The ideal student

This semester, the team of instructors that teaches our first-year sequence is taking a fresh look at the syllabi for those courses. We've had some turnover since we last did this exercise, and it's time to incorporate the new members fully and reassess what the rest of us (including some folks no longer in the team) have brought to the table.

To start off, I borrowed an exercise that I found in a description of an earth sciences curriculum revision. The course designers think of the ideal student who has just finished the class, and ask themselves: What should that student be able to do? What should that student know?

This seems to dovetail nicely with a common topic of conversation among the faculty in my department. When we discover that a student in our upper-division courses, who like all our students has had this introductory sequence, does not know how to do something, we are frustrated. Why can't she cite her sources? Why doesn't he know how to use the library card catalog? Didn't they learn this in the first year? So one could approach answering those "ideal student" questions from the negative side: What gaps in skill or knowledge surprise us when they appear in our upper-division students?

Here's my first pass at answering those questions. Keep in mind that these are high-ability students, for better or for worse. For better: They've almost all had advanced courses (such as AP) in high school, and so can be presumed to start from a higher baseline and make more progress in the first year in college. For worse: They've often been able to conceal lacks and gaps by competence in other areas, and sometimes their schools have not pushed them because scarce instructional resources must be spent on lower-performing students.

The ideal student finishing Honors Core I and II should be able to ...

• summarize the main points of a text
• understand that different academic disciplines utilize distinct toolsets to shed light on "big" cross-disciplinary questions
• defend assertions about an author's meaning and intent with textual evidence
• understand how historical and cultural context shapes thinkers, thoughts, and texts
• write meaningful, effective introductory and concluding paragraphs
• outline an effective argument
• follow that outline to produce an effective prose argument
• construct clear, efficient sentences in formal writing
• construct sentences with active verbs and agential subjects (avoiding passive voice and impersonal constructions)
• avoid empty verbiage, including unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, repetition, and framing devices
• employ effective and well-selected search strategies to find relevant information in the library, on the web, and in online databases
• evaluate the reliability and value of information sources
• apply the perspective of major thinkers and schools of thought to the student's own experience, beliefs, and assumptions
• reevaluate, with an openness to revision, personal beliefs and assumptions in the light of new information, perspectives, and contexts
• appreciate the disciplinary expertise and perspective of each member of the instructional team
• welcome new information, perspectives, and contexts as an opportunity for personal growth
• reflect on the student's own education as a historically-conditioned institution reflecting contested social values and visions
• commit to further thought and exploration as a way of reconciling conflicts of perspective and value
• exercise judgment in responding to feedback

The ideal student finishing Honors Core I and II should know ...

• how Platonic philosophy came to shape current popular understandings of Christianity
• how existentialism challenges claims, both ontological and moral, about essences and natures
• how Darwin, Marx, and Freud crafted rich and compelling accounts of human nature's developmental history
• the broad difference between idealism and materialism as accounts of reality and experience
• the power of environment -- social and physical -- as a shaping force in experience and thought
• the power of language and metaphor as a shaping force in experience and thought
• that the answers to "big" significant questions are complex, historically conditioned, and multi-faceted
• how the kinds of answers we give to "big" significant questions about humanity shape our response to current challenges and crises

I'm sure there's more -- or maybe there should be less. When the rest of the team responds and we look at it all together, I'll be interested to see how our ideal students are alike, and how they are different.

One weekend in November

At the NCHC business meeting bright and early this morning, my boss -- who is also, as the incoming president-elect, the chair of next year's conference -- stood up to give a preview of the 2012 annual meeting in Boston. He painted a glowing picture of an uncrowned schedule that would allow the city to be a key "program" at the conference; of the prestigious and compelling plenary speaker; of the gorgeous venue and attractive amenities. And then he mentioned, almost offhand, that the conference would be held almost a month later than this year -- November 14-18, 2012.

I got a sinking feeling. That sounded suspiciously like the weekend before Thanksgiving, which is when the American Academy of Religion holds its annual meeting. I mentioned the confluence to a fellow religion scholar whose Honors half-time duties brought him to Phoenix to attend this meeting; "isn't the AAR in Boston, too?" he suggested. For a moment I was full of hope. Perhaps I would just be shuttling from hotel to hotel, attending some sessions at each conference and discharging various board and committee responsibilities by swapping lanyards and badges several times a day.

