A Matter of Definition, Criteria, and Standards in Honors: A History, from the Basic Characteristics to the “NCHC Shared Principles and Practices of Honors Education”

Authors

Richard Badenhausen, Westminster University
James Buss, Ball State University

Date of this Version

2024

Document Type

Article

Citation

Honors in Practice (2024) 20; National Collegiate Honors Council; Guest editor: John Zubizarreta

Comments

Copyright 2024, National Collegiate Honors Council. Used by permission.

Abstract

For more than half a century, the honors community has debated the role of standards. This comprehensive overview of those discussions—the first ever—traces the evolution of how honors education has defined itself from its early years right up until the 2022 adoption of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s new “NCHC Shared Principles and Practices of Honors Education.” While the latest document may seem to represent a stark change, the genealogy unfolded here demonstrates the “Shared Principles” as a return to the collegial and inclusive spirit of the earliest discussions about standards while reflecting more recent issues in contemporary higher education.

The most prominent practitioners of honors education in the 1950s and 1960s emphasized the diversity of programs, the need for flexibility in experiences, pedagogical innovation, and student-centered learning. The new “Shared Principles” owe a debt to earlier documents that sought to encode such approaches. Along the way, the essay explores the contentious debates around calls for accreditation and certification of honors programs and colleges; how such calls conflicted with some key founding principles of honors; and how subtle shifts in versions of the “Basic Characteristics” quietly moved an increasingly dogmatic document closer to a more restrictive, certification instrument.

The essay also demonstrates some of the key shifts in understanding how a standards document like the “Shared Principles” can be used. For example, they are positioned as an inclusive set of characteristics that explain what honors education has to offer, rather than a series of criteria used to regulate the boundaries of honors education. They serve as blueprints for what we aspire to in honors education rather than a mere list of resources we ask for, and thus they will be especially useful in guiding generative discussions that emerge from program review. And they align honors programs and colleges with the central concerns of their host institutions, positioning honors as central to their success.