New Mexico Mercury

In a world of future shock, where nothing seems stable and change often happens for no rhyme or reason, institutions with continuity and humane values are worth preserving, even as they evolve.

The crucial thing to avoid is ruining a great and on-going achievement while trying to make it bigger and better.

The University of New Mexico’s new Honors College has morphed this year from the Honors Program, which is one of the gems of the American Honors movement. It’s regularly ranked as one of the top three programs in the nation. 

Honors at UNM has been directed by Rosalie Otero for the last 21 years. She patiently built the momentum to transform the Program into the College. Dr. Otero is retiring this June. Her achievements here are legendary in the honors world. She and her faculty created a program that is deeply loved by thousands of alumni and one that’s managed to adapt to new conditions while maintaining its integrity down the decades.

Long time Honors faculty member Ursula Shepherd will serve as the Honors College’s new associate dean. She was selected in 2011 as one of four U.S. Professors of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

And that’s what Honors at UNM has always been about – great teaching.

As Shepherd, a biologist, says, “I believe every student who passes through my classroom has the ability to be outstanding. It’s my job to help each of them find what they are passionate about and to show them that it’s possible.”  Everyone who teaches in Honors at UNM, and I’ve taught there for 27 years, feels the same way.

That was the vision of its founder, Dudley Wynn, when Honors at UNM opened its doors 1957 with its first undergraduate seminar.

Wynn, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, was also a founder of the National Collegiate Honors Council. He, and his program here, set the tone for the open minded, rigorous, interdisciplinary ideal of honors education in America.

Honors at UNM and elsewhere is built around some very practical teaching principles that have endured over the years, despite many attacks from insensitive administrators and bean counters.

Chief among these teaching fundamentals is a small – 15 to 17 student – class size.  It is only in such a potentially intimate setting that the spirit of an Honors seminar can be pursued. A larger class size would make it impossible for professors and students to deal with each other about great ideas and concepts though intense and open interpersonal communication. The more people in the classroom, the shallower the encounter.

Honors students, in a small seminar setting, can honestly discuss great subjects and readings with each other and their teachers, motivated by their own curiosities and by the expectations of their peers. Students create intellectual friendships in such an atmosphere, feel inspired to go after the best in themselves, build lifelong associations, and broaden their horizons by not only reading and discussing pressing issues of the day, but by also enriching their own desire to know more and to deepen their understanding of how the world works.

In such a setting, students learn how to learn. They acquire the skills of critical interpretation and logical analysis, and they come to see how to communicate their insights and perspectives in a guided and supportive environment. Small seminars foster trust and friendship.  They help to create the kind of safe environment that is essential for student innovation and exploration.

The goal of an Honors seminar is that through meaningful discussion, open-minded questioning, and the exploration of differences, students will come to prize their own unique imaginations, and create personal learning disciplines that will evolve and sharpen with the years.

Dean Wynn’s idea for Honors at UNM was to create a small liberal arts enclave, appealing to the best students on campus, regardless of their disciplines. It would use student-oriented undergraduate seminars as its format. It would be multidisciplinary, looking at literature, philosophy, history, political science from the perspective of other humanistic specialties, as well as pre-med, pre-law, engineering and hard sciences.

The Honors Program has always attracted some of UNM’s best teachers and scholars. They teach in the program because they know that a university education is not just about future employment. The university experience should be a mind expanding experience in which a young person encounters the range of possibilities of a life of learning, studying, thinking, and exploring. 

The small seminar setting still makes education a personal experience rather than a kind of career-driven boot camp. It stimulates students to think for themselves, to be flexible, to have the courage of their convictions, and to be agile enough to survive in a world in which careers have become ever more undependable.

As Honors at UNM evolves into a full blown Honors College with its own dean and power base in the university, it is essential that continuity with its traditions are maintained.

Honors works. It is a proven success.

Honors at UNM is admired everywhere.

Some big institutions and businesses, as a friend of mine says, operate on the principle of “If it Works, Break It.” 

An Honors College will grow and prosper only if it maintains its traditional high quality of classroom work. 

Don’t break it just so it can grow bigger.