FALL 2008 / Volume 8 - Issue 1
Honors students, faculty and deans celebrate potential — in themselves and in others
BY BARBARA GERWIN YEAGER, ’83, MLS ’86
Honors students turn in to honors people thanks, in large part, to the example set for them by the Honors College staff and honors faculty. Many long careers have wound their way
through the 75-year history of the Kent State honors program, and many veterans are still seeking challenges when they might be resting on their laurels.
You’re a working mom, balancing a career you love and a family full of kids who all made traveling sports teams. You realize that you need to update some job skills, but there’s only one way to do that. You’re going to have to go back to school and you know what that means: homework. What do you do?
Just say no. There will time for that when the kids are grown. Your boss isn’t requiring it, and you can do the job without it.
Take the course — and not just any course. Take one you know will be really hard, because it will also be the best way to get the experience you need.
When Deborah Craig began working at the Honors College in the late 1970s, she was a graduate student and went on to complete a doctorate. But 20 years into her career as an honors advisor, she began to feel a bit distanced from the hundreds of students she works with each year. To refresh her undergraduate perspective, she signed up for a class well outside her comfort zone — honors Earth Dynamics.
“And then,” she says, “I hit the wall. Honors students can be demanding, and I found out why. I was really motivated to do my best in that class, and I really needed help from the professor to diagnose and solve the problems I was having with the material.”
In seeking that help, and in balancing home and work and homework, Craig tapped into a core tendency of honors people. “They have an inner drive to be successful, not just in their jobs, but in their lives,” she says. “That drive can be overwhelmed by all the demands students have on their time and energy, but we do everything we can to keep it alive.”
Next question:
You’re a tenured full professor with years of teaching experience, a distinguished list of publications and seniority over almost everyone in the department. Your work is nationally respected, and you’re basking in the many satisfactions of a long career. Whom would you rather teach?
Three graduate students from your own department.
Fifteen freshmen, none of whom plan to major in your discipline.
All of the above.
English professors Lew Fried and Mack Hassler will both be teaching Freshman Honors Colloquium in the fall of 2008, as they’ve done for many of the past 30 years. Such is the legacy of Dean Mel Feinberg, who established the year-long alternative to freshman English as a foundation of the Honors College at Kent State, and who insisted that it be rigorous.
Colloquium is also idiosyncratic — each section is based on the interests of the professor. Fried’s students will be immersed in great books (and perhaps a little Hebrew), while Hassler’s will be studying science fiction. “Like graduate courses and senior seminars, it’s the type of class that helps you explore your own work and literary directions,” says Hassler. “Other courses don’t have as much opportunity for personal intellectual development.”
Fried recalls that in the early days of colloquium, “a lot of us were exhilarated by the opportunity to develop a year-long freshman course.” His colleague Hassler admits, “I’m still excited by that opportunity!”
For extra credit:
Perhaps, like Hassler and Fried, you’re a tenured professor with an equally distinguished reputation, and you get a call from the university provost offering you an administrative position. You’ll have the pleasure of serving on 20 committees, managing a budget that is stretched to the limit and supervising a skeleton crew. It’s hard to imagine you’ll have time to do the work you really love.
Just say no (respectfully). You’re a teacher, not an administrator. You can do more good in the classroom than on the dean’s council.
Think of the challenges — so many new things to try, so many great people to work with. Maybe you could take the job … just for a few years.
Larry Andrews struggled with the decision, but in the end he took the job as Honors College dean in the early ’90s and stayed for 14 years. During his tenure, a university accreditation study identified the Honors College as one of Kent State’s particular “jewels.” But the term suggests something a bit more polished than the honors experience is — or should be. In practice, says Andrews, an honors program needs to accommodate not just the “good student,” but the “original character.” Good teaching includes willingness to take risks and a “work in progress” mentality. Good leadership needs a sense of play. He advised other administrators in a commentary for the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, “This is a critically important message you can exemplify as well as address explicitly with honors students. Show them that taking risks can be exhilarating, and engage them in ‘what-if?’ thinking. Play of this most serious sort will fuel their senior thesis work and guide them in their lives beyond academia — in work, in philosophical questioning, in love.”
Part of the Honors College mission, wrote Ottavio Casale — another former dean with an appreciation for play — is to make “accountants more poetical and poets more accountable.” Somewhere in that intersection is the challenge for the next 75 years of honors at Kent State. A student’s gains in self-creation, inner drive or broader perspective are hard to measure, but they are the most important products of honors education.
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