October 7, 2004
UW honors program challenges the brightest
How do you recruit faculty for a program that is not able to offer lavish support or huge salaries, that won’t likely generate articles in prestigious journals, and that probably involves more work than your average class?
You offer them an opportunity to work with some of the smartest undergraduates in Washington. You enable them to teach topics of their own choosing, based on their research and academic interests. You give them the ability to teach classes of varied lengths, unencumbered by the constraints of the academic quarter.
And then you watch their eyes light up as they see what the brightest can do when they’re challenged. Welcome to the UW Honors Program.
“Our goal is to recruit the smartest kids in the state,” says Shawn Wong, professor of English, who recently assumed directorship of the program. That means, he says, going head-to-head with Stanford, Harvard and Berkeley and stressing ways in which the UW honors experience is equal to, or perhaps better than, what these other “name” schools can offer.
That also means, to an extent, playing to the students’ strengths. “These are students who love learning,” Wong said. “They are diligent high achievers. But at the same time, these students are not nerds. They are not narrow in their interests. I’ve found they have big hearts. Many of them crave international experience, and they want to give back to the community.”
The general education courses of the program draw from the cream of the UW faculty, many of whom normally don’t teach undergraduates. Wong and his associate director, Julie Villegas, also have tapped independent community scholars to teach special topics. One such teacher is Roger Morris, who served on the National Security Council senior staff in the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Villegas heard him lecture on United States foreign policy and asked him if he’d like to teach in the Honors Program.
Morris taught a course this spring titled American Century, about the United States’ encounters with the world in the past 100 years.
“It was very apparent, from the first days of the class, that I was dealing with a highly motivated, articulate and gifted group of students,” Morris said. “They came from a variety of backgrounds, and their interests ranged across the sciences and arts — drama, photography, prelaw, history, computer science, physics, and mathematics.”
The class discussions were challenging, Morris said, but the real eye-opening experience was the assigned final paper.
“I wanted the paper to be an effort in creativity,” he said. “I wanted something unconventional, that showed that the student had mastered the topic, and it could be in whatever format or approach that the student chose.” Morris described the results as “unbelievable” and “brilliant.” He received an epic poem, a Socratic dialogue, a one-woman performance and a simulated Newsweek centerfold special report. He also got a raft of more conventional, but nonetheless insightful, term papers.
“It’s exactly what I asked for,” he said. “But I had no idea the products would be as inventive and wide-ranging as they turned out. I wanted the learning process to be liberating, to take the students outside the normal formulas for success which they had obviously mastered.”
Morris reports that he gave a lot of As, and that the student ratings of the class were “outrageously high.” He said the course changed the way he thinks about learning and about how to motivate students — and not just those in the Honors Program.
Other outside scholars who teach in the program include Frances McHugh, executive director of Richard Hugo House, who will be teaching a two-week course titled Damage and Repair, focused on cultural institutions and architecture. Another course, taught by a Microsoft employee, was built around the concept of sustainable development and was scheduled on Saturdays because of her work demands.
“We allow our teachers to shape the classes around their availability, or the demands of the subject,” Wong said, adding that flexible scheduling is a model that he has adapted from European schools.
Lou Wolcher, professor of law, was enticed into the program while attending an orientation with his son, a second-year student in the Honors Program. Wolcher had never taught undergraduates in his 20 years of teaching. He decided to offer a course titled Thinking About Justice, in which students explore the relation between law and justice, as well as politics and justice, by focusing on philosophical texts, both ancient and modern, dealing with these relationships.
Wolcher found the class refreshing. “The students surprised me with the insights they brought to discussions. They’re not yet jaundiced by professionalism; they were in the class simply because they wanted to learn,” he said.
Wolcher reported that the class was more work than his typical law school class, in which he would simply lecture and give an exam. He ended up requiring three papers and an oral presentation, which made extra work for him, in addition to the prep work for a brand new class. But the experience was so positive he’s planning to offer the same class this year.
The program also lets students offer seminars, under faculty supervision. Amy Piedalue, a recent honors graduate, is offering a seminar this fall titled Giving Back: Exploring the Nexus of Service, Active Citizenship and the College Years. Service learning is popular among honor students, and the seminar is an opportunity for students to explore ideas about engagement in civil society — resume building versus character building — and the question of whether the privilege of a college education also creates a responsibility for giving back to the community.
Piedalue has been pursuing her own answers to these questions. She will be traveling in Latin America on a Bonderman Fellowship, which will pay all her expenses with the proviso that she must explore and not study or do research. “I’m interested in the idea of global citizenship,” she said, “and I’m planning a career in an international organization dealing with issues of social justice. So I’m interested in exploring how I fit into the world, and with organizations and people who don’t come from a privileged background.”
Piedalue, a high school valedictorian, applied to Harvard and Yale as well as the UW. “I liked the idea of a public school and the idea of an education that would leave me with less debt. I wanted a smaller ‘home’ within the University. My high school teachers and some students I knew told me good things about the program. I liked the idea of smaller classes, access to faculty, and greater challenges.”
Piedalue values highly her experience in the Honors Program.
“I enjoy having discussions, and the level of engagement of students in honors classes was much greater than in the rest of my classes,” she said. “We were encouraged to challenge everything, to challenge what was being taught. The students in this program are engaged in everything on campus — research, studies abroad, service. In our general education classes, we have students majoring in the sciences, social sciences and humanities all together in one class.
“We’ve learned a lot from each other, and we’ve learned how challenging yourself applies to the world outside of academia. Most important, we’ve learned that the world is bigger than what you study.”
