Value added.
Wilson, M. Roy
With more than a thousand honors programs or colleges in the United
States and that number growing every year, defining the value of honors
is a significant undertaking. Honors seems to have become an obligatory
upgrade that no college or university president can afford to be
without, but there is more than institutional trending to be considered,
or at least there should be, so the real issue is defining the value
that honors adds--for students, for faculty, for staff, and for the
larger community we serve When it comes to budgets and governing boards
and all the constituencies the university is responsible to, the way
that each of us determines the value added is going to be different Some
best practices are consistent across the whole range of colleges and
universities where honors education goes forward, but the real value
added is in how we apply those best practices to make the most of each
institution's distinctive character and strengths, and how we turn
good ideas into conscious practice.
Let's start with who we are. At Wayne State University we
pride ourselves on a history of academic excellence and opportunity that
reaches back almost 150 years. Wayne State is a comprehensive university
with more than 380 degree and certificate programs. We have
Michigan's most diverse student body, with an enrollment of more
than 27,000 in our thirteen schools and colleges, including more than
18,000 students in our undergraduate programs. We have 245,000 living
Warrior alumni. WSU is one of only 108 institutions in the United States
to receive the highest rating for research productivity from the
Carnegie Foundation (Research University/Very High Activity). Along with
Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, we are
partners in the University Research Corridor (URC), which is advancing
research, moving new technologies to the marketplace, helping create new
jobs, and giving a boost to the state's economy According to a
report released by Anderson Economic Group LLC, the URC contributed $16.
6 billion in 2012 to the state's economy--a 30% increase from the
first assessment in 2007 Wayne State is Michigan's only urban
research university, located in the heart of Midtown Detroit. We are
proud to be one of a limited number of institutions nationally to hold
the highest Carnegie classification for both research and community
engagement. Our vision is to become a preeminent public, urban research
university known for academic and research excellence, success across a
diverse student body, and meaningful engagement in its urban community.
Communicating to students the distinctive character of Wayne State
University and making our vision a reality to them is an important part
of our mission, not just during recruitment but all the way through
their baccalaureate experience. The Irvin D. Reid Honors College has an
important role to play in communicating this vision. Honors is a marquee
for the best WSU has to offer to undergraduates and a means of engaging
them, consciously, in the special opportunities that set this university
apart. In keeping with the university's vision, the honors college
is city-based and service-oriented, with an enrollment of more than
1,800 this past academic year. Honors students choose to major in any of
the 126 available options, which means that the college is not tied to
any particular academic discipline; instead, it represents the virtues
of a liberal education that reaches across departments, schools, and
colleges. For our students, the aim is to integrate the specialized--and
essential--knowledge of the disciplines into a broader understanding of
themselves, our community, and the world. With understanding comes
engagement. The honors experience at Wayne State is based on four
pillars--community, service, research, career--which define the
curricular and co-curricular elements of our program and also highlight
the distinctive strengths of this university, at the same time making
real the value-added, high-impact practices that define the very best of
undergraduate education.
Entering freshmen participate in a year-long course on the city and
citizenship, with a special emphasis on Detroit; they are part of a
learning community that foregrounds group work, interdisciplinary
research, and freshman seminars. The aim is to ensure that students
become active members of a community and that they also take full
advantage of the community where we live, with a Detroit Passport that
includes trips to cultural and entertainment venues that are integrated
into the first-year course. In the second year, students apply what they
do in the classroom to service-learning projects, facilitated by the
office for CommunityEngagement@Wayne, which is part of the honors
college. In year three, the emphasis is on research. The office of
Research@Honors provides workshops and advising to help students develop
independent research projects in order to take full advantage of the
resources provided by an RU/VH institution. In year four, students
undertake a capstone project, preparing their senior thesis, which is a
summing up of what they are capable of achieving, as they embark on
their careers. Whether students pursue a general university honors
curriculum or departmental honors, the goal of honors is the same: to
add value by challenging students to ask more of themselves and
providing the resources they need to succeed.