Then I checked the website. Yep, the NCHC conference dates were the weekend before Thanksgiving. And nope, the AAR was not meeting in the same city; we'd be in Chicago while my boss executes the signature event of his tenure in Honors national leadership for 1800 of his closest friends.

I ended up in the same position earlier this year when our instiitution hosted a regional conference on a weekend when I was already committed to be In Atlanta for an AAR board meeting. It's a terrible conflict. On the one hand, I have longstanding commitments and specific offices to fulfill in the AAR for the next year or two, and my role in NCHC is much less formal. But on the other hand, my institution and my closest colleagues are taking on huge organizational tasks, and just when I could be of the most help, I disappear.

These collisions of conferences will be less frequent once I rotate off the AAR board -- at that 2012 meeting in Chicago. I'm ready at that point to assume more formal roles in NCHC. It's sickening and heart-wrenching, though, to see the involvement requested and reasonably expected of me peak at the same time in two organizations whose calendars have in no way been aligned for my benefit..

It's a dry heat

Arizona in October. Autumnal is not the word anyone would use to describe it. The high temperatures are in the 90s, you have to keep hydrating all day or risk splitting headaches, and even in the evening short sleeves and short skirts are comfortable.

Not that you get much of a chance to go outside at an event like this. I left my hotel room at 6:30 am in order to get a Starbucks drink across the street before the conference breakfast buffet opened, and that was the last time I set foor anywhere other than a meeting room, hallway, or bathroom until after 4 pm. It was one of the fullest days I've experienced at any conference I've ever attended, national, international, regional, disciplinary, or Honors. And it was a productive day; my presence meant something in nearly every session, whether I was presenting, supporting friends and colleagues at their presentations, doing committee work, or voting on official business.

I'm not sure today will turn out to have been the least stressful day of the conference; tomorrow my colleague and I need to make sure we're fully prepped for the workshop we're leading, and then Sunday morning we have to execute that plan. That's the longest session of sustained responsibility of the trip. But I'm ready for a little more balance in my day -- regular meals, time to check e-mail occasionally, maybe even work on some of the tasks I brought with me. As it is, today's nonstop sprint caused me to lose ground on some of the things I have to do every day, meaning there's even more to squeeze into the last few days of the trip. Luckily the unscheduled time should expand as the weekend goes on.

In the valley of the sun

The NCHC conference is like no other. The bulk of the attendees are students -- although the proportion of faculty and professional staff has been growing for years. The parties are frequent and lavish. The sessions are evenly distributed between matters pedagogical and administrative, and students presenting on everything under the sun. And the discussions frequently begin, end, or break down over the vast differences among the programs who send representatives here.

I've got an exceptionally full day tomorrow, with bookings straight through from 7:30 am to 4 pm. Breathing may have to be optional; eating certainly will be. I'm ready for some sleep after a day two hours longer than I'm used to -- and that's not counting the hour early that I awoke to go to the airport.

After tomorrow, things slow down at least a bit, until Sunday morning when I'll be on the spot leading a workshop. I need to find some downtime for the many tasks I've brought with me, like grading and giving feedback, but for the next 24 hours, those to-dos will have to be set aside. Nothing adds stress to a full day of being on the spot like constant guilty reminders of the things you're not doing.

Are there any songs about Phoenix, Arizona?

Trip number 2 of my autumn of travel begins tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn. I'm headed with several of my colleagues and students to the National Collegiate Honors Council annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.

It will be my first trip to Phoenix, and possibly my first visit to Arizona (my parents might be able to confirm whether we ever passed through any part of the state on any of our family trips).  The location of this year's conference is not without controversy; a lot of academic groups are boycotting the state because of their immigration law.  Having been on the planning and financial side of these operations, though, I know that contracts made years ago are not easily broken, and that organizations without huge cash reserves to absorb penalties for doing so have few choices.

The weirdest thing about this trip is the weather difference.  We just entered our biggest shot of autumn to date, with nighttime temperatures near freezing, and jackets and sweaters necessary in the day.  When I leave tomorrow morning before the sun comes up, I'll need to bundle up, but none of those layers will be useful in the slightest for the next five days.

