards, challenges, and strategies for honors directors, we have endeavored to classify activities into roles and measure how well these roles describe honors directors working today.

Education is like science in that it is often thought to be worth pursuing because of its practical results. The promoters of STEM education are primarily interested not in the coherence or beauty of scientific theories but in the economic importance of applied science and technology. As the great German philosopher, physicist, and psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz noted in 1862, however, there is a catch to the pursuit of economic success through science: hunting for “immediate practical utility” rarely works. The unspoken argument here is that the pursuit of science for its own sake, unfettered by commercial concerns, ultimately pays off in useful if unexpected ways. Helmholtz’s maneuver has been undertaken by champions of basic scientific research to the present day. Through his interest in physiological optics, for instance, Helmholtz invented the ophthalmoscope in 1851, and his many contributions to mathematical physics and the philosophy of science helped to create the conditions for the revolutions in early twentieth-century physics with their practical outcome, atomic fission. Like Helmholtz, scientists like Einstein, Bohr, Rutherford, and others started out wanting only to discover how nature worked. They did not aim to change the course of the twentieth century.

The same relationship we see between pure and applied science is present in ideas about education. Naturally we hope that education is useful, but, if we educate only for “immediate practical utility,” we get a different result than what we commonly expect from university study. At most four-year colleges, about a third of a student’s coursework is still given over to general or liberal education even though the perennial debate continues between those who see education’s value in terms of its usefulness and those who defend learning for its own sake. In tight economic times, utility and the bottom line loom large in the political and popular imagination. Nonetheless, we offer a general education, especially in honors, without reference to immediate usefulness because we believe that it serves an important purpose.

HONORS STUDENTS

Even when an honors curriculum fulfills all the general education requirements of an institution, as it does at the University of Oregon, honors students still take most of their courses outside of honors. One of the “Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program” is that “program requirements themselves should include a substantial portion of the participants’ undergraduate work, usually in the vicinity of 20% to 25% of their total course work and certainly no less than 15%” (Spurrier 193), implying that honors students typically take at least 75% of their coursework outside of honors. The influence of honors education beyond the perimeters of a particular program is thus substantial as these bright students interact with their peers and teachers outside of honors.

One of the defining features of honors education resides not so much in the stellar array of designer courses we offer as in the students themselves and the kinds of questions they pose. Smart, incisive, quirky, challenging questions coming from students with interests and expertise from across campus do not reproduce knowledge. Rather, they often critique and expose gaps in the basis of that knowledge and have the potential to lead us to new insights and directions of inquiry (for a useful study of the differences between honors and non-honors students, particularly in the area of “deep processing,” see Carnicom and Clump). These talented young men and women bring their engaged and sometimes aggressive curiosity to non-honors classes within and outside of their departments, raising the intellectual stakes for all students; they ask questions that transform lectures and discussions into moments of uncertainty, ambiguity or wonder; and they have the potential to inspire or provoke other students to search for answers on their own. Honors students also meet with faculty to discuss social and political issues outside of class with greater frequency than non-honors students, as noted by Shushok, and thus model greater intellectual engagement as well as acumen.

■ Peter Sederberg’s essay on honors colleges brings readers up to date on how they differ from honors programs.

■ Lydia Lyons’ new essay shows how two-year honors experiences can benefit students and lead them to great choices in completing the bachelor’s degree and going beyond.

■ Kate Bruce adds an enriched view of travels with honors students.

These and all the other helpful essays on scholarships, community, Honors Semesters, parenting, and partnerships make the 4th edition a must in your collection of current honors reference works. This book is STILL the only honors guide on the market, and it is your best tool for networking with local high schools and community colleges as well as for keeping your administration up to date on what your program offers.

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WKU is not the first, or the only, institution to invest in honors education in order to effect institutional change. This strategy goes back to Frank Aydelotte and the creation of the country’s first honors program at Swarthmore in 1922 (Rinn 70) and is seen in the growth of honors education at all levels of higher education. Ransdell’s experience in alumni relations and development at two institutions with robust honors colleges and programs allowed him to see first-hand the role honors can play on a university campus. He understood that a well-designed honors experience can be an institutional transformative investment, not simply a marquee program for the recruitment and care of small number of academically gifted and high achieving students.