Faculty also become self-conscious partners in the value-added
project, in keeping with the mission of the honors college to be both a
marquee and also a workshop and laboratory for new ideas. High-impact
practices start in the two-semester course on the city and citizenship
that all entering students take, an interdisciplinary course sequence
that emphasizes problem-solving, group work, and active engagement with
our community The faculty who are seminar leaders in the first-year
course are recent PhDs starting out on their careers, and honors
provides them a good start in a setting where they work in teams with
senior WSU colleagues. If the kind of interdisciplinary, problem-based
thinking that informs the first-year curriculum is to define the future
of liberal education, which seems a real and welcome possibility, then
the value-added strategy of honors needs to extend beyond the first-year
course to members of the WSU faculty at large, so the honors college has
undertaken, through its Faculty Fellows Program, to award faculty
incentive grants that promote the use of high-impact, cutting-edge
pedagogy in the classroom These grants, which are being designed in
partnership with the WSU Office for Teaching & Learning, will build
on current junior/senior level-seminars with new courses designed to
integrate practices, enhance the learning process, and expose students
to the most current topics in a wide range of academic disciplines.
The four pillars of honors--community, service, research, and
career--are also central to the experience of staff, who benefit by
becoming members of a community of professionals. Staff serve in
multiple roles: they are advisers and teachers, they oversee learning
communities and co-curricular projects, they engage in service and
service learning through the WSU Office for Community Engagement, and
they are hands-on collaborators with each other and with students in the
whole range of activities that define our honors college programs. Staff
are encouraged to develop career paths in honors education in order to
take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by a research
institution such as ours: through professional training, by
participating at regional and national meetings, and through their own
research projects Currently, two staff members have made the honors
curriculum the subject of doctoral research projects--one on the
value-added impact of service learning and the second on best practices
in general education.
In keeping with our status as an RU/VH institution, the honors
college has undertaken an ongoing, longitudinal study of value-added
outcomes in honors. This emphasis on research finds a place in the
national conversation about honors education as the founding dean of our
college, Jerry Herron, assumes the presidency of the National Collegiate
Honors Council. Together with his colleagues, he is working to promote
the role of value-added research as the basis for a larger national
conversation about the importance of liberal education. "[T]he
world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and
order," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in "The American
Scholar," where he sets out what it means to become a scholar.
"[T]here is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites
and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench." Our
challenge, as scholars, is to puzzle out the design that animates
understanding and makes sense of all that we can know--now more than
ever.
Maybe it is best to think about honors not in terms of an end
result but as an ongoing conversation about value added and all the ways
that this institution and our students, faculty, and staff work to
achieve excellence to benefit our whole community. There is surely no
better place than this city and no better time than now to be having
this conversation This indispensably American place, Detroit, is
embarked on a comeback unprecedented in our history yet representative
of all we have accomplished as a people and all we have left to do if we
are to live up to our high ideals. The university is central to this
good work just as honors is central to the conversation about the range
of possibilities that define the best in higher education. From the
beginning, the mission of our honors college has been to showcase our
distinctive address so that students, parents, members of the larger
community, and we ourselves know what it means to be here: all that we
get to do and must do well because of who we are and where we are. There
is no finer work than this, especially when our students tell us that we
have succeeded. As a recent graduate, Erika Giroux (class of 2014)
kindly wrote, "In short, the Honors College expands education to
the best and fullest sense of the word: academic, social, cultural, and
interpersonal consciousness and understanding. This empathic potential
is why I chose Wayne State Honors, and I simply cannot imagine my life
any other way" We are proud of students like Erika, just as we are
proud she chose to come here for her education Such outstanding scholars
demonstrate the value that honors adds and how much that means--to all
of us.
M. Roy Wilson, President
Wayne State University
Honors Dean: Jerry Herron
President Wilson may be contacted at president@wayne.edu.