We have lots of work to do at the conference; personally, I have a committee meeting to attend, a presentation to give, and a post-conference workshop to lead.  There will also be some parties, some dinners, some networking, and a lot of time to catch up on classwork.  As soon as I get back, I'll be focused on finishing my third major conference presentation of the semester, which is due to the respondent less than two weeks after my return.  The merry-go-round won't stop until that final trip of the year, to the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Francisco, is over.

Next year in Phoenix

Aside from my usual disagreements with the lavishness of the arrangements, I had a wonderful time at this year's National Collegiate Honors Society meeting.  I helped lead two sessions (one of which I think was quite valuable to the audience, the other of which was more valuable to the presenters), and was called upon to participate in two more for which I had relevant expertise.  I attended two business meetings and served as a consultant to a half-dozen members looking for a way to make their programs better.  It was one of the more valuable three-day conference stretches of my professional career, in terms experience shared and gained per unit of time spent.

Next year the meeting is in Phoenix, Arizona, and right at this point it looks like a tough sell.  The sentiment for boycotting conventions in Arizona over their immigration law is still active, for one thing.  National meetings in western states always do more poorly, for another, a fact I've learned over my time with the American Academy of Religion; the bulk of the membership is on or near the east coast, and the time and expense involved in making the longer trip reliably depress attendance.

I know that the 2011 conference planner, Greg Lanier of the University of West Florida, has some innovative and bold ideas to make the meeting attractive yet responsible.  And hey, I'm looking forward to the single-hop Southwest flight from my home airport as much as anything.  So I'm hoping that the Phoenix meeting exceeds expectations and sets a new standard for the organization.  It would be nice if we could take this crisis of a meeting with two strikes against it and turn it into an opportunity to rethink the whole national convention paradigm for NCHC, wouldn't it?

Excuse me, there's something in my eye

No one relishes getting up early on Saturday morning and going to work. But sometimes there are compensations.

I arrived on campus at about 8:15 this morning for our annual sophomore matriculation event. In order to continue into the Honors Interdisciplinary Studies minor, second-year students read documents important to the program's founding and prepare ten-minute presentations on some academic subject. They spend the morning fanned out across the campus in groups of four or five, discussing the values of the program, giving their talks, and fielding questions.

Not five minutes after I walked into the auditorium, the students began arriving, dressed for success. And interspersed among them came alumni, nearly twenty of them, who volunteered for the chance to spend a Saturday morning with these students as moderators for their small group sessions.

More than 100 sophomores were in that room by the time the program was to start. And I felt a kind of giddy happiness that these nineteen- and twenty-year-olds were up early on a Saturday morning to follow in the footsteps of the thousand who have gone before them. It was icing on the cake that among them were some of those thousand -- their predecessors, from twenty years ago to last year's graduates, who were so eager to come back and experience a little bit of the Honors experience again that they gave up a weekend morning of their own free will and traveled from all over the region to meet them.

Anybody would be thrilled to work in an institution that inspires that kind of devotion and excitement. And I get to be reminded of it every year -- never more forcefully than on Sophomore Lecture Saturday. It's an honor and a joy, and there's no better recompense for losing out on sleeping late.

Core competency

Today I spent the morning orienting and interviewing twenty-four students -- currently on my campus, and planning to transfer from other schools -- who hope to enter the Honors College next semester. On a day when there are no classes in preparation for finals next week, these freshmen and sophomores spent three and a half hours listening to information, absorbing an academic presentation, writing an essay, and discussing ideas in small groups.

I'm always made hopeful by admissions and recruiting. Students respond so enthusiastically and with such persistence to the promise of an academic program where they can play a central and active role. As I spoke, listened, and judged which of them fit our standards most closely, I was once again charmed and gratified by the dedication that led them to complete such an arduous process. Some of them, I could tell almost immediately, were "our kind" -- students who want to take charge of their education, who are set on fire by ideas, who need a place where they are surrounded by their true peers.

After writing detailed evaluations of the four students who participated in my seminar group, I packed up and headed over to the dorm where most of our current students live. There, as happens almost every Friday, a group of undergraduates had planned a presentation. This one happened to be the final event in a semester-long series created by a junior. Her work with Japanese students in the Intensive English Program classes on campus, combined with the coincidental scheduling of Honors and IEP classes in the same seminar rooms, gave her the idea to invite Japanese students into the Honors dorm to give presentations on Japanese life and culture, and on their perceptions of American life and culture. We provided the venue, the technology, the publicity, and some snacks. The students provided the idea and the implementation.

