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,…

Honors programs, as home to the highest test scores and highest GPAs on many campuses (for reasons that are not particularly justifiable), can become assembly lines for prestige-scholarship applications and their dangling appendages, the applicants themselves. As honors programs become cogs in universities' PR machines, they decouple from their…

In this article, Marygold Walsh-Dilley supports the notion that research in honors is a lot less common than it would appear to a casual observer and that such analyses will help administrators demonstrate the significant benefits of honors education for both honors students and the larger colleges and universities they serve. She also supports a…

An honors senior thesis introduces students into a world of scholarship and professional activity in a way that no single course, either semester- or year-long, can do (Anderson, Lyons, and Weiner). Many honors educators consider honors thesis work to be the defining honors experience. For graduate schools, employers, and the students themselves,…

At a time when higher education is more expensive than ever and the value of the liberal arts has been called into question, it might seem paradoxical to argue that honors--generally offering its students' large merit scholarships and small classes--is an asset to the university. However, the prestige of a university benefits both from the high…

One of the most profound statements in James Herbert's lead essay-simple as it seems at the very beginning of his piece, "Thinking and Rethinking: The Practical Value of an Honors Education," concerns his discovery early in his career that "a liberal education in honors was good preparation for life." Stressing the importance…

Families, especially those considering sending their children to a private four-year university, need all the help they can get in funding college. Annmarie Guzy's essay "AP, Dual Enrollment, and the Survival of Honors Education" in this issue powerfully spells out the financial benefits that accrue from using AP courses to satisfy…

In this article Chancellor Susan Koch considers the value of the honors program at her institute, the University of Illinois at Springfield. She begins by reflecting on her own under graduate experience at her alma mater, Dakota State University and explains how her experience there helped her to create the honors program at the University of…

In an opening address to the university community a few years ago, Thomas Haas, President of Grand Valley State University set out three key concepts (three contemporary Rs) to guide thinking as the institution grows and develops. They all have to do with student success: relevance, rigor, and return on investment. Haas articulated that the…

In a cultural environment that maintains that post-secondary education ought to produce job ready graduates, the importance of the liberal arts and the competencies they teach, along with the questions they engage, often comes up for debate. In such a culture, honors may appear frivolous, elitist, and rear-guard. Angela Marie Salas defends both…

The value that honors programs hold for universities lies in the tangibles. Honors programs help an institution pinpoint and cultivate the talents of its finest students. They help these students achieve undergraduate research and encourage them to seek further inquiry and creative endeavor. They provide the counsel, advising, and encouragement…

In their essay "Nontraditional Honors," Janice Rye Kinghorn and Whitney Womack Smith state that students who are "twenty-five-years of age and older are usually considered nontraditional." However, they first acknowledge that "traditional" and "nontraditional" are "constructed and slippery terms."…

The challenge posed by for-profit educators to the existing system is a real one that is not likely to go away any time soon and is, in fact, likely to intensify. Brian Etheridge describes Gary Bell's essay as a thoughtful exegesis on how we came to this point. He roots his narrative in the explosion of the profit motive, citing several instances…

Gary Bell's essay, "The Profit Motive in Honors Education," raises important questions about the future of honors education--questions that will have the greatest impact on honors students. The voices of those students are not typically included in discussions about the funding and administration of honors even though they have crucial…

In a world that no longer privileges thinking, Andrew Martino writes here that we might need to consider what we are asking of our students--and why--when we ask them to think. This article presents a declaration of how Martino thinks honors education can serve as a resistant force against the increasing encroachment of a wholly utilitarian…