Honors Liberal Arts for the 21st Century

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National Collegiate Honors Council

Monographs: Chapters

National Collegiate Honors Council

2023

Honors Liberal Arts for the 21st Century Honors Liberal Arts for the 21st Century

John Carrell

Texas Tech University

, [email protected]

Aliza S. Wong

Texas Tech University

, [email protected]

Chad Cain

Texas Tech University

, [email protected]

Carrie J. Preston

Boston University

, [email protected]

Muhammad H. Zaman

Boston University

, [email protected]

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Arts for the 21st Century" (2023).

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Honors Liberal Arts for the 21st Century

John Carrell

Texas Tech University

Aliza S. Wong

Texas Tech University

Chad Cain

Texas Tech University

Carrie J. Preston

Boston University

Muhammad H. Zaman

Boston University

introduction

onors colleges are rearticulating their mission and purpose

within the changing landscape of higher education in the

United States. Many honors colleges were originally designed to

oer students transformative undergraduate experiences similar to

Honors Colleges in the 21st Century | Richard Badenhausen, editor

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those of a small liberal arts college but within the context of a larger

university. ey oen featured a Great Books-based curriculum

with a primarily Western canon of texts taught chronologically,

as well as a history of ideas that, once controversial and debated,

became part of “paradigm shis” (Kuhn). While this curriculum

aligned with traditional notions of the liberal arts, honors col

leges that historically oered a curriculum based on classical “great

books” and “big ideas” increasingly faced tensions between that

curriculum and the crucial concerns of inclusion, anti-colonialism,

anti-racism, equity, diversity, and social justice—all of critical inter

est to contemporary students. Many honors students and faculty in

such programs have asked why they should devote time to reading

the canon of “great books” when the standards of greatness were

developed by closed groups of Western intellectuals, whose power,

inuence, and wealth were oen built on the exploitation of others

through systems of colonialism and enslavement. Western canons

have been criticized for their racial, ethnic, and gendered biases, as

well as their elitism and failure to represent the diversity and com

plexity of contemporary U.S. college students. As universities and

colleges have increasingly brought global challenges into under

graduate classrooms, many honors colleges have asked how they

can modernize the liberal arts for the twenty-rst century.

We argue that honors colleges can deploy the power of the

liberal arts to emphasize diversity, equity, global citizenship, and

empowerment by combining liberal arts and STEM elds in inter

disciplinary approaches to global challenges, such as climate change,

the pandemic, and forced displacement. We advocate for the goal

of inspiring the next generation of ethically engaged global leaders,

scholars, and practitioners. Traditionally, the liberal arts included

arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, grammar, logic, music, and rhet

oric, but today the liberal arts have evolved to include such elds

as art, science, history, languages, and literature, to name a few. A

liberal arts education embraces the breadth and depth of human

existence. In a society increasingly motivated by material culture,

the liberal arts allow for an expansiveness of thinking, an explora

tion of human creativity, and an emphasis on understanding and

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bettering the human condition. Beyond pragmatism and applica-

tion, a liberal arts education allows for the unfettered contemplation

of human possibility. (See the Forum on Honors Beyond the Lib

eral Arts.)

is chapter builds on our experiences of retaining a com

mitment to the liberal arts and humanities while developing

interdisciplinary majors, courses, and programs emphasizing

STEM training and featuring partnerships across the liberal arts

and professional schools. At two very dierent institutions—a

Research 1, Division 1 public university, Texas Tech University

(TTU), and a large private urban research university, Boston Uni

versity (BU)—we shied the honors curriculum away from a focus

on great books/great ideas to one on interdisciplinary approaches

to grand challenges. While preserving the free inquiry characteris

tic of the liberal arts and resisting cuts to the humanities, the new

curriculum brings these values to the most contemporary issues

and approaches, thus positioning students to center humanistic

and ethical perspectives, regardless of their future professions.

