 English professor Hugh Egan leads an honors seminar on the American frontier. Bill Truslow photo |
Just a year ago, we reported in this space plans for an ambitious new honors program in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Much has developed in the intervening period, not the least of which is that the inaugural group of first year honors students has arrived on campus and, by all accounts, they are living up to the high expectations for them and for the new program.
Throughout this past spring semester, the honors steering committee, led by program director Hugh Egan, sifted through admissions applications, seeking out the most talented students to invite to apply to the honors program. The group of 32 that was eventually selected includes students from a wide range of programs in the school; just over a third are exploratory, with the others coming from the social sciences, the humanities, theater, and natural sciences and mathematics. "It's a great group of people. We're on the same wavelength, with similar motivations, different backgrounds, varied perspectives, and above all the will to enjoy a challenging academic curriculum," says Dheeraj Verma, one of the international students who joined the program.
The honors students are getting to know one another by taking one of two honors first year seminars. Egan's seminar, The American Frontier, has students reading and responding to imaginative documents of discovery, settlement, and exploration in American literature, ranging from Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans to McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Writing professor Ron Denson teaches the other honors seminar, Savages and Civilization: The Continuing Rediscovery of America, which also considers the initial encounters between Europeans and native Americans. All the new honors students were given two books to read over the summer. After reading The Indian Chronicles, a novel by Jose Barreiro, the students were treated to a rare opportunity to actually discuss the work with the author, who visited the seminars this fall to talk about the issues in his book.
The honors program isn't just about reading, study, and discussion, how-ever. In late September a group traveled to Cooperstown. Egan and Denson, accompanied by art history professor Nancy Brcak and mathematics professor Stan Seltzer, enjoyed the opportunity to travel with the students. "The trip was especially nice in the way it overlapped with what we're studying in the classroom," says Egan. "In his writing seminar Ron focuses upon early encounters between European and native populations, and the Fenimore house in Cooperstown has a new American Indian wing that collects art from both before and after European contact. In my class we read novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Willa Cather, and a number of the exhibits in the Fenimore house and Farmer's Museum were pertinent. One of our students sat down and started operating a 19th-century loom, and she was surprisingly good at it!"
Part of what makes the honors program a special opportunity for the students is the out-of-class activities. A reception early in the semester gave President James J. Whalen and the faculty an opportunity to meet the students and welcome them to the campus. A suite of rooms in Williams Hall has been set aside for the program. One large, spacious room is set up as a reading room and lounge, while another study room nearby is equipped with state-of-the-art computers for the students' use. A Parents Weekend reception provided a chance for students to introduce their professors to their families. Showings of films like Roland Joffe's The Mission complement the subject matter of the honors courses and provide a nice opportunity for an evening gathering. As honors student Jennifer Close puts it, "It's about intelligent discussions on some cool books, movies, and readings mixed with trips, great people, and, of course, pizza!"
As the students move on into the intermediate seminars that are at the core of the program, they will continue to encounter challenging faculty and course work. Politics professor Zillah Eisenstein will be teaching a course titled Rethinking the Nation in the 21st Century. Art history professor Gary Wells is offering Object and Image: Art History in an Age of Visual Information, and Nancy Rader's psychology seminar, Biological Minds and Cultural Brains, will examine how one's world is mediated by a combination of biology, experience, and culture. Additional courses in literature, writing, and history are in the wings for next year, with other faculty now in the process of developing new honors seminars.
The faculty interest is, of course, sparked by the opportunity to work with these talented students. According to Denson, "It is gratifying to see the extent to which they are both willing and able to take responsibility for their own learning. Intellectually inquisitive and highly motivated, they engage freely in discussions with each other during class (not just with their teacher), and they are especially insightful when it comes to making helpful comments on each other's essay drafts. They are fully engaged, in other words, in teaching and learning from each other. The rapport and camaraderie they've established have made this a true honors community, one that I feel privileged to participate in."
The College's theater season opened with a production of Lynda
Barry's The Good Times Are Killing Me, which featured musical
hits of the 1960s. Shown here doing the "tighten up"
dance are (from left) Jen Kaminer '97, Kenya Hamilton '00, T Butler
'98, and Jenny Weiss '97.
Rachel Hogancamp photo