Building a robust honors college or program is not an inexpensive proposition. The per-student cost of an honors scholar in an appropriately funded honors college can rival the cost per student of varsity athletes. Leaders of every academic unit will argue that the funding provided to honors is best invested in their unit. If an institution chooses to invest $1,000,000 of reoccurring funds in a single academic discipline, that unit will undoubtedly improve dramatically, but the investment might do little if anything to improve the academic reputation of other departments on campus or the educational experience of students in other units. Less self-interested faculty might argue that the university’s finite resources should be invested across a range of academic units, not concentrated in honors. This “let’s give everyone something” mentality is undoubtedly equitable, but equally distributed investments are typically so small as to result in no noticeable improvement to any units or the institution as a whole. Ironically, an investment in a university- wide honors structure can have the effect of helping multiple units. Put another way, the concentration of resources in a university honors college can have the effect of diffusing the benefits to more academic units. The key point is that strategically investing resources in a properly constructed honors experience produces opportunities for students and faculty across the university, creating the possibility of enhancing the reputation of the entire university, not just a select department or two.

Volume 12 Number 2

Fall/Winter 2011

JOURNAL EDITORS

EDITORIAL POLICY

DEADLINES

JOURNAL EDITORS

EDITORIAL BOARD

CONTENTS

THE ROOTS OF THE NATIONAL COLLEGIATE HONORS COUNCIL

FORUM ON “THE INSTITUTIONAL IMPACT OF HONORS”

RESEARCH ESSAYS

CALL FOR PAPERS

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

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.

Honors education in the United States can trace its roots in large part to the groundbreaking curricular changes that Frank Aydelotte introduced at Swarthmore upon becoming its president in 1921 (Rinn, 70). Reacting to increased enrollment and influenced by his experience as a Rhodes Scholar, Aydelotte wanted to break the lock-step, homogenizing approach of American higher education that catered to the average students in a group or class, holding back the best and brightest. Using Oxford-style tutorials as inspiration, Aydelotte wanted to create a more individualized educational experience for gifted students that focused on the creation of knowledge more than its mere reproduction.

For those of us still committed to high-quality undergraduate education, however, honors programs are an oasis in the midst of this academic desert. Scott Carnicom ponders a seeming contradiction in the fact that the pedagogical innovation touted by honors educators is in reality the conservation of such traditional ideals as small, discussion-driven classes; I think that honors faculty rightly see such traditions as innovative in comparison to the assessment-driven methods that we are told to employ in other classes. All of this assessment, theoretically tied to improving recruitment and retention of students, may well be hindering the recruitment and retention of faculty, especially those who bring with us not only peer-reviewed publications but also national-level committee service that translates effectively to institutional leadership on faculty senates, school-wide committees, and administrative appointments. Seeds of our groundbreaking scholarship incubate in our innovative classroom practices, subject to far fewer of the invasive assessment instruments applied to our regular courses. What happens to our classes, and in turn our scholarship, when the suggested types of honors assessment become required and regimented, as might happen if NCHC becomes the accreditation body for postsecondary honors education? Will the freedom and originality that drew us to honors be quashed?

The UHC at Pitt is unusual in its institutional context and impact because it is not a membership organization; that is, it has no separate admission or application process by which students gain access to what it provides. While students can participate in UHC in identifiable ways (coursework, advising, intellectual community, and a bachelor of philosophy degree), the overall mission of UHC is to promote extra breadth and depth in undergraduate education and to help those inclined toward such goals find each other. For these kindred spirits, “good enough” does not suffice. They share a willingness to work harder than necessary simply because they enjoy it. The intrinsic curiosity of students sought by and drawn to UHC opportunities does not show up via quantitative measures; there is no SAT score for inquisitiveness. It takes a lot of hard work within the larger institution for us to find these students and for them to find us, but the university as a whole benefits from the mutual quest.

