FALL 2008 / Volume 8 - Issue 1
Honors College students receive carnations during the annual Honors College brunch.
Photo by Gary Harwood, '83
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Lisa Schnellinger, ’80, and the Pajhwok Afghan News staff in Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of Lisa Schnellinger
ounded in 1933, Kent State’s honors program is a venerable elder in the national honors tradition. The first student graduated with individual honors in 1934, when Kent, the university, was just beginning to emerge from Kent, the Normal School. A universitywide honors program, with more formal admissions standards and expectations of its students, began in 1960. And in 1965, the honors program became one of the earliest honors colleges in the country.
In all those 75 years, this may be the first multiple choice test administered in an honors context. But it doesn’t take an essay to analyze or predict what honors people will do in response to certain stimuli. Here’s a quick scan to test your honors aptitude.
You are 18 years old. Everyone thinks you have potential, but your high school grades weren’t great. (You were too bored with your homework to finish it.) On your first day of freshman English at Kent State, the professor begins writing on the board in what seems to be Hebrew. After a few minutes, he turns to the class and says, “Would any of you like to comment on this?” What do you do?
Run for the door. It’s either the wrong class, or the guy is nuts. And what does that have to do with your computer science major anyway?
Sit still and hear the call of a million things you don’t know, from the mouth of a person who can teach you.
Jim Rohrer, ’82, did stay in Dr. Lew Fried’s freshman colloquium, though there were times he knew he was in over his head. He says by the end of the first semester, “Whatever bar Lew set, I was determined to reach it.” Because of that class and that teacher, Rohrer is now a college professor himself, with an outsider’s perspective on honors at Kent State.
“College is purely utilitarian to so many people,” he acknowledges, “but honors is not vocational. It’s about learning to think and analyze. You don’t know where it’s going to take you.
“Not every institution is willing to invest in creating space for that. In a state university, it requires an unusual amount of commitment to create something that is, by nature, not for the masses.”
Next question:
After college and a few years practicing your chosen profession, you realize that you’ve exhausted the possibilities of your culture, your job and your town (even though you already left Kent for a city on the West Coast known to be a mecca for cool people like you). It’s time to make a change. What do you do?
Stick to your career path. Seek a bigger salary or a more impressive title. At least move out of that tiny apartment and find a real house.
Make a new path. Take your skills to the people who need them, even it means you won’t be settling down for a long time.
Journalist Lisa Schnellinger, ’80, moved to Seattle a few years after graduation to work for the Post-Intelligencer. And then, she says, “I just ran out of things to do.
“I loved my Chinese history and language courses at Kent State, and the Post-Intelligencer had a relationship with China Daily. When they needed editors, I said, ‘I’m there.’”
During the next 16 years, she trained journalists in 18 countries, including Afghanistan and many other places where she didn’t speak the language, or the country was at war, or the people didn’t exactly trust Americans. “When those opportunities came up,” she says, “I just kept taking them. It was a way to bring together everything I loved — the highest ideals of journalism.
“The biggest thing the Honors College taught me was how to find smaller communities within the larger community. I get overwhelmed easily, but I’m really compelled to explore the world. You have to find ways to make yourself at home wherever you are.”
For extra credit:
You’ve earned a national reputation as an innovative manager, and you agree to lead a promising start-up organization. All is going well until, on a beautiful spring day two years into your tenure, an unthinkable tragedy threatens the future of the enterprise. What do you do?
Lock it down. Expect the worst, and divert all resources to prepare for it.
Open it up. Hope for the best, and design an organization that can create it.
Dr. Mike Lunine served as dean of the Honors College from 1968 to 1971, the years that bridged the wild expansion of the baby boom and the agonized contraction following the events surrounding May 4, 1970. The tower he helped to build on that bridge was tall enough to look forward, but it was not made of ivory.
“May 4 gave me a bit of a platform in the national honors community,” he says, “and I advocated dropping the emphasis on IQ in favor of HQ — humanity quotient. At Kent State, we tried to enlarge the notion of what a so-called honors student is. An honors program should enable people called ‘students’ and people called ‘professors’ to work together to confront very large questions. What would be a good society? How do war and race and poverty affect that? All people have the capability to think about these questions, and all people need to think about them.”
The honors response to those large questions, and even to the small questions posed here, is not always the easy or safe response. If there’s one thing that honors people have in common, it’s the ability to rise to a challenge, and perhaps to find a challenge when there’s none in the immediate vicinity.
Lunine saw the Honors College as a place where everyone involved could do a lot of “self-designing.” It’s a liberal concept, impractically interdisciplinary, possibly elitist and costly to maintain. But the 75 years of economic and social flux that provide context for Kent State’s honors experiment suggest that the well-designed self may be the most durable product of all.
“Honors,” Lunine still insists, “is about performance. What matters is not how you came in, but how you look when you come out.”
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