Conference Ideas For Honors Club

Two Honors students, Nicole Alexander (first yr.) and Mynul Khan (senior), traveled with the director, David Boyer, to the Upper Midwest Honors conference at Iowa State University in Ames, April 3-5. 2003.

Let's pick up the narrative thread...

We choose two foci to watch for at the conference

Once Nicole woke up in back seat, we three also talked about the two issues facing our program that I most hoped we would find out about from other programs here. One was to revive participation in the Honors Club. The club officers have done a great job with programming, certainly the equal of past honors officers in years when the club was thriving. But attendance is still terrible. So I don't think programming is the problem, or rather it's not the solution. At the conference we actually did go to two presentations on honors student organizations, each followed by discussion, and spoke informally with students and faculty.

In notes below, I'll call these our two "car questions": (1) how to revitalize the club, and (2) how to initiate and maintain a senior seminar without adding to graduation requirements. I still need to consult with students, faculty, and administration. I hope that includes lots of people reading this. Also, both concepts evolved once we got there and began listening to discussion among students and faculty from other programs.

Nicole speaks

As for the Honors Club, having more community service opportunities is a wonderful idea. Many students want to volunteer and help others out. Soup kitchens and meal drives are just a few. Another idea would be for the students to pick the professors for the next semester classes. That way students would feel they are taking a part in their education. These are the ideas I have been hearing all day.

Mynul's comments after hearing presentation and discussion at the conference
To make our honors club more active, I think we need to give honors club more power so that people in honors club can make important decisions. We can follow the example from Drake University where honors club people design their own class. Besides this we can also select our professor for any particular class. Honors class can bring intellectual people on campus that way people can be inspired.

David's comments on car question #1: Vital honors student organizations: many paths on one campus

I've underlined key ideas.

The conference included so much interesting student work that we went to papers that were not about "car questions" at all. And yet the three of us managed to double up on two presentations on student groups, one by Drake and one by SDSU. The latter had active floor discussion afterwards. In both cases the student organizations they described were complicated, and were tied in complex ways to their related honors program's operations. Not everything they do would work for us.

One discussion did lead me to rethink our problem in several ways. First, one faculty member pointed out that (1) pressures on students have evolved. She pointed out how many students work and are under extras pressure from classes and activities. Thus, low participation in an honors club may not be a sign of poor identification with the program or its student body.

Second, another director opined that (2) there can be lots of ways of connecting with an honors program besides coming to club meetings and activities or taking part in governance. So maybe we should take a "many roads" approach to revitalizing student involvement.

(To my mind this is one of the chief benefits of coming to these conferences: talking through ideas really does change my perspective and thus has a substantive bearing on what I end up recommending back on our campus.)

Finally, I have been assuming that the key to revitalizing our club is to give the students once more (3) the sense of ownership and control that previous generations of SCSU Honors students have had. At regional meetings, our program used to be a model to other programs of what is possible in student governance of honors. Honors students from other campuses simply could not believe how strongly SCSU students shaped our Honors Program. For example, at most schools students have nothing to do with admitting other students.

And I think that's right, that we do need to restore ownership. But I have been overlooking another important factor, namely (4) the effect of passing along leadership from one generation of students to the next. Part of this is peer modeling, and I don't mean fashions. In programs that are currently "live," that is a big factor: returning students say to new students, "This program is ours, and we want it to be yours as well." According to the SDSU honors students, one benefit is that you get an amazing, creative diversity of ideas for honors events from first year students.

And so it used to be in our program: y'all passed the torch to the newbies immediately upon their arrival, starting with handwritten invitations to midsummer and fall picnics. I think we can start that spirit going right now, starting with the current officers and currently active members. (If it should involve a picnic, honors students from other programs who presented today warned the rest of us not to pile it right on top of other fall events, like our Mainstreet.)

Back to (3) student ownership.

Here are some ways that program ownership is exerted at other schools by students. Not all involve coming to honors club meetings. Some of these are things we have done or still do; others not. Some would work for us and some not. By combining some mix of these, we could create many roads to owning honors.

