Again the question occurs: If this applications phenomenon actually exists (it has never been proven), how does it help regular students? If a high school senior in New England sees that UMass has gone up in, say, U.S.News’s rankings, and she enrolls at the school but is not accepted into the honors program, how has she advanced her educational opportunities? In fact, is this not another Admissions Office scam, an academic bait and switch? Of course, she could tire of the large lecture classes and distant faculty, and embrace the facet of the school nicknamed “ZooMass,” the large party scene, much of it revolving around the school’s intercollegiate athletics program.
The administrators at this university claim that the “ZooMass” image is unfair, and that Commonwealth College will soon obliterate it. Yet, they proudly told USA Today that after the basketball team’s success in the NCAA men’s tourney in the early and mid 1990s, “out-of-state applications increased 50 percent”; they also tried to smile their way through a major scandal involving the abysmal GPAs of many players on those NCAA tourney teams. Then the school newspaper, after a snowball pelting by UMass students of nearby Amherst College caused $10,000 in damage, admitted, “How can we change the University’s ZooMass reputation … when we re-enact scenes straight out of Animal House?” Also there were the “Right to Party” demonstrations when the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education banned alcohol at all public colleges and universities in the state. “Save our beer,” UMass students chanted at their rally.
UMass remains a beer-and-circus school, and, appropriately, Insider’s Guide 2000 quotes its students as proclaiming that “the most popular beverage on campus [is] Busch Lite.” Predictably, many UMass faculty members prefer to teach in Commonwealth College than in the general undergraduate education units. And this school, like many others promoting honors programs, rewards them for this work. Because Big-time U’s generally advance professors for research, not teaching, this seems contradictory, but, always pursuing ever elusive “prestige,” these schools are willing to compensate faculty for working with honors students. For this reason and some less tangible ones, many professors eagerly migrate to honors programs and colleges.
The heart of the [Temple University honors] program is a set of courses open only to honors students and typically taught by specially selected, full-time faculty members, many of whom have won the Temple University Great Teacher Award. The program features small classes of about 20 students and encourages a lively, seminar-style classroom atmosphere.
—Temple University’s honors program official description
This university, as well as most others, accompanies the honors program written material with photos of famous professors sitting at seminar tables with small groups of lively and engaged undergraduates. National magazines like U.S. News also feature these shots in their annual issues. Indeed, these icons of great teaching and learning—along with the photos of professors and attentive students on grassy knolls—also appear in the Admissions Office material for regular, nonhonors students, prompting the Boyer Commission to complain about “an advertising practice that [universities] would condemn in the commercial world”: in reality, multitudes of “students graduate without ever seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research.” Regular Temple students discover this when they try to enroll in a seminar with a Great Teacher Award winner. Finally, Temple’s honors program does not change this school’s top-ten rating for “Least happy students” in Princeton Review or help its legions of undergraduates.
Not only do many universities like Temple divert internal funds into special honors programs, but they also try to generate outside grant money for them. A campus of the University of Wisconsin received a large foundation grant to fund three visiting professors a year “to teach exclusively in the [honors] program for three year terms.” In addition, according to the school’s honors material, some of its “best teachers and scholars teach regularly in the program, offering undergraduates the opportunity to work with faculty members often available only to graduate students.” Obviously, the missing words in this sentence are “a few” as in: “offering a few undergraduates the opportunity … .” Like other public universities, the tuition dollars of regular undergraduates provide this school’s main source of revenue, but, as increasingly occurs in higher education, these students are neglected for the honors program few.
Honors students are easy. They’re motivated, inventive. They never complain about homework, extra reading, or deadlines. They are better read than most and want to read more. We have spirited discussions in these groups because the students themselves are so good and so eager.
—Richard Moll, higher education expert, quoting an unnamed
honors program director
Honors students embody one of the oldest university traditions: the academically talented students who become the intellectual children of the professoriate and, subsequently, the future faculty. Unlike regular undergraduates who enter required lecture courses as a conscripted army—unhappy, frequently shuffling their feet, closing their notebooks with ten minutes to go in the lecture, sometimes leaving before the professor finishes speaking—honors students volunteer for their classes (usually seminars) and listen carefully to the faculty member, then eagerly ask and answer questions. According to a longtime honors instructor, “They are a joy to teach, especially after wrestling with and being thrown out of the ring by average students, never mind when in lectures they look like they want to hit you with their chairs.”
