2007 Report to the Honors Director

March 26, 2007

To the Director of the University of Washington Honors Program:

The Honors Program is an exciting and stimulating part of academic and social life for many undergraduates at the University of Washington. The Honors Program currently offers students the opportunity to take interesting and unique classes taught by personable professors in a small setting, but Honors can be more. The Honors Program should stretch students’ abilities, broaden their understandings, and refine their interests. A self-motivated group of honors students formed the Honors Student Advisory Panel (HSAP) several years ago with the intent that a small group of dedicated honors students could act as the student voice in Honors Program academic and social affairs, representing the Honors student body and providing a student liaison to the Honors faculty and staff. As involved students, we see the Honors Program as a valuable resource to our education. Individually, we all have different ideas of how the Honors Program could be improved and, like Honors faculty, staff, and leadership above and before us, sometimes disagree on the best direction for the Honors Program. HSAP provides a forum for the most dedicated Honors students to discuss issues that are important to our undergraduate academic and social experiences. Membership to HSAP is based on competitive application. Despite our disparate backgrounds and visions, we all share a desire to help improve the program and the honors experience for all students, and it is perhaps because of our commitment to diversity in all forms – ethnic, social, and academic – that we have been so successful in representing the Honors student body in all its forms. The Honors Program is wonderful but there is always room for improvement, and our goal is to facilitate those improvements as the voice of honors students.

Currently the Honors Program offers a select number of classes and day-to-day services such as advising, weekly email announcements, a student computer lounge, and free academic printing. This bare-bones depiction is a fair description of many students’ experience in Honors. We understand that everyone will not identify with the Honors Program and the community that goes along with it, but HSAP would like to revitalize how Honors students see the program and increase levels of involvement. This revitalization would take place on many levels. HSAP currently commits itself to building an academic community in Honors by organizing academic events such as Speaker Series and Research Colloquia, organizing and awarding the Honors Excellence in Teaching Award to recognize student-selected Honors faculty, as well as by supporting the Honors Peer Mentorship program and Honors House community in the student dormitories. This academic community is one that HSAP would like to see grow – a vision that may not be feasible without the support of Honors faculty and staff. In terms of coursework, we would like to see a more coherent core curriculum with regular teaching faculty. The current core curriculum appears almost ad hoc at times as the department tries to find professors to fill gaps that are still present near registration. Many times professors do not have a clear understanding of the Honors Program, causing the intellectual challenge of each course to vary significantly. Similarly, departments are also often severely uninformed when it comes to advising College Honors students, which causes many difficulties when pursuing Departmental Honors later in an Honors academic career. The problems outlined here are some of the main issues facing the Honors Program as seen by HSAP. We believe a coherent, well-developed, and regularized curriculum is necessary as a solid foundation for the program, but also that there are many other ways in which Honors can become a better service to its student community.

The following pages offer a description of the projects that HSAP actively supports, and outlines the issues that currently face honors students in each respective area.

Sincerely,
The Honors Student Advisory Panel

For further information, please refer to the complete report.
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