YES
William Crain:
Honors colleges produce harmful inequities

Many universities have established honors colleges for highly qualified applicants. Each university hopes that this special college will enhance its overall stature, but I believe that honors colleges basically hurt undergraduate education.

Honors colleges provide small classes, stimulating projects and individual mentoring for the select few, leaving fewer resources for the rest. This situation produces resentment and ill feeling, lowering general morale. What's more, the entering freshmen who are not chosen for the honors college can be made to feel second-rate before they have had a chance to realize their potential.

I am especially concerned about the effect of honors colleges on the students who historically have been denied access to high-quality education--poor working-class students and students of color. Through no choice of their own, these students disproportionately attend underfunded, overcrowded elementary and secondary schools and receive an inadequate preparation for college. In 1969, the City University of New York (CUNY), where I teach, initiated an open admissions policy that has given hundreds of thousands of such students their first real chance to develop their minds and pursue their dreams. Many students have required some remedial work, but this hasn't stopped them from achieving remarkable success.

However, CUNY's current, right-wing board of trustees has curtailed students' opportunities by banning remedial courses in all of the university's bachelor's degree programs. At the same time, CUNY leaders are recasting the university into a tiered structure. They are designating certain colleges as elite institutions with stiff admissions requirements and creating a new, university-wide honors college. The honors college will provide highly qualified students with free tuition, small classes, laptop computers and an expense account to spend on academically enriching experiences such as study abroad.

So, who will gain admission to the elite colleges and the honors college? Not the students of color and working-class students who haven't received an adequate preparation for college. With a few exceptions, they will be admitted to the "lower tier" colleges. Thus, the new hierarchical structure will perpetuate the racial and social class inequities of New York City.

I believe that CUNY's new direction is part of a national trend, and we should oppose it. Instead of focusing on honors colleges, we should work to provide the best possible educational opportunities for all students.

NO
Thomas E. Helm:
Honors are at home in the public university

Honors colleges contribute to individual faculty curricular and instructional innovation, to say nothing of faculty rejuvenation. They facilitate new programs and curricular initiatives among departments and colleges. Not the least, they advance the public university's commitment to providing appropriate curricula, programs and services for an increasingly diverse student population.

For faculty who teach honors courses, the experience can be a "teaching sabbatical," a brief time away from the routine of their regular teaching assignments. It might, of course, be argued that this takes the best faculty away from students who need them most. It is more often the case that honors teaching affords the faculty the freedom to explore, develop, and implement new course materials and teaching strategies--materials and strategies that they take back with them to their departments and to their regular classrooms.

Because of its access to resources, its special expertise, and its institutional flexibility, honors in collaboration with departments and other colleges is able to innovate, test, develop and implement special curricular and program options. In the last two years at our university, honors created an electronic portfolio option with the College of Business and Technology, and we are developing a service learning project with the College of Education and Human Services. In the future, we expect these special opportunities, with appropriate adaptations, to be available options for all undergraduates in those colleges.

In a U.S. News & World Report article, "Choosing an Honors Experience," a case was made that for a growing number of academically talented students, honors in the public university represents an attractive alternative to the elite private university. Certainly, one of the historic roles of honors is the recruitment and retention of academically talented students.

Honors students, of course, enrich the whole life of the university. They bring their energy, excitement, perspectives and abilities to all of their courses and to every aspect of university life. It seems then a moot point that they strengthen, enrich and enliven undergraduate education. What we sometimes lose sight of, however, is that the honors cohort itself is a part of the great diversity that the public university celebrates. The honors college and the honors program are fully consistent with the public university's commitment to creating and supporting an undergraduate student population of diverse talents, backgrounds and preparation.