In her classic 1934 work Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict discusses the role of custom and tradition in an individual’s cultural experience and belief system. In her study of diverse cultures, Benedict documents the rituals, traditions, and ceremonies that give meaning to our lives. The academy has long recognized the importance of tradition, with the donning of academic regalia at commencement representing one of the many examples of long-standing cultural rituals that add meaning to students’ higher education experiences. Encapsulated within the modern academy, honors education is a culture in its own right (see Slavin). We can identify a set of common customs and traditions that shape and are shaped by our experience and belief systems about honors education, including active-learning strategies like City as Text™ and Partners in the Park as well as classical pedagogical approaches such as seminar discussions and one-on-one mentoring. Though we may not have a universal honors culture, we have a shared identity. Indeed, for many of us, the culture of honors gives meaning to our role as educators; we identify strongly with the honors communities on our campuses. Honors also provides opportunities to share our cultural experiences at regional and national honors conferences, where we celebrate our honors culture.

Included in Andrews’s study is the changing focus and structure of the newsletter, prompting the editors of Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council and Honors in Practice to take a brief look back at the history of the two current NCHC publications in hopes that these journals will have the good fortune to find a Larry Andrews fifty years from now. JNCHC is a semi-annual publication that in the year 2000 replaced the Forum for Honors (1970–96) after a four-year hiatus during which the NCHC had no scholarly publication. Unlike the Forum for Honors, each issue of JNCHC initially focused on a single theme, inviting essays only on that theme. Topics addressed in the first twelve issues were: Liberal Learning in the New Century; Science in Honors; Educational Transitions; On Honors Education; Honors and the Creative Arts; Liberal Learning; Technology in Honors; Students and Teachers in Honors; Multiperspectivism in Honors Education; Research in Honors; and The Psychology and Sociology of Honors.

John studied physics at Cambridge University and received his PhD in physics from the University of London in 1963. He was then invited to New Mexico to serve as a radiological physicist at the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico and joined the physics department at the University of New Mexico in 1964. His work as honors director at New Mexico was followed by his appointment as honors director at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1978. Though John was also a member of the physics department at UMCP, the possibilities of honors education captured his imagination more and more.

While at the University of Maryland, John introduced several innovative approaches to honors education that remain important today. He introduced the idea of learning communities into the honors curriculum and developed that model of education to reach out to high school teachers in the Washington D.C. area, arranging for them to spend a sabbatical leave embedded in the Maryland honors program. He integrated various developmental models, including the work of William Perry, into the honors program, and he became widely known as an innovator and explorer both in his own classes and the NCHC. He spoke frequently about his insights into education and the processes of learning at national and regional conferences. His love of learning and of learning about learning became a defining and enduring characteristic of NCHC.

These three key elements are equally important for the whole of higher education because they provide a structure for building rigor and relevance in the curriculum and for supporting student success. An additional role for honors programs should thus be academic leadership. The overarching commitment of honors to liberal learning is especially relevant today, given the pressure from various constituencies to focus on career preparation at the expense of traditional education. Carnicom understands this potential barrier to liberal learning: “Society,” he observes, “has become more focused on how the professoriate grades than how we teach, and a college education is viewed as a simple, transitory commodity to be traded for a high-paying vocation.”

. . . historically been an antidote for elitism, democratically leveling the playing field and providing a top-notch education to students outside the hallowed halls of the oldest and/or most prestigious institutions.

Much has been made of the elitist argument, and much in the honors literature goes a long way to countering arguments that attempt to equate honors education with elitism, but I would argue that the case for honors can be strengthened by building on Carnicom’s observation that the innovative/traditional pedagogical methods associated with honors education can level the playing field.

In a 2011 New York Times article, David Leonhardt explores the persistent socio-economic disparities in the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Despite claims to a meritocratic process, the students filling the classrooms of elite institutions are disproportionately affluent. While this observation is hardly shocking given the preparatory educational benefits inherent in an upper-class upbringing, some of the specific observations made by Leonhardt point to an opportunity for honors programs to implement their centuries-old “innovations” to democratize the attainment of higher education success. Only 44% of low-income students with high standardized test scores attend four-year colleges, opting instead for community colleges or no college at all. Furthermore, of those high-testing, low-income students who do attend a four-year school right out of high school, their completion rate is significantly lower than similar-scoring students from the top earning brackets (“Top Colleges” 1).

