Imagination and the Humanities in Honors across the Disciplines at a Jesuit University.

In 1988, I was a graduate student in English in New York City, and I found myself despairing of the field. I had always imagined that I would find a way to "make the world a better place," to "heal" it in one translation of the Hebrew tikkun ha'olam. Instead, or so it seemed in my darker reflections, I was busy trying to parse what French theorists were saying in essays that seemed to make little sense in either the original or the translation. My college classmates, off to careers in law, medicine and business, seemed poised to make differences I never could. Then I picked up a copy of The New York Times that day, and I was struck by what two of the lead stories had in common. The notorious fatwa against Salman Rushdie was still in its early days, and there was unprecedented unrest in Czechoslovakia around the continued imprisonment of playwright Vaclav Havel. Both were writers, humanists by design or default, and each was shaking the world, challenging a totalitarian mood by the simple act of unleashing his imagination in directions he could not have anticipated These two stories were all I needed to get me through that particular period of doubting the value of work in the humanities. They inspired me to see the extent of a single human experience and helped me imagine I could still make the difference I wanted if I went to the classroom and worked on my own writing. I saw in these stories a kind of applied humanities, the work of the imagination in the world. As Larry Andrews's essay reminds us, the humanities again--or still--seem under assault. When our graduates leave us with an average student loan debt of more than $50,000, we can easily see why we face so much pressure to measure the value of a degree by the concrete opportunities it opens up. Reading a poem or arguing about what Plato means is all well and good, but, if it doesn't help our graduates find work (so the implicit argument goes), it is not valuable enough. The translation of "not valuable" in that context might be "insufficiently practical" or simply "too imaginative." In my literature classes, I find myself extolling the importance of critical thinking all the more. Yes, I still believe in the intrinsic value of reading literature, but now I make a point of reminding my students that the work of that reading prepares them for the professional world. When they read carefully, they train themselves to be better corporate contributors. When they write well, they put themselves forward as more capable participants in professional exchange. I have sacrificed nothing in the work of the class, at least I hope not, but I find I have to justify it in these new ways because too many of our students understandably carry an implicit question wherever they go: Is this worth what I'm paying for it? That is, I feel pressure to underscore the humanities by showing that they are worth the price in some currency other than their own. The story is different in my honors classes, however. At the University of Scranton, we do not tie scholarships to participation in the honors program. Our students are already high-achievers, so they tend already to receive our more substantial merit packages The one financial benefit we do offer is to raise the number of credits they can take at the flat rate from eighteen to twenty-one. In other words, we try to give them their honors classes for free, charging them the same for an experience that requires more institutional resources than the norm. We do not, though, spell out this honors advantage in financial terms; we assume that our honors students pursue honors for what feels like a purer motive Our implicit message to students is that you do honors work here because you want to do it; it costs only your effort and your inspiration. The work is its own reward whether it is something you pursue in a lab, a library, a clinic, or the field. Appreciate it for its own sake, or you will have to endure a grueling five-semester sequence. …