(a) I'll start with our own program's historical strengths. I'm finally convening the faculty and student advisory groups, who I will ask to address the very issues in these conference notes. (Some other schools have advisory groups, too.) And in the fall we can start up an Honors student admissions advisory group. Beverly had continued this from past years, but I didn't jump on it last fall, I'm afraid. And it's a bit late for it this year. Sigh. We'll get there. Same with students helping recruit students. We did some of that this year, but not enough. You'll hear from me in the fall as Admissions begins setting up high school visits.

(b) Continuing with our program's historical strengths, we need to restart the practice of student evaluation of Honors classes. But I'm not sure how. I'll bet you know some of the pitfalls of evaluations. And I was never too impressed with their effectiveness. And yet, when they're well done they can be a valid and effective channel for student influence on the program. And I think we need them, in some form.

(c) But at some schools, like Drake, the emphasis is, rather, on student recruitment of Honors classes from favored instructors. I swear, you students have the power to melt a teacher's heart by saying that s/he should consider teaching in Honors. You could think of it as anticipatoryvaluation of the subject matter and instructor rather than retrospectiveevaluation of the course offering.

But once again, we used to try this and in past years it never worked well. Students would write out eighteen bojillion (that's a gillion squared) ideas for classes and instructors and...well, what do you do with eighteen bojillion miscellaneous suggestions? You ignore them all, right? That's exactly what we did.

Well, at Drake, the honors students make recruitment of targeted instructors and subject matters a concerted group effort. And we could do that. I'm not quite clear how their system works. Maybe it's not a system. Anyway, we could listen to all our students' ideas, and a small student committee could decide on a few instructors to approach in a given year and encourage new course ideas. (And of course anyone can goad hoc to a good teacher and try to recruit him or her to Honors. There's no law that says you have to wait for a committee to act.)

A pitfall: In discussion I've sometimes heard one student's favorite idea for a course get hyped as "the group's idea." It'll be important to keep the process open-ended for faculty uptake, and keep pooling student input as faculty recruitment develops.

(d) At some other schools, students arrange elaborate speaker series, with their honors program office doing the legwork. In one case they outcompete their own campus's version of our UPB. When speakers come to campus for a campus-wide audience, Honors students can read (let's say) a book by the person and have lunch with the author. Some students question whether people would come to hear such speakers, whether added intellectual events aren't just one more burden on people's time (a sad thought), and whether we shouldn't just let UPB keep doing what they do so well. On the other hand, maybe our Honors Club could do more to promote intellectual life outside classes. And maybe we could cooperate with UPB in some fashion to provide a special experience for Honors students when a speaker or performer is on campus.

(e) On some campuses (ISU, SDSU), Honors students must attend a first-semester class orienting them to their honors program, their campus, and their town. (At Ball State in Ohio, it's a summer retreat for a couple weeks.) This can involve some advising and some focusing on one's college education: for example, one student reported that in her convocation class she mapped out her four years' classes as best she could at the time. Some administrators at SCSU would like to get something like that going here, perhaps in the setting of the dorm floors for Honors and other groups of first year students. And I have started to look into a one-day-early move-in for Honors students in fall 2004 followed by a one-day Honors convocation and orientation before classes begin, the day before Mainstreet. (Note to myself: allow for varying Sabbath observances.)

What's really striking about the ISU and SDSU Honors semester-long convocations is that students teach them, supervised by faculty! (The student teachers earn credit.) These 1-and-2-credit classes can have substantive academic and orientation content. That seems to me to be a really good way for students both to exert creative ownership and to welcome in the next group. And advice about campus life can make more sense if it comes from student to student.

(f) Study groups. This isn't a club event, but it can pull people together in a way that reinforces our basic reason for being here at school. intellectual friendships are often founded in study groups. Our Honors Club could sponsor these. So could the Honors Program, on your advice.

(g) Service projects. In recent years our Honors Women's College (HWC) arose out of some dissatisfaction over what was then a cliquish group of Honors Club officers, and a desire to exert genuine student leadership. The HWC really took the lead in meaningful service projects. The newly revived HWC does not intend to compete with Honors Club, but supplement it with a different focus. And at the same time, the Honors Club has forged a new link with, uh, with Volunteer Link. (How on earth did I get tangled in that last sentence?)

(h) With all these in mind, and others the reader might supply, we need to ask current students and next year's first year students what kind of student involvement they want to have. That's no doubt the first step towards genuine ownership.

And so maybe the first thing is to poll our students as to what kind of Honors Club they want.