Carnicom asks whether honors education preserves history or spurs innovation, both ideas in service to a larger one regarding honors’ impact on the larger institutions that house them. After reading Academically Adrift, I wondered if one of those impacts might, in fact, be devastating. Might the oncampus sequestering of honors academic culture—particularly those honors pedagogical tools that Carnicom refers to as residing in honors’ “time capsule” of the “best educational practices of the past”—discourage the university’s “general population” (to borrow prison lingo) from breaking out of a consumer-based, occupationally-centered, sub-standard version of college learning? Perhaps the mere presence of an honors program suggests that its educational practice is appropriate only for honors students, leaving the rest of the campus in the dust. More problematically still, the maintenance of an honors curriculum might exonerate a university community from demanding an honors-level rigor from everyone else. In light of what Academically Adrift demonstrates, I wonder if it is really true that honors—as I so often tell myself and my faculty—is really just different and not more difficult.

Larry Andrews

Jaclyn Bankert

Sister Edith Bogue

Bernice Braid

Marian Bruce

Scott Carnicom

James J. Clauss

Craig T. Cobane

Theodore Coladarci

Kevin L. Dooley

Richard England

Linda Frost

Annmarie Guzy

Mark Haggerty

Nathan Hilberg

Mimi Killinger

Kenneth Oswald

Benjamin Moritz

Gladys Palma de Schrynemakers

Debra S. Schroeder

Charlie Slavin

Ernest Smith

Becky L. Spritz

Several methodologies have been proposed to mitigate, halt, or even reverse losses in biodiversity (Johns; Novacek). Of these, education that conveys the importance of biodiversity to human subsistence is one particularly effective approach (Caro et al.; Braus; Bonine et al.; Brewer; Jacobson et al.). At the post-secondary level, biodiversity education is primarily the responsibility of a few closely-related scientific departments such as biology, natural resources, ecology, and environmental sciences. This restricted focus is not unexpected since biodiversity is a discipline that falls squarely under the purview of the natural sciences (see Takacs, 1996). However, in addition to its deep biological roots, biodiversity routinely traverses legal (Keiter; Glowka), political (Thomas; Boardman), economic (Chopra; Swanson; Johnson et al.), ethical (Tilman; Clark), and social (Takacs; Peine) arenas. Thus, comprehensive studies in biodiversity and its conservation require at least a cursory understanding of several highly varied academic disciplines (Van Dyke). Such a holistic presentation of diverse academic disciplines may present a significant challenge to individual instructors, many of whom have spent their careers acquiring expertise in a single, narrowly focused field of study.

The multifaceted nature of biodiversity and conservation lends itself nicely to honors programs. Among other goals, honors seeks to provide for its students a multidisciplinary educational experience that furthers the core mission of a program. For example, at Northern Kentucky University, our honors program emphasizes four central domains: 1) active learning 2) global citizenship, 3) civic engagement, and 4) undergraduate research. We will demonstrate the ease with which biodiversity and conservation education can align with these four domains and with the multidisciplinarity and valuesbased mission of honors. While we use the NKU Honors Program as an example, we hope that readers readily and easily extend this example to their own honors programs, departments, or colleges. We attempt to highlight how the myriad of academic expertise typically housed within honors programs readily promotes and addresses biodiversity and conservation education.

Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Dedication to John Howarth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
David N. Mowry

Editor’s Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Ada Long

THE ROOTS OF THE NATIONAL COLLEGIATE HONORS COUNCIL

The Wisdom of Our Elders: Honors Discussions in The Superior Student, 1958–65 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Larry Andrews

FORUM ON “THE INSTITUTIONAL IMPACT OF HONORS”

Honors Education: Innovation or Conservation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Scott Carnicom

Defending the Traditions by Preserving the Classics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Kevin L. Dooley

The Helmholtz Maneuver, or The Idea of (Honors in) a University. . . . . . 59
Richard England

Can the Elitism of Honors Help Students at Non-Elite Schools?. . . . . . . . 65
Benjamin Moritz

Academically Adept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Linda Frost

Extra Breadth and Depth in Undergraduate Education: The Institutional Impact of an Interdisciplinary Honors Research Fellowship. . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Nathan Hilberg and Jaclyn Bankert

Conservation, Experimentation, Innovation, and Model Honors Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Bernice Braid and Gladys Palma de Schrynemakers

Harry Potter and the Specter of Honors Accreditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Annmarie Guzy

Emerging from the Honors Oasis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Becky L. Spritz

The Benefits of Honors Education for All College Students . . . . . . . . . . . 95
James J. Clauss

Moving Mountains: Honors as Leverage for Institutional Change . . . . . 101
Craig T. Cobane

RESEARCH ESSAYS

The Roles and Activities of Honors Directors: Similarities and Differences across Carnegie Institution Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Debra S. Schroeder, Marian Bruce, and Sr. Edith Bogue

Honors Thesis Rubrics: A Step toward More Consistent and Valid Assessment in Honors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Mark Haggerty, Theodore Coladarci, Mimi Killinger, and Charlie Slavin

A Role for Honors in Conservation and Biodiversity Education . . . . . . . 167
Kenneth J. Oswald and Ernest Smith

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

NCHC Publication Order Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

Honors credit for honors students studying abroad, then, has to capture the honors differential that is already there, make it explicit, and raise it to consciousness in order to reveal its implications. A journal or blog of reflections on cultural differences provides the best opportunity to register the nuances of experience that depart from the familiar. However, the journal cannot remain simply a chronicle of one’s activities abroad; rather, the annotation of experiences comprises the basic structure onto which the student tracks her/his reflections on cultural difference. The day-to-day chronicle is therefore the necessary foundation for the sort of meta-cognition or higherlevel reflection that defines honors but is itself not honors work. In order to help the student articulate and maintain that higher level of self-reflection on cultural difference in different contexts, the Hofstra University Honors College (HUHC) requires the elaboration in advance (under advisement) of ten categories of culture, adapted to the student’s interests, area of study, and planned activities. Generally, the categories are based in part on traditional disciplines at the university that also define, abstractly and inevitably, dimensions of the student’s experience such as transportation, food, economics, history, language, art forms, politics, geography, and urban planning. Such categories help the student extend and generalize from a discrete, local, and personal incident or observation to more far-reaching considerations about a culture.

While travel abroad has been a part of affluent American culture since our country was founded, the purpose of travel abroad as it has informed study abroad programs in the past few decades and as it was expressed by Michelle Obama, is still relatively new. The European Grand Tour, which was incorporated into American education as the Junior Year Abroad in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, has evolved from an exercise in personal sophistication to a commitment to internationalism. International education recognizes that much of students’ education should occur beyond the walls of the classroom and that their worldviews are shaped by their experiences. Students are thus encouraged to participate in an array of traditional and non-traditional learning that includes travel along with other social, academic, and cultural activities. Unlike the old European Grand Tour, these experiential learning opportunities are designed to challenge students’ assumptions and certainties, resulting in a more engaged and meaningful experience that makes undergraduate education globally relevant and significant. This new kind of study abroad requires a more rigorous preparation for travel so that students have the background and skills they need to strengthen their relations with diverse populations from different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds.

Given these new functions of study abroad, Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) designed a summer Spanish Language Immersion Program (SLIP) in Mexico that provides an enriched educational experience and encourages foreign-language scholarship for undergraduate honors students in this Historically Black University. Designed to be affordable at a cost of $3,300 for the student (including tuition, fees, class registration, airfare, and housing), SLIP has provided a five-week immersion experience in Queretaro, Mexico, every summer since 2002. Honors students live with host families, take courses at El Centro Intercultural de Queretaro, participate in cultural activities and excursions, and engage in volunteer service projects. A joint effort of the WSSU Honors Program and the Department of English and Foreign Languages, the SLIP program advances the university’s mission to internationalize the campus through rigorous academic courses, robust experiential learning opportunities, and meaningful cultural enrichment activities.

