Are Honors Programs Elitist?: No, But Scholars Programs Can Be

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Occasionally the Provost's Forum has guest columns composed by an individual who reports to the Provost. The following thoughts were penned by Steven Dandaneau, Director of the Chancellor's Honors Program on the Knoxville campus.

As ironic as it sounds, there are no honors students at elite educational institutions, this, for the simple reason that such institutions—Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.—do not offer honors programs. If, however, a student’s ticket is punched for one of the nation’s highly selective and typically lavishly funded “scholars programs,” then their future may well entail supping educational bubbly from a catbird seat perched slightly above the crème de la crème.

The distinction between honors and scholars programs, although not fast, is an important one. Where they exist, honors programs usually serve 5% or 10% of undergraduates, large groups of students for whom they are the principal conduit for various educational enhancements and enrichments, such as a thesis option. While sizable when compared to scholars programs, honors programs are most often established at small and medium-size colleges and universities, particularly those, regardless of size, which serve the needs of students from lower- and middle-income families for whom social mobility is compelling interest.

Review of the 700-plus honors programs currently paying dues to the National Collegiate Honors Council belies the view that honors programs are elitist, a point which is perhaps best illustrated by the 2007 annual meeting of the Tennessee Collegiate Honors Council. This past February, the University of Tennessee was pleased to host honors students, faculty and administrators from Austin Peay, Cleveland State C. C., East Tennessee State, Fisk, Freed-Hardeman, Lee, Middle Tennessee State, Southwest Tennessee C.C., Tennessee State, Tennessee Tech, Tusculum, and the University of Memphis, fine institutions all, but none, including the host institution, with elitism in its mission statement. Far from constituting separatist enclaves, honors programs across Tennessee and, likewise, across the United States, serve the special needs of excellent students who have chosen, usually due to economic considerations, to matriculate at non-elite institutions of higher education, and it is typically the case that such institutions create honors programs, in large part, to recruit greater numbers of these academically exceptional students in the first place.

Scholars programs are another ball of wax. Here, the model is of an intimate and exclusive program, usually admitting 15-40 students annually. Scholars programs are created as a means to lure only the very topmost prospective students, often to the nation’s most elite institutions, there creating a class of elite students at elite institutions who, as a marker of their exalted status, receive every benefit and privilege imaginable, from the usual waiver of tuition, fees, and room-&-board, to guaranteed support for research and study abroad, common enhanced curricula and summer enrichment programs, cultural passes, computers, executive-level internships, library and housing privileges, books, stipends (i.e., pizza money), and, in some cases, even free campus parking! Construed to facilitate peer learning among and between its meticulously selected members, scholars programs are refined and inherently inward-looking.

Even though the best of them enjoy endowments that exceed many entire colleges and universities, elite scholars programs often fly under the public’s radar screen. While just plain folks might be aware that regional University X or the local Y Tech offers an honors program, or land-grant leaders like Michigan State and Penn State and more than 20 additional AAU-member research universities, including the Universities of Michigan, Maryland, and Minnesota, feature huge and successful honors colleges and programs, even seasoned higher education professionals are likely to baulk when asked to identify the nation’s leading scholars programs.

To concretize the honors/scholars distinction as much as to take a stab at naming names, then, I would contend that any reasonable observer would identify the University of Virgina’s Jefferson Scholars and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Morehead-Cain Scholars Programs as the nation’s leading scholars programs. Both are supported by massive endowments, with the Jefferson Scholars Foundation currently seeking to add $100 million to its existing $130 million endowment, and the Morehead-Cain endowment, fresh from an infusion of $100 million earlier this year, already exceeding $200 million. The only honors program that can match these resources is the University of Arkansas’s Honors College, which received $200 million from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation in 2003 but which uses these funds to support over 1,800 students at its Fayetteville campus. In contrast, Jefferson and Morehead-Cain annually select 33 and 75-85 students respectively.

Morehead-Cain and Jefferson also recruit the topmost students in the United States and from abroad to institutions which are, by any usual measure or ranking, already among the most highly respected; both also graduate an extraordinary number of nationally and internationally competitive scholarship recipients. For example, 23 of the University of North Carolina’s last 26 Rhodes Scholars have been Morehead Scholars. But Morehead-Cain and Jefferson are not the only notable scholars programs. Others include privates like Boston College’s Presidential, Georgetown University’s John Carroll, and Columbia University’s Kluge Scholars Programs, while leading publics include the University of Florida’s Lombardi Scholars, the University of Georgia’s Foundation Fellows, and Indiana University’s Wells Scholars Programs.

This is not to say, however, that honors programs at LeMoyne or Laredo Community College or, for that matter, at Syracuse or Texas A&M, are the epitome of Jacksonian democracy whereas scholars programs are collegiate Robber Barons. Both types of programs can serve a legitimate purpose and, more often than not, both contribute significantly to the academic quality and prestige of their institutions.

Who, after all, would deny a community college or an up-and-coming state university a means to recruit and then meet the educational needs of exceptionally talented and motivated students? By the same token, who would deny behemoths like Arizona State or The Ohio State University the right to experiment with the beneficent economies of scale that often attend to honors colleges on the nation’s most populous campuses? And who would contest that everyone affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, Kansas State University, or CUNY, not just a handful of honors students, are significantly better off as a result of the numerous prestigious post-baccalaureate scholarships that honors students at these institutions have received in recent years?

Charges of elitism, even when muffled, appear to me to be wholly misplaced. More often than not, honors programs and the opportunities they provide help the non-elite student attending non-elite institutions receive the same benefits and opportunities offered as a matter of course to students at pricy and very often self-consciously elite institutions, while honors-supported success stories at even relatively plebian institutions inspire and motivate well beyond the narrow confines of an honors college or program.

But do the nation’s well-heeled scholars programs serve equally noble purposes? The answer is that they can and, no doubt, often do. Intimate, peer-learning intensive programs serve exceptionally gifted students for whom the 500-student physics lecture would be a fate worse than a standard watered-down sociology textbook. Without scholars programs, students of truly exceptional ability are unlikely to realize their full potential. This is problematic in any case but magnified when the potential in question so often borders upon, or is in up to its neck in, highly valued and intricate forms of intelligence, artistry and leadership. It is also only fair to note that the nation’s premiere scholars programs almost always require students to work cooperatively and for larger and higher ends. The most thoughtfully planned among them promote service and develop community as they eschew any sort of revelry in their own elite status. The hope is to cultivate character and social commitment in place of self-consciousness of entitlement and privilege. Elite is not necessarily tantamount to elitist.

Charges of elitism are thus probably beside the point: honors and scholars programs are here to stay. The work needed is to better integrate them, that is, each type of program in its respective way, with over-arching college and university goals, to better anchor them in the basic animating values of American higher education, and to better understand their potential to contribute to improved undergraduate education for all.

17 August 2007