These presentations aren't part of any class. They're completely student-driven. And week after week, as I attend, I am more convinced that our job as educators is to provide our students with the support and resources they need to pursue their own projects. Some of that support is educational -- students need to be trained in the fields that will enable them to proceed competently. Some of it is guidance -- many students don't have a project yet, or don't know how to go about making it realizable.

But much of it is simply logistical. With students like ours, great things can happen when you provide a structure and then get out of the way. I'm starting to wonder how many other traditional activities of our program -- classes, publications, grants, co-curriculars -- would look quite different if we thought of them not as assignments or roadmaps to education, but as resource centers where students come and get what they need to advance their personal developmental agendas.

Peak experience

Noel returned from Toronto last night and we enjoyed a typical evening of television and trivia. But the next day I was the one saying "so long," as I packed my bags for a weekend with our incoming Honors class, assorted upperclassmen in leadership positions, faculty, and a bunch of glutton-for-punishment alumni who gleefully pay good money to relive their undergraduate experience every fall.

Although we're going to catch some of Ike's wrath late tomorrow and Sunday, today was an unseasonably warm day that grew breezier up on the mountaintop. We come to the Winthrop Rockefeller conference center each September, and every year the place grows more luxurious and the staff more attentive. It's more like being pampered at some kind of Arkansas version of a resort hotel and spa than anything: copious delicious food (tonight's dessert table featured a smooth-as-silk chocolate cake with cream cheese icing decorated with "Welcome UCA!"), beautiful hotel and apartment-style lodging with wireless internet throughout, technologically-advanced meeting rooms, and 180 acres of recreation space including a fully-equipped fitness center, indoor tennis, volleyball, paddleboats, and easy access to hiking trails at the adjacent state park.

I've been looking forward to this weekend because it affords so much time for reading, knitting, socializing, and relaxing. We do some work, too -- a writing workshop tomorrow morning, a guest speaker tomorrow night. But there's something so freeing about not being in charge, being able to simply enjoy this pleasant place and these unscheduled hours. After a week of staying on point with the kids and at work, I'm ready to breathe deeply and enjoy simply ... being.

Denver roundup

Back from the conference on another flight plagued with delays -- including a 45 minute wait for luggage -- and I'm still abuzz over some of the realizations that impressed themselves upon me in the last two days.

In some ways you go to these conferences to be inspired, to have moments of clarity. Surrounded by those engaged in the same discipline or work as you, carrying on a ceaseless back-channel chat in your head as they make their presentations, complaining or bonding with your colleagues over drinks or dinner or waiting for a session to start, gauging the temperature of new acquaintances to see whether they are revolutionaries or reactionaries. It's impossible not to figure out some stuff. The problems that are confusing, intractable muck day to day become clear categories and corresponding programs of action.

Of course, when you go back, you lose some of that clarity. After two days talking intensely with my administrative team about the direction we're trying to take the program, we tend to think we've come to some agreement about how to frame problems and where to look for solutions. But back in the muck, it's harder to carry out those plans. People, and one's obligations toward them, get in the way.

The realization about which I'm most conflicted is that there are two kinds of people in my field: those who are willing to consider radical change, and those who will always find a reason to resist and refuse. We educators are not supposed to believe that some people are ineducable. But perhaps at some point, and for some personalities, they are. The unfortunate fact about Honors education is that comparably few people get into it because of a deep compatability of their aims with its values. Instead, they are asked by their university administrations to take the job -- administrations that know little and care less about those values, and have no opinion on how best to achieve them (other than to do so as cheaply as possible). That's not a recipe for matching up innovators and student-centered folk with Honors programs. The reasons universities ask certain folks to take charge of Honors have much more to do with who's at hand, who's available, and who can be persuaded than with what Honors is all about.

And so we end up with some people floundering to find out what Honors means and how to get it done, and others content with the murky, fuzzy, marshmallow buzzwords that are the only descriptors with any hope of being applied to the diversity of programs, aims, values, reasons for being, and structures that call themselves Honors. And not many with any vision for making its inchoate promises concrete, and then making them real.

