Taking stock
Walton gift and honors education
Twenty years ago, the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation made a $300 million commitment to the University of Arkansas.
A portion of this historic gift was used to establish the Honors College, with an eye toward stopping the “brain drain” of ambitious students leaving the state to attend college. The goal was to create a competitive educational option right here in Arkansas, and this year, as we celebrate our 20th birthday, I can confirm that we’ve done that and more. But there’s work to be done to expand the idea of “honors education” from its elite origin to a powerful tool to uplift our state.
As dean of the University of Arkansas Honors College and a historian by trade, I have studied the historical processes creating honors education across the nation.
Our neighbor to the south, UT-Austin, is home to one of the earliest public liberal-arts-centered honors programs, Plan II (1935). Here at the University of Arkansas, students began graduating with honors in the mid-1930s, with the first program formalized in 1954, following a post-World War II wave of universities that added honors programs to their colleges of arts and sciences.
Sitting comfortably at the center of a liberal arts education in the 1950s, honors programs drew their political capital from the canon of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and literature, underscoring the unique heritage of the “West.” In so doing, the American curriculum took up arms to battle the Eastern Bloc and its renunciation of “enlightened” Western principles. Honors as Cold War crusader continues to inhabit the legacy of colleges like ours. Is it the case that the traditional “great-books” pedagogy still serves a new generation possessing diverse perspectives on culture and society? The answer is yes … and no. Thanks to that generous gift from the Walton family in 2002, we were able to extend honors to every academic unit on campus, in majors from agricultural economics to supply-chain management. Today, honors course offerings range from gene editing to studying medieval manuscripts.
Recently, I visited with a reporter from U.S. News & World Report on the question of why ambitious high school seniors should choose a public honors college over a small, liberal arts college. I was surprised how quickly the response came to me: Because our honors scholars can take a seminar on Dante with a well-published scholar of Italian and then turn around and sign up for a lively forum on blockchain taught by a professor who connects them with national leaders in the field.
And I believe strongly that this is indeed the case here at the University of Arkansas.
Our honors scholars give me great hope for the future of the United States. They are civic-minded and politically engaged. Even entrepreneurial. They take intellectual risks like combining philosophy with biological engineering or finance with religious studies. Our students’ vision of society is open and full of potential. Social justice is what they demand, as well as environmental advocacy. They deserve an honors education every bit as adventurous as they are.
Beyond the defining feature of having the smarts to pursue honors, this group draws students from varied geographic, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Far from being an elite club, we use our resources to put higher education within reach of students who otherwise couldn’t afford it. We’re also able to award more than $1 million in grants each year to support study abroad, research and internships, creating life-changing experiences for bright students.
But we have more work to do to ensure that our honors students are as diverse as the population here in Arkansas.
We’ve worked to ensure our college is more diverse with our Honors College Path Program, established in 2014 to recruit and mentor exceptional students from underrepresented populations. Thanks to nearly $2 million in grant funding and generous support from private donors, we’re now able to provide scholarships to our Path students, and they are running with the opportunities we provide. We also mentor students who are the first in their families to attend college and continue to raise money to provide scholarships for students from all areas of the state.
We also need to rethink the honors curriculum of the 21st century to dispel those vestiges of the Cold War era from our classrooms while deploying ethical gems from the classical past. We need to give space to honors scholars to forge their own paths to graduation, whether they take that journey through an impressive thesis based on original research, international education and internships, or civic engagement and service learning.
Our hope is to diversify the capstone experience of our students, tailoring it to their career goals and their academic interests rather than an imagined ideal curriculum of the past.