A high school senior on a college visiting tour, after sitting in on an honors class at a Big-time U, said, “They spent the hour on the professor’s specialty. The kids had done all the required reading and even the supplementary stuff. They asked the professor constant questions, interrupted him, argued all the time with him and each other. It must be so hard for profs to teach them.” The interviewer replied, “No, it’s like teaching graduate students. Most faculty members could roll out of bed at 3 A.M. and do it. But try teaching regular undergraduates who haven’t done the reading and won’t say a thing. Now that’s hard teaching, straight uphill.” Regular undergraduates can also crush faculty egos, whereas honors students flatter the professorial psyche and give faculty the illusion of being great teachers (some educators term honors students “pre-learners,” in other words, they master most things on their own, with no need of formal instruction).
In addition, traditional academic snobbery enters the faculty/honors student equation. A typical professorial pronouncement on regular undergrads versus honors students came from a faculty member commenting on the cheating issue: “I’m not here to prevent [ordinary] students from cheating. I’m here to help the genuine learners catch fire. Spending my time listening to appeals or [making] accusations of cheating is not my idea of spending it well.” Possibly if faculty members did not have to deal with hundreds of students in huge lecture classes, they might help regular undergraduates “catch fire” too; blaming and dismissing them solves nothing.
Not only do Big-time U’s monetarily reward professors for doing honors courses, but many faculty members gain other professional benefits. The University of Maryland honors program brags that “most of the faculty [in it] are teaching courses they created just for honors students—courses they are especially eager to teach.” Often faculty are keen because they are mutating their research into the topic of the honors seminar, and gaining valuable research time—as they do in graduate courses—by focusing their energy in this way. In addition, faculty members regularly turn their honors undergraduates into free research assistants.
Honors programs boast that their students have frequent opportunities to work directly with professors, and often they accompany their lists of “research projects and internships” with photos of undergraduates in labs examining test tubes with their instructors. At their best these research exercises engage and train future faculty members. However, as with all aspects of Big-time U’s, the reality behind the glossy photos of
profs and students sharing a lab beaker is often different. One honors program professor admitted, “A lot of this directed research thing is a sham. I have my honors students doing scut work for me for free, but they don’t seem to mind, and it definitely lowers my research costs.”
Because Big-time U’s promote their honors programs, some schools fund the student assistantships and internships, and faculty quickly glom onto these dollars. An English professor remarked, “My honors kids get minimum wage and I have them digging into databases for references for my projects and grant applications. It’s great for me and saves me research costs. I’m not sure what they learn from it, other than the fact that lots of research is totally boring and tedious but has to be done.”
Commonwealth College at UMass also boasts of its honors research opportunities, and how it “provides assistance to students in identifying faculty members with whom they can form mentoring relationships.” Not only does this fulfill many professors’ need to have academic children, but, for some, it also salves their consciences. Demographically, a sizable percentage of faculty members at research universities did not attend Big-time U’s as undergraduates; instead, they went to small schools like the ones clustered near UMass—Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith—and they received excellent educations and faculty mentoring. This seminal experience often propelled them into academia, and, as professors, they wish to reproduce it for their students—except they work at Big-time U’s and mainly encounter undergraduates by the hundreds in lecture classes. These faculty members go along with the research university system but sometimes their consciences bother them—hence their fondness for honors programs and their work there.
In honors program brochures, usually written by the faculty director, a constant theme is: “The program means the opportunity [for faculty] to teach bright students in inventive, interdisciplinary, and small-class settings, and advanced or intensive classes devoted to particular disciplines” (Indiana University). These professors are often among the best teachers at their schools because, from their undergraduate experiences, they have a sense of what excellent teaching/learning entails. However, this prompts the recurring question: How does this situation help regular students at Big-time U’s? It doesn’t; indeed, it drains many of the best teachers away from regular undergraduate classrooms, impoverishing them even more than they need be.
When honors program brochures discuss the perks that students receive when entering their lifeboats, they provide a clear view of some of the other difficulties that regular undergraduates encounter at the same universities:
Clemson University
Calhoun College, Honors Program ...
Some of the advantages of membership in Calhoun College are priority class scheduling and registration, the option of honors housing, extended library loan privileges, and special lectures and cultural events.
—Clemson University’s honors program official description
In an era when regular students at many universities, including Clemson, have difficulties obtaining places in courses, and, due to closed class sections and red tape, some undergraduates have to postpone graduation because they cannot complete all of their course requirements, Big-time U’s give honors students “priority … scheduling and registration,” allowing them to sign up for classes before opening registration to regular undergraduates (intercollegiate athletes also receive this privilege, see Chapter 20). Gaining entrance to lecture courses is rarely a problem, but sometimes honors students snap up spaces in smaller upper division courses, preventing regular undergraduates from taking these required classes in their major field.