background

When TTU founded its honors college twenty-one years ago,

transforming the small program housed in the College of Arts and

Sciences into a full-edged college, TTU students, faculty, and

sta were invited to create a small liberal arts-like college within

a large research university. In these twenty-one years, the TTU

Honors College has developed a mission “to provide an enriched

learning experience for intellectually capable and curious under

graduate students” and “serve as a catalyst for innovative growth

and change at the University” (Texas Tech). Working closely with

all TTU colleges and schools, the honors college invites the most

talented, generous, innovative scholar-teachers to sustain an envi

ronment in which academically ambitious students have access to

the resources of a major research university. ey engage in intense,

intellectually rigorous conversations in small seminar-style classes.

e honors college’s enriched curriculum hones students’ critical

thinking and multi-modal communication skills and exposes them

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to extraordinary educational experiences such as a senior thesis,

study abroad, community service and engagement, and intern

ships. TTU honors courses dig deeper into a topic, introduce and

seek solutions to the grand challenges facing society today, and

question the validity of orthodox truisms.

Preparation of honors students at TTU is based on the inte

gration of a liberal arts education within the student’s major. Like

many students in other honors colleges, TTU honors students may

major in any area the institution oers. e TTU Honors College

remains one of the few honors colleges, however, that hosts its own

major, Honors Science and the Humanities (HSH).

Boston University’s Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand

Honors College, founded in 2010 and renamed in 2011 aer a record

$25 million gi from trustee Rajen Kilachand, was designed to oer

a four-year undergraduate program and living-learning community

to BU’s highest-performing incoming rst-year students. Students

enroll in one of BU’s degree-granting undergraduate schools and

colleges and take approximately a quarter of their credits through

the Kilachand Honors College. e initial goal of the college was to

provide the small classes, personal attention, close interaction with

faculty, and communal atmosphere of a small liberal arts college,

together with the intellectual range and resources of a major urban

research university. e curriculum emphasized great books and

big ideas, interdisciplinary exploration, and the ethical dilemmas

of history. e value of this version of the liberal arts was dicult

to articulate, particularly to students enrolled in BU’s professional

schools, including engineering, business, education, and pre-med;

moreover, retention of these students was a challenge.

Despite their commitment to oering small classes and addi

tional resources to high-achieving students, the honors colleges at

TTU and BU have each faced the challenge of convincing a new

generation of parents and students of the malleability, utility, and

foundational importance of the liberal arts and humanities as the

number of science and engineering majors continues to increase.

To meet this challenge, we reconceptualized and rebranded lib

eral arts education for the twenty-rst century while maintaining

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a strong emphasis on the humanities and critical inquiry, a shi

we believe provides a model for other honors colleges. Although

the histories and missions of TTU and BU are dierent, a similar

approach to modernizing the liberal arts was applied successfully at

both honors colleges.

implementations:

texas tech university honors science and humanities

In the past ten years, as discourse about economic recessions,

employment challenges, and other structural disruptions per

meates the media, more students understand college as focused

professional training rather than an opportunity for intellectual

exploration. Even in honors colleges, where the principles of cre

ative and critical thinking are a prominent focus, students are

burdened with major requirements that are becoming increasingly

specic, skills oriented, and narrow in perspective.

By the fall of 2018, the number of students in TTU Honors Col

lege’s previous liberal arts major—Honors Arts and Letters—had

become critically low, causing the TTU Honors College to rethink

how to commit students to creative and critical thinking in the lib

eral arts. Evaluation of major choices helped in determining the

direction and focus of what this revamped liberal arts major should

be in light of the fact that TTU Honors College students may choose

to declare a major oered by any of the colleges at Texas Tech. In

fact, most students have declared a STEM eld major within either

the TTU College of Arts & Sciences or the Whitacre College of

Engineering. e Honors Science and Humanities (HSH) major

was created to modernize the liberal arts curriculum, bringing the

ancient Greek trivium and quadrivium into the twenty-rst cen

tury while focusing on the development of STEM elds and talents.