The first challenge for student participants was to acquaint themselves with the unique subject matter they would tackle over the next nine months. Naturally, before getting to work, the students needed to learn what early English cycle plays were and when and why they were first performed. The three primary types of popular theatre in early and early modern England can be differentiated by performance venue: parish plays, which depicted the lives of saints and were produced by churches in rural communities; theatre performed by strolling players, whose repertoire would have consisted mainly of Robin Hood plays; and urban theatre, such as the cycle plays discussed here. The play-cycles are called by the name of the cities in which they were performed, and the full texts of only four of the English cycles survive: the York Cycle, the Wakefield or Towneley Cycle, the N-Town Cycle, and The Chester Cycle out of which came the play that Kent State University Honors College students would produce.

These play-cycles were sometimes called “mystery cycles” because the guilds (or “mysteries”) in the city were responsible for producing the individual episodes making up the entire cycle. They were likely derived from liturgical drama and were intended to teach the scriptures and reinforce faith in the sacraments. The earliest records we have of liturgical drama come from the late tenth century. This liturgical drama is the Queum quaeritis (Whom do you seek?), referred to by Alexandra Johnston as a “dialogue,” and although it is not a theatrical performance as such, it is likely that it lead to what we might consider more “traditional” theatrical performances (CCMET, 3–4; Wasson, 28). By the mid-sixteenth century, the English Reformation was underway, and, as England separated from its Catholic roots, changes in religious and state law resulted in the cessation of such productions. The plays lay dormant and largely untouched for two hundred years. Then in the early nineteenth century, a scholar by the name of Thomas Sharp rediscovered episodes from what may have been a cycle performed at Coventry. His work, A dissertation on the pageants or dramatic mysteries anciently performed at Coventry, opened a rich and largely uncharted realm of scholarly research. As scholars engaged the subject of early English theatre and cycle plays in particular, the citizens of York and Chester began to mount performances of their eponymous cycles, which were no longer a thing of the past.

In many ways, this broad-based support is understandable. American students’ understanding of the world is remarkably shallow. As the U.S. Senate noted in its 2006 resolution, “87% of students in the United States between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot locate Iraq on a world map, 83% cannot find Afghanistan, 58% cannot find Japan, and 11% cannot even find the United States” (Vistawide). The Lincoln Commission, which was established by Congress in 2004, also explained, “What nations do not know exacts a heavy toll. The stakes involved in study abroad are that simple, that straightforward, and that important” (3).

■ Peter Sederberg’s essay on honors colleges brings readers up to date on how they differ from honors programs.

■ Lydia Lyons’ new essay shows how two-year honors experiences can benefit students and lead them to great choices in completing the bachelor’s degree and going beyond.

■ Kate Bruce adds an enriched view of travels with honors students.

These and all the other helpful essays on scholarships, community, Honors Semesters, parenting, and partnerships make the 4th edition a must in your collection of current honors reference works. This book is STILL the only honors guide on the market, and it is your best tool for networking with local high schools and community colleges as well as for keeping your administration up to date on what your program offers.

NCHC PUBLICATION ORDER FORM

NATIONAL COLLEGIATE HONORS COUNCIL MONOGRAPHS & JOURNALS

In spite of a growing body of literature supporting the benefits of honors programs (Achterberg; Cosgrove; Hartleroad; Park & Maisto; Ross & Roman; Seifert, Pascarella, Colangelo, & Assouline; Shushok), some members of the national community of honors educators remain resistant to the concept of assessing their programs. Lanier cites the spring/summer 2006 volume of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (JNCHC) that included nine essays in its “Forum on Outcomes Assessment, Accountability, and Honors”; he writes that two thirds of them focused on the problem and dangers in program assessment. A common theme in several of the essays opposing assessment was that the unique and qualitative nature of the stated outcomes of honors programs makes assessment difficult or unhelpful (Digby; Freyman; Strong).

