Transformation from Within

As a college president for over twenty years, it has not escaped my attention that sometimes investments in an honors program or college are decried as "elitist": as unnecessary investments in already privileged students with little wider institutional payoff. We have heard the familiar refrain at Emory & Henry at times, but our work building on, expanding, and constantly revisiting and revising the pedagogical innovations that come out of our honors program refutes the idea that this work benefits only a few. Our college has demonstrated that honors, far from being elitist, benefits all the students on campus. The faculty of Emory & Henry College established the honors program in 2009 to provide an enhanced academic experience for the college's best students. The program inducted its first class of sixteen students in the fall of 2009, and the first cohort graduated with College Honors Diplomas in May of 2013.1 arrived at Emory & Henry soon thereafter in August 2013, when the honors program was already establishing itself as a success. In fact, Kyle Boden--an honors student, a double-major in biology and chemistry, and quarterback and captain of the football team--was a member of the search committee that selected me. Imagine my delight at getting to announce at my very first Board of Trustees meeting that, thanks in part to the advising provided by the honors program, Kyle was selected as Emory & Henry's first Rhodes Scholar finalist in a hundred years. The faculty had several goals in establishing the honors program. The founding documents of the program name several of them: * Increase the college's population of exceptionally talented, intellectually curious students. * Provide those students with special experiences, a more flexible and challenging core curriculum, intense academic advising, and intellectual challenges that will retain them at Emory & Henry through graduation. * Challenge our intellectually talented students to exercise their curiosity and to design their own courses, internships, and learning experiences. * Place our scholars in a challenging cohort of similarly ambitious students who will push each other to do their very best work. * Encourage students to take what they are learning at Emory & Henry out into the world and to bring what they learn out in the world back to share at Emory & Henry. * Provide opportunities for students to engage with Emory & Henry's premier faculty by placing some of the best teachers in the country in small, cohort classes with the best students in our region. When I arrived, the data suggested that we were succeeding in those goals. Where Emory & Henry had struggled in the mid-2000s to maintain our national test score averages, the academic profile of our top quartile stabilized and started to rise. Where we had recently suffered high attrition among our top academic performers, honors students were now persisting at the college at nearly a 95% four-year graduation rate. The intellectual energy and accolades they were bringing Emory & Henry were noticeable on any walk across campus and in the pages of our alumni magazine and admissions materials. Our honors scholars were studying abroad in record numbers and presenting their work in undergraduate research forums as well as at professional meetings Their seminars were fast-evolving into dynamic and cooperative workshops in which students were playing the lead role in selecting questions and problems to study and in reaching out to draw a wide circle of faculty into complex, sometimes heated, discussions of multidisciplinary problems that might have been neglected by individual major-focused departments. All of these successes might make for a vibrant and exciting honors program, but if these educational benefits were limited to a select group of students, we would have missed much of the value of what was happening. …