HSH majors can choose from four concentrations, all of which cen

ter the vocabulary of the humanities as the driving factor in human

discovery and action:

• Medicine, Global Health, and the Humanities. is concen

tration encourages pre-health honors students to broaden

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their educational experiences in order to become more

competitive applicants to professional healthcare programs

and more well-rounded professionals. rough a profound

exploration of the intersections between health, healing, and

the humanities, graduates will be able to better communi

cate the compassion, creativity, and innovation of scientic

thinking in humanistic terms.

• Environment and the Humanities. With its foundation in the

sciences, this concentration focuses on the study of the human

relationship to the environment. Courses draw upon science,

engineering, philosophy, literature, and the arts. Honors stu

dents delve profoundly into environmental sciences through

the historic relationship between human beings and their

surroundings.

• Politics, Philosophy, Economics, and the Law. is concen

tration is designed to oer students the opportunity to gain

a solid sense of the human-constructed world, where it

came from, and where it may be going. e track explores

the world’s greatest intellectual and cultural achievements,

as well as the struggles and tensions that are always part of

politics, power, and privilege. Honors students will hone

their skills in writing, multi-modal communication, schol

arly research, and critical analysis, better preparing them for

graduate school and/or a broad range of careers in law, busi

ness, communication, education, and advocacy.

• Humanities-Driven STEM (HDSTEM). e HDSTEM focus

is now being developed with the generous support of an

NEH Connections Planning Grant. is concentration

oers honors students interested in engineering, architec

ture, structural design, urban planning, natural resources,

and life cycle analysis the opportunity to contextualize con

struction, manufacturing, and industrial practices within

a discourse on human and natural environments. Students

engage with complex questions in the areas of sustainabil

ity, marketing, and fabrication even as they connect to the

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historic and social impacts of scientic, industrial, and tech-

nological revolutions.

Each concentration is made up of a selection of ve courses devel

oped in collaboration with the other colleges, the Museum of

Texas Tech, the School of Law, the TTU Health Sciences Center

(TTUHSC), the STEM CORE, and Mexican American and Latinx

Studies. e TTU Honors College works in collaboration with

the Creative Process Commons and the Humanities Center to

create curricular and co-curricular oerings that foreground the

humanities pedagogically and methodologically in each of these

concentrations. Moreover, interdisciplinary collaboration through

team teaching is strongly encouraged for all programs within the

HSH major. is interdisciplinary focus allows students to see the

interaction between elds rsthand and learn the challenges and

triumphs of an interconnected world.

beyond honors science and the humanities

HSH is the hallmark of TTU’s honors liberal arts education.

e dened coursework and tracks give students control of their

education as they confront the rigor of critical thinking and inno

vative ideation. While some honors students may choose a dierent

major than HSH, HSH courses are available to all honors students.

Further, the many programs the TTU Honors College provides for

students are guided by the same principles of HSH and a liberal

arts education. In their exit surveys, graduating seniors note the

following as evidence of our teaching excellence and commitment

to student academic success:

• Undergraduate Research Scholars (URS) Program is the

largest undergraduate research program at the university; it

pairs students committed to research with faculty mentors

(including those at the School of Law and TTUHSC); sup

ports undergraduate travel and registration fees to present at

professional research conferences as well as publications and

honors college theses; and results in work in graduate labs,

archives, and libraries;

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• Honors seminars dare students to think creatively, innova-

tively, and beyond the four walls of a classroom with such

oerings as Sustaining the Global Ecology and Economy in

the 21st Century; Exploring Human Interaction rough

Video Games; Introduction to Scientic Illustration: Bones,

Birds, and Botanicals; Epidemiology of Infectious and

Chronic Diseases; and Icons of Popular Culture: Mystery

Science eater 3000;

• Honors Summit courses bring theory and praxis together in

experiential ways with such oerings as Global Grand Chal

lenges: Past, Present, and Future; Hamlet, Unlimited; Science

Fiction and Science; Principles of Public Health; and Making

a Sustainable Future: Environmental, Economic, and Social

Impacts of Sustainability;

