In considering the extent to which honors education should engage with political and social justice movements, the author argues that its programs must first reckon with their own histories and complicity within systems of domination and oppression before determining the best approach. This essay examines how the continued legacy of racialized…

Honors advocates and scholars should pursue transdisciplinary inquiry to overcome traditional notions of well-defined knowledge boundaries. This essay examines the publication record of the National Collegiate Honors Council beyond its immediate utilitarian value as a means for communication with its members. Citing usage and metrics, the author…

A recent study of honors curricula across the nation indicates that 75.6% of honors programs and colleges at four-year institutions have thesis or capstone requirements (Savage and Cognard-Black). In addition to institutions with thesis requirements, many more also have the option for students to complete theses. For example, an earlier study…

Although the development of digital competencies has become increasingly important in higher education, integrating digital literacies in the college classroom has occurred at a slow pace. Honors programs and colleges represent one area of the academy that typically values a more traditional approach to skill development while resisting…

Institutions of higher learning have been facing budget constrictions throughout the country, leading to consolidations and cutbacks. Administrators often have to make hard choices about what programs to eliminate or cut back, but one program that is not on the table at the University of North Georgia is the honors program. The university is…

Honors programs and colleges are sources of innovation and risk-taking, but they often maintain some roots in the origins of their home institutions. From its founding in 1913, when a small group of businessmen gathered to formally study business, to 2015 when that Evening School of Commerce had grown to a vibrant 32,000-student research…

Supporters of university honors programs argue that these programs benefit the university and entire student body while critics argue that honors programs reproduce socioeconomic and racial privileges. In an attempt to address these issues, researchers used quantitative survey data to compare the background characteristics, behaviors, and…

Fiscal responsibility matters at institutions of higher learning, especially when they are public and supported by taxpayers, but colleges are not businesses. The consequences of fiscal irresponsibility profoundly affect students, faculty, and staff, as well as teaching, research, and service activities. This essay gives a brief history of the…

In their essay "Nontraditional Honors," Janice Rye Kinghorn and Whitney Womack Smith state that students who are "twenty-five-years of age and older are usually considered nontraditional." However, they first acknowledge that "traditional" and "nontraditional" are "constructed and slippery terms."…

Since Jerry Herron begins his forum essay, "Notes toward an Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy," with his anecdotal True Genealogical Confessions, Jeffery Portnoy, writes here that he feels feel obligated to begin in a similar mode. One side of Portnoy's family was in the real estate business in St. Louis, and the other…