Volume 12 Number 1

Spring/Summer 2011

The theoretical contexts of our Ghana program have both prepared us for our experiences and validated them. In Kuh’s research on the effects of high impact educational practices, he notes that “student development is a cumulative process shaped by many events and experiences inside and outside the classroom (13). Chickering (as cited in Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, & Whitt) adds another dimension to student development that he calls “cool passion”: “Cool passion seeks a fulfillment by joining the forces of heart and mind, commitment and critical analysis. Such passion pursues its purposes with ‘tenuous tenacity’” (77). Finally, Vande Berg refers to a new student learning paradigm that influences how we approach study abroad programs: “We no longer believe that our responsibilities to our students, where their learning is concerned, end when they leave the United States” (394). This paradigm, along with Kuh’s cumulative model and Chickering’s “cool passion,” illuminate the high-impact practice of our study abroad program in Ghana.

So colleges and universities must face the difficult questions of how to address the academic, social, and cultural concerns of students; what ought to be the nature and character of the collegiate experience to which students have access; and, more specifically, what can be done to address the needs and unique challenges facing honors students. Successful efforts, whether institution-wide or at the department level, place a strong emphasis on cultivating academically engaging, socially relevant, and culturally inclusive learning environments for honors students. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in particular are increasingly sensitive to the strategic importance of having quality programs for honors students in the context of their current struggle for equity and equality. Even more than Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), HBCUs are confronted with educational issues that are historically and culturally deep.

Although much can be gained from any experience of studying in another country, a program that is created and run by honors faculty is better. Honors international programs that have been designed and led by honors faculty tend to be customized both to the students and to the honors program, assuring that field pedagogy will replicate the standards and quality that students can expect in their home classes, seminars, and colloquia. Such programs are well-organized since they have to be arranged and approved well in advance. Furthermore, since the faculty members are aware of resources on campus or can propose and receive grants for international programs, the opportunities for students who cannot afford the expense of studying abroad are greater. For example, an honors faculty member at the University of New Mexico received a National Science Foundation grant for our Honors Biodiversity Program in Australia that allowed her to include qualified students regardless of their economic status.

Equally important are the design and execution that can often only be organized by faculty members from the home campus. Faculty-led international programs are designed with awareness of the important components for encountering or engaging with a site: The component parts exist in time-space. Organizing them presupposes pace, rhythm, and movement through them. Unlike the presuppositions of campus organization, which (however inaccurately) assumes static structures and immovable objects, every [honors international program] begins with the concept of motion and the dynamic of movement through space over time. [Faculty] construct unique calendars, juxtapose field explorations and classroom discussion, and create arenas in which differing voices lead discussion throughout a term with variable blocks of time allocated to these activities. Further, participants are invited to see themselves as explorers—that is, to move and simultaneously watch themselves moving through uncharted territory. The mapping they undertake is, therefore, of a space, of themselves moving through that space, of themselves transforming that space into a place that has taken on the tangible familiarity of what they, the [students], have measured by their alert movement through it. (Braid 19).

How this culture is actually created in the classroom was the starting point of research undertaken at the behest of our dean by a group of students and faculty in the honors college at the University of Maine. While the administrators of honors programs have a sense of what they think characterizes an honors culture, our questions were how faculty and students understand and implement this culture in a classroom; how honors models and pedagogies play out; and what factors exert more influence than others in achieving the honors culture to which we aspire. In a program such as ours, with faculty coming from a number of disciplinary homes and schools of thought, we wanted to know how the culture of honors is cultivated in practice. As Charlie Slavin is fond of saying, “some people get honors and some don’t.”

Our study is a preliminary one only, a point to keep in mind throughout the discussion. A much larger research project would be necessary to draw broad conclusions, but this study sheds some light on the nature of honors culture from the perspective of faculty and students and, as such, is a worthwhile contribution to that “rich and varied conversation” described by Long. Our research focused on the first course that incoming students take in honors (HON 111) and included observations of only the first five weeks in two of the sixteen sections of the course offered in the fall 2009 semester. Using non-participant observation in the classrooms and surveys of students and faculty, we sought to understand how a random group of individuals brought together in a section of HON 111 emerges as a class with a shared identity and purpose.