• First-Year Experience (FYE)/Learning Community Group

(LCG) Program oers core curriculum taught by some of the

best teachers/scholars at TTU to help the transition of rst-

year students to university life. Special Topics Workshops

in LCGs encourage rst-year students to become familiar

with the vocabulary of the timeliest issues (mental health,

substance abuse, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality,

rape culture and campus safety, and microaggressions) and

understand best practices in engaging in civil dialogues;

• TTU Honors HDSTEM Film Series—a collaboration with

Alamo Drahouse that invites the honors community, the

wider TTU campus, and members of the city of Lubbock

to view lms and then hear from two speakers, a humanist

and a scientist, as they discuss the intersections of the arts,

humanities, and STEM in popular culture;

• TTU Honors special guest lectures—with a particular focus

on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and with the support

of other entities on the TTU campus, honors students are

invited to have one-on-one discussions with some of the

most important thinkers, writers, and innovators of the age,

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followed by a larger public lecture. Guests have included

Julio Ricardo Varela, Harriet Washington, Katharine Hay

hoe, and many more.

Ultimately, the honors college asks our students not just what

they want to be when their academic career ends, but who they

want to be and what it means to be human. And we ask the funda

mental question of what it means to grow and learn. TTU Honors

College students rise to the challenge and seek solutions to our

grand challenges through research, creative activity, writing, team

work, and innovation. Our in-house faculty, aliated faculty, and

sta are committed to undergraduate education and work to cre

ate the space and ambience that allows for inquiry, invention, and

application. With creative approaches to pedagogy, interdisciplin

ary classes, team teaching, and non-traditional coursework, our

students, faculty, and sta make every experience one in which we

can grow and excel together.

implementations:

boston university’s interdisciplinary perspectives

on global challenges

Faced with many of the same challenges as the TTU Honors

College, the BU Kilachand Honors College rearticulated its mission

to provide a liberal arts education and small living-learning com

munity with a focus on three interconnected pillars: Community,

Knowledge, and Humanity.

Community

rough co-curricular and social events, personal and pro-

fessional development opportunities, peer mentoring, and

empowerment spaces, we invite students to participate fully in our

diverse community. Each course also develops its own community,

fostered by a common pursuit of knowledge.

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Knowledge

Kilachand Honors College oers a challenging liberal education

grounded in exploration, discovery, creativity, and the real-world

applications of knowledge. We rearticulated the goal of a liberal arts

education as one that nurtures the capacity to engage armatively

and skillfully with diverse social, cultural, scientic, and philosoph

ical discourses and perspectives. We emphasize a free exchange and

expression of ideas, constructive debate that respects intellectual

and cultural diversity, and the principle of pluralism as a source

of strength and insight. We apply perspectives from the sciences,

arts, humanities, and professional schools to understand the shared

conditions of our humanity.

Humanity

Kilachand students consider important global, social, corpo-

rate, and geopolitical challenges both inside the classroom and

outside in our experiential learning program, which oers students

opportunities to learn by doing and reecting on the experience

of doing. Our students imagine and execute a substantial work of

empirical or scholarly research, creativity, or invention that we call

the Keystone Project. e Kilachand Internship Program supports

students participating in unpaid social justice internships. rough

our collaboration with Boston Medical Center’s diversity initiative,

our students may teach and mentor Boston Public High School

students interested in health careers through a unique pipeline

program. Finally, Kilachand students can participate in short-term

study abroad programs in challenging environments through our

Initiative on Forced Displacement.

example:

boston university’s focus on forced displacement

Kilachand Honors College’s multi-pronged work on the global

challenge of forced displacement is perhaps the clearest example of

our approach to modernizing the liberal arts for twenty-rst-century

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learners. Our program responds to a series of crises that have led

the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR) to identify over 100

million people of concern in May 2022. e challenge of forced dis

placement is rooted in myriad factors, ranging from conict and

colonialism to corruption and climate change. Refugees and inter

nally displaced communities