Building an Honors Education for the Twenty-First Century: Making Connections in and outside the Classroom

When I was sifting through stacks of brochures from colleges as a high school student (in the days before the Internet and college web sites), I had a vague sense that I wanted to find a college with an honors program in which it was "cool" for students to develop close mentoring relationships with faculty and where students were encouraged to seek both breadth and depth in their education. While I enjoyed my public high school experience, I knew that I wanted to go beyond memorizing facts and preparing for standardized tests. I could not fully articulate my educational goals or the reasons for them at that time, but in hindsight I realize that I was seeking a significant opportunity to participate in an environment marked by high-impact learning practices, a focus on the big issues facing humanity, and lifelong learning. I had the good fortune to enjoy such a life-changing experience in college, and as a university president I now strive to create similar opportunities for the next generations of students. I wound up selecting Swarthmore College in large part because of its unique honors program. When I was at Swarthmore, students in the honors program were required to participate in six intensive seminars (in a major and a minor) during the last two years of college. These seminars generally met once a week for several hours and were marked by very close faculty-student interaction. Students took turns writing papers to share with their classmates. Those who wrote seminar papers read additional material beyond what the other students read for that week and were also responsible for leading the discussion on that topic Seminar professors served as guides and mentors but did not lecture. They also didn't give tests or hand out grades because, at the end of a student's senior year, external examiners came from other colleges and universities across the country to administer oral and written examinations of their own making (with only the seminar syllabus as a guide). This student-centered approach to learning (modeled on the tutorial system at Oxford) required participants to take an active role and created a strong sense of community. You learned from and with your classmates, and you relied on them to write useful papers and to lead quality discussions. Students spent less time trying to impress their professors with answers they thought the professors wanted to hear--since their classroom professors were not the ones ultimately responsible for their evaluation in the program--and more time grappling with big questions and issues. We honed our critical thinking and communication skills through our discussions and debates, and we often continued the conversations outside of class in the residence halls, in the dining hall, or on the quad. The program forced us to take initiative, and we had freedom and flexibility to be creative and innovative in our approach to learning. In preparing for the external examinations at the end of my senior year, I also found myself making connections between different courses and disciplines that I had not grasped or appreciated when I first engaged with the material. I especially remember how the seminar American Intellectual History, which had seemed initially like a hodge-podge of disconnected strands of thought, finally started to make sense as I began to see the interrelationships among developments in science, politics, philosophy, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on my career since that time, I can see how I have internalized and utilized elements of my college honors experience in a variety of professional settings. As a young lawyer in private practice, I often found myself seeking to look beyond any one strand of case law to make connections between different branches of the law--and in doing so to try to develop creative solutions to conflicts that at first seemed binary or perhaps even intractable. Later, as in-house counsel at two large research universities (Michigan and Rutgers), I relished the opportunity to work with faculty from many different fields as we learned to communicate across the boundaries of our respective disciplines. …