Honors housing is also a desirable perk. At Clemson, honors students can live in “Holmes Hall, a converted hotel of four-person suites, complete with a kitchenette, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.” Not only are the physical accommodations in honors facilities at Clemson and most other schools usually better than the ordinary dorms, but living conditions—particularly the low noise level—make honors residence halls much more pleasant than the often zoolike regular dorms. Even universities that do not provide separate residences for their honors students always have “centers or lounges where students gather together for informal conversations, luncheons, discussions,” and so on (Peterson’s Honors Programs).
Another major perk for honors students, particularly valuable at huge campuses, are faculty advisors. Instead of receiving the fast shuffle from the lowly paid staff advisors given to regular undergraduates, honors students discuss their class schedules with faculty members who steer them into the best courses available, and who also know the system and its loopholes. In an interview at the University of Texas, Austin, an honors student commented:
I have many privileges here which make my undergraduate education particularly strong. But I hear awful stories from my high school friends who came with me to UT (nonhonors students) about poor advising, about being signed up for the wrong courses, and about wasting whole semesters and years not fulfilling graduation requirements. It sounds grim, and I’m thankful that I have a great faculty advisor.
At some schools, regular undergraduates resent the perks of the honors students. The University of Iowa has an elaborate wall-to-wall four-year honors track called the Unified Program, with all the standard perks, whereas regular undergrads at this school encounter the usual Big Ten treatment, including large lecture classes, “which can have as many as 800 students.” In 1999, Insider’s Guide wrote that for regular Iowa students, “the most unpopular administration regulation” concerned “some of the selective programs like the Unified Program. They tend to siphon off the best students from mainstream college life.”
In interviews at this school, nonhonors undergraduates complained about the large lecture classes—a number of interviewees said that they had attended small Iowa high schools and “were completely lost” in the immense freshmen UI courses, and some honors students from similar backgrounds admitted that they felt “very lucky” to be in Unified Program seminars. However, both groups mentioned their affection for Iowa’s college sports teams, including the women’s basketball squad, and their participation in the lively on—and off—campus party scene. A number of honors students from the Chicago area said that they chose Iowa over more academically prestigious institutions because of the “Unified Program and Big Ten sports.” These comments underline the fact that although Big-time U’s continue the traditional separation between academically talented students and other undergraduates, the walls between these subcultures are more permeable than ever before.
A University of Maryland honors student articulated this when she explained that in her honors dorm: “You’re living and learning together”; however, we also “like to have fun and party. But we know when it’s time to hit the books,” unlike many collegiate students at Maryland and other schools. In fact, because many honors undergrads fear being called “dorks” and “nerds” by regular students, most universities with separate honors housing make living there optional for participants in the program.
In terms of the University of Iowa’s situation, UI trails behind the honors colleges, intercollegiate athletic teams, and party scenes of a number of other Big Ten institutions. Indeed, this conference features a school with one of the strongest honors programs in America, top football and men’s basketball teams, and a consistently high ranking on “Party school” lists. Bring on the Spartans.
The Honors College at Michigan State University …
—Exempts its members from the standard curricular requirements and … [allows them to] bypass prerequisite and limited enrollment stipulations [in undergraduate courses]; and also enroll in graduate courses …
—Features faculty advisors in the majors …
—Promotes early access to research opportunities …
—Makes available, but optional, honors housing in four different residence halls.
—Michigan State’s self-description in
The College Guide for Ac
ademically Talented Students
The most interesting aspect of this statement about MSU’s honors program is where it appeared and what it did not say. The College Guide is an advertising booklet sent to high school students who score in the upper range of the PSAT, SAT, and ACT exams. The publication features self-descriptions by universities and colleges that stress undergraduate education—Rice, Emory, Washington of St. Louis, Kenyon, etc.—as well as ads for some Big-time U’s and small Division III colleges. The fascinating element in Michigan State’s entry is the fact that the school focuses entirely on its honors program—it never mentions regular undergraduate education at MSU except by negative implication, e.g., it “exempts” honors students from “standard curricular requirements,” etc. A naive reader of The College Guide might think that the MSU Honors College is the only educational establishment in East Lansing, Michigan, surrounded by cherry orchards, with the state capitol in the distance.
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