Time Honored
First introduced in 1922, honors programs are on the rise, especially at public universities where overcrowding has hurt undergraduate teaching.

THEMATIC OPTION, UNIQUE AS IT SEEMS, is part of a growing trend in higher education. About 1,000 American colleges and universities boast an honors program, according to Joan Digby, author of Peterson’s Honors Programs guide
and past president of the National Collegiate Honors Council.
In America, the concept is believed to have originated at Swarthmore College, where a system modeled on Oxford’s “pass-honors” approach first surfaced in 1922. Hallmarks of early programs were close student-faculty contact, academic rigor and independent learning. Other aspects emerged over time: emphasis on experiential “city-as-text” learning, training in writing and Western culture, opportunities for undergraduate research. Not to be confused with departmental honors (which rewards excellence within a narrow discipline), college honors celebrates intellectualism as a lifelong pursuit, with “interdisciplinary” as its watchword.
The movement continues to gain momentum. “Every university that’s successful with honors is putting it up front, using it to show off some dimension of its intellectual strength,” says Digby.
That’s particularly evident in public universities, where such programs are seen as a hedge against overcrowding. At big state schools, honors programs work as safe-havens where driven undergrads can get the perks and personal attention they deserve. This fall, City University of New York will unveil a program that comes with full-tuition scholarships and stipends; a laptop computer; academic expense accounts to cover study abroad; internships and mentoring; and passes to the Big Apple’s concert halls, theaters, museums and galleries.
The honors movement isn’t confined to overcrowded public universities. It’s making inroads at vocational-technical schools like Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and two-year institutions like Chicago’s Wilbur Wright College, where English professor Bruce Gans in 1997 started a “great books” program that now serves some 800 mostly inner-city students. Weary of reading freshman compositions on abortion and handguns, Gans decided to raise the bar. These days, his students turn in papers on political correctness in ancient Athens and social codes in Beowulf.
The newest trend, according to Digby, is for honors programs to grow into full-fledged honors colleges – balmy liberal arts islands sheltered from the boisterous seas of undergraduate life. Four years ago, UMass Amherst launched Commonwealth College, a freestanding honors college with separate housing, its own administration and a 69-page schedule of courses, each limited to 25 students. The college currently enrolls 2,000 students.
Such liberal arts sanctuaries have come under fire lately, notably in a Chronicle of Higher Education article last October, titled “End the Mediocrity of Our Public Universities.” While publics “brag in their literature about their Mercedes-like honors units, the courses that they provide regular students sound like broken-down buses,” charges Murray Sperber, an English professor at Indiana University. His scorn doesn’t extend to private institutions, which account for about half of all honors programs and, says Digby, are springing up even in seminaries and selective liberal arts schools (one still flourishes at pioneering Swarthmore).
Critics like Sperber aren’t attacking the honors concept. Quite the contrary, they want all undergraduate education to be as fine as what honors students receive.
“Can general undergraduate education actually become one large honors program?” asks Sperber. “It’s less utopian than it appears.” All it will take, he claims, is slimming down undergraduate class sizes, stressing teaching in faculty promotions, and abolishing the lecture course system. A tall order for most publics.
But at USC, this process is already underway. For years Thematic Option has served as an incubator where fresh ideas for undergraduate teaching get beta-tested, then integrated into the general college experience. Look for more innovations in years to come.

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