Upcoming Honors Conferences

Honors conferences

There are two conferences each year that pertain to us. NCHC, the National Collegiate Honors Council, is a national association of Honors programs, with lots of experience advising and mutually supporting honors programs as they—we—struggle with our many unique problems and development opportunities. NCHC also runs a national semester program called Honors Semesters, kind of like study abroad except that it's at a university in the USA, where they use the "City As Text" pedagogy to give Honors students a wonderful experience around a changing theme. Now that we're on semesters, we should start participating in Honors Semesters (it's competitive). I'll look into the next few semester offerings. Maybe we can use some Honors scholarship money to cut costs, as we do for our Oxford program.

The next NCHC meeting is in Chicago, November 5-9, 2003 (Wednesday evening to Sunday morning). I think we should go to it, lots of us. I'll start promoting it now with Honors students on campus and this summer with our new freshmen orientation advisees.

The Upper Midwest Honors Council, UMHC, is a regional subdivision of NCHC that extends from the Dakotas to Michigan. The next few, as I learned at the business meeting today, will be:

• 2004: April 15-17 at NDSU in Fargo.
• 2005: March 31-April 2 at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
• 2006: St. Cloud State. Are you readayyyyyyyyy?
• 2007: Dickinson State University in Dickinson, ND. Way out west.

All those schools, and many more, are here at ISU, including some of our close neighbors in Minnesota.

When I was directing our program in the mid 1990s, I used to go alone to the national meeting in the fall, and take a big crew of students to the regional one. Students can present research, creative works, etc. at both the regional and the national. The regional tends to be more student-oriented and more informal, or personal. The national focuses much more on nuts and bolts—and visions—for faculty and directors. The national organization, NCHC, maintains lots of services such as consultants and a national database of programs. At this conference I learned that the national honors organization is now based here at ISU; it used to be based at Radford University in New York. The Iowa State honors director for almost thirty years, Liz Beck, whom I have always admired greatly for the way she constantly strengthens her program, is now the national executive secretary.