To consign some of my colleagues to the outer darkness, giving up hope that they can be persuaded to embrace rigor and revolution, cuts against the grain. And yet in the room listening to Derek Powazek's electric presentation -- hearing him challenge academics to truly empower their students rather than preserving their own authority and privilege -- it was abundantly clear that there was a deep divide in the room. On one side -- the students, who knew exactly what he was talking about and were thrilled to hear someone saying something real and challenging to the educational establishment, and a few of us maverick academics who want to turn the structure on its head and bring it out of its pre-war romantic obsession with cults of personality and control over information. On the other -- the rest of the professoriate, aghast at the idea of trusting the masses, bemoaning the death of the canon (again), worried for their power and their jobs.

And yet, as loath as I am to see that divide as real, there's a gulf in my own faculty that's hard to deny. I'm beyond the point of believing it can be bridged, and now I'm just wondering how it should be dealt with. I'm not sure my like-minded colleagues are at that point with me, and part of my ongoing roller-coaster ride is thinking that they have made their camp in what I see as the real world, only to find out that they're back on the other side trying to change people that can't be changed.

At this point, the realizations and the clarity of purpose that came with them are still fresh in my mind. I'm going to enjoy them while I can, before they get obscured by the day-to-day confusion that will get us all off track until the next conference.

Some lessons we apparently haven't learned

• If you are an expert in educational technology, you should know better than to put 300 words of text on a powerpoint slide for us to read while you also want us to be listening to you.
• You might want to plug your computer in for your presentation so it doesn't shut down in the middle.


• Pointedly, the student presentation on Powerpoint that immediately follows these technical difficulties points out how uninspiring and distracting it is when a professor has to spend time fiddling with and apologizing for the technology before giving the lecture.


• The same student presentation mentions the distracting and unnerving cell-phone-ringing-in-the-classroom phenomenon -- commenting ironically on the white-haired professor in the front row half an hour earlier who not only dug out his ringing cell phone during the presentation, but answered it without leaving his seat.


• It's really hard to believe -- and disheartening -- that after the wowzer keynote presentation by Derek Powazek on harnessing the power of online community, we have a presentation about why a course should use online discussions followed by one about how not to use Powerpoint. During two successive presentations that really pushed the envelope about how to develop the rhetoric of student empowerment into a reality -- Rick and Phil's visions of a disintermediated, collaborative Honors 2025 followed by Derek's evangelism for the wisdom of crowds and the transformation of passive audiences into creators and organizers -- the response was overwhelmingly fearful. Students need lectures! This will devalue the great books! Web-based voting and ranking systems reduce truth to a popularity contest! We spent our careers becoming experts and now we're going to be rendered redundant! Now in the presentations in the paper session that follows, we're back where people are comfortable ... tools rather than ideas, widgets rather than structures, how-to's rather than why-to's. We've got to keep pushing on this. It's not about what program to use or what plug-in to buy -- it's about how technology provides a medium that shapes, for good or ill depending on how intentional you are, your community's participation in your mission. It's about how technology sends a message about your values and goals. It's about getting rid of the layer of unfulfilled or contradictory rhetoric between your community and their educational experience.


• My favorite part of my job is my discussions with my fellow administrators, Phil and Rick. (My second favorite part is being in the classroom with students. My third favorite part is realizing that something I said to a student made a difference in their work or their life.) We are three people excited about doing more for students, infecting the whole university with our passions, thinking big, imagining new structures, reinventing existing traditions. Together we are ready and eager to make it all real. My least favorite part of my job is dealing with people who dig in their heels and don't want to change anything. People who are skeptical of anything new, automatically. People who would rather rehash past debates and explain how everything went wrong than think about what to do next. People who'd rather not hear about the mission of their institution because it might indict their teaching and practice as out of step with the mission, or worse (and this absolutely happens) in direct contradiction to that mission. My intense dislike for dealing with this attitude is a problem for me -- because my academic colleagues by nature are very conservative and independent. They do not want to be told what to do, and they do not want to change what they do. That attitude is on full display here at NCHC, as evidenced by the last bullet. And so I have roller-coastered from euphoria at Derek's magnetic, arresting, and wholly inspiring presentation, to crushing despair at the petty, rudimentary, and unreflective information (if you can call it that) that people here are so much more comfortable with. Unfortunately, without a structure for this organization and its meeting that puts those values of innovation, rigor, and challenge front and center in every aspect, we'll continue to be a feel-good weekend with a big party where everybody gets patted on the back for having "Honors" attached to their titles, and nobody has to submit to any tough questions about what that means.