One universally accepted focus of higher education these days seems to be study abroad, an opportunity that was restricted to the affluent throughout much of our history but that has now become an essential offering at almost all colleges and universities, perhaps especially in honors. Some debate about the value of study abroad, its assets and problems, is thus the Forum topic of this issue of JNCHC.

Universities used to generate new ideas and create models that were adopted by those outside the ivory tower, from art and entertainment to industry and politics. However, the modern university, perhaps lacking its old confidence, turns again and again to the corporate world for many of its practices, including so-called accountability. Politicians, claiming to speak for the “consumers” of higher education who spend ever-increasing sums for college tuition, have in many cases required colleges and universities that receive state and federal funding, which means just about every institution of higher learning, to show “transparency and accountability,” and the schools, urged by accreditation agencies, have decided that “assessment of student learning” is the best response to critics and consumers alike. Through reaccreditation, budgeting decisions, curriculum approval and other means, university administrators have exerted pressure upon deans, department chairs, and individual faculty members to “embrace the culture of assessment.” In our previous article for JNCHC, we questioned the validity of assessment as an accurate measurement of student learning in honors. We will argue in this essay that the “culture” of assessment and accountability is not what honors faculty should choose to embrace.

Bernice Braid

Morgan Brockington

Scott Carnicom

Ray J. Davis

Janaan Decker

Neil H. Donahue

Marsha Driscoll

Annie Hakim

Carolyn Haynes

Leena Karsan

Kristen Kuhns

Melissa Ladenheim

Molly MacLagan

Soncerey L. Montgomery

Rosalie C. Otero

Gladys Palma de Schrynemakers

Christopher A. Snyder

Uchenna P. Vasser

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes. (16)

Carolyn Haynes, in “Overcoming the Study Abroad Hype,” reminds us that American higher education has come to expect that “study abroad” will do for our students what we have not accomplished through courses designed to open minds, enrich imaginations, and polish world citizens. She also reminds us that global understanding is far from a guaranteed outcome of foreign study. Often, routine perceptions, stereotypes, and long-standing assumptions about people and places are resistant to change—particularly when they are only implied rather than articulated or challenged—and prevent us from achieving the “largeness of mind” that Geertz advocates.

At its most recent annual conference on “Global Positioning: Essential Learning, Student Success, and the Currency of U.S. Degrees” (January 2011), the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) focused on “globalizing” undergraduate education. The presentations addressed international experiences, but sending students abroad was not, as such, a dominant issue addressed. Rather, presenters concentrated on courses and co-curricular experiences that help students develop ways of seeing and knowing that promote perspectival flexibility, arguing that without appropriate and pertinent ‘mindsets’ students were unlikely to derive the maximum benefit from study abroad.

Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Dedication to Freddye Turner Davy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Editor’s Introduction
Ada Long . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Forum on "Honors Study Abroad"

Overcoming the Study Abroad Hype
Carolyn Haynes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

A Case Among Cases
Bernice Braid and Gladys Palma de Schrynemakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Honors in Ghana: How Study Abroad Enriches Students’ Lives
Leena Karsan, Annie Hakim, and Janaan Decker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Taking It Global
Soncerey L. Montgomery and Uchenna P. Vasser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Faculty-Led International Honors Programs
Rosalie C. Otero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

The Honors Differential: At Home and Abroad
Neil H. Donahue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

PORTZ-PRIZE-WINNING ESSAY, 2010

Realizing Early English Drama
Molly MacLagan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Honors Education at HBCUs: Core Values, Best Practices, and Select Challenges
Ray J. Davis and Soncerey L. Montgomery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

National Survey of College and University Honors Programs Assessment Protocols
Marsha B. Driscoll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Assessment, Accountability, and Honors Education
Christopher A. Snyder and Scott Carnicom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Ethnogenesis: The Construction and Dynamics of the Honors Classroom Culture
Melissa Ladenheim, Kristen Kuhns, and Morgan Brockington. . . . . 129

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

NCHC Publication Order Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158