Access, Not Exclusion: Honors at a Public Institution.

I tend to joke with our Dean of the Honors College, Ken Blemings, that his main goal is to work himself out of a job. Sorry, Ken. After all, it is in our nature as agents of higher education to recruit, retain, and graduate the best and brightest talent available. In other words, every student walking onto our campus ought to be honors caliber. Likewise, the overall college experience for every student ought to be honors quality. I have been around the block for the last thirty-plus years serving as president of five major institutions in the United States, and I can affirm that the increased value placed on an honors education is enriching entire universities and how they operate We are witnessing a shift in the way we prepare the next great generation of thinkers and doers, thanks to the high standards that the Honors College at West Virginia University and at other campuses across the nation have established. Speaking for West Virginia University, a public, research, land-grant institution, I can attest to the following strengths of an honors program: 1. It increases the intellectual climate of the university 2. It recognizes high-achieving students and their potential impact in the region and state 3. It pairs outstanding teachers with small groups of students. 4. It teaches critical and reflective practices. 5. It is interdisciplinary, blending all varieties of students together from the arts to the sciences. This effect is visible even to the general masses. In a piece called "A Prudent College Path" (8 Aug. 2015), New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni highlighted how honors programs at public universities are luring top-notch students away from the elitist Ivy Leagues. A lower price tag is one reason. Here is another outlined in Bruni's column: honors programs promise a more inclusive environment of devoted, highly driven students within an even more diverse campus population. When honors colleges deliver on their promises, they are being anti-elitist. I know that many honors colleges and programs struggle with perceptions of elitism on their campuses, but we should never mistake an elite education for an elitist one When you look at it from a different angle, at the way a strong honors college or program can affect the whole campus, especially one with a mission for access and service, you get a different result. The obvious way that honors colleges are about access is that they give individual students access to the kind of educational opportunities and environment that they might not have been able to afford otherwise. Just look at the unorthodox yet thought-provoking approaches taken by a WVU Honors College instructor, Kevin Gooding. Also a Methodist pastor, Gooding teaches a small class exclusively for honors students on the Salem witch trials. At the beginning of each semester, Gooding's students choose one of the accused Salem witches and study her trial. One student discovered that one of her ancestors was accused by her own children of witchcraft and was executed on August 19, 1692. Had the student not taken that class, she might have never known that sobering yet fascinating fact of her family history. No, the Salem witch trials course is not just another class. Nor can one even label it a run-of-the-mill history class. Gooding describes it as a study of the "facts" of the trials themselves and how their interpretation has changed based on the time and culture of the interpreter. The class looks not only at scholarly interpretations but at popular ones as well: poetry, fiction, theater, film, television, and music. As an extra perk, students watch and analyze episodes of Bewitched and The Simpsons that invoke the ongoing cultural relevance of the witch trials in our modern imagination. Gooding's approach as a teacher is not just to throw dates and names out for students to remember. Instead, he demonstrates how the witch trials were events, situations, and ideas that have gone into forming who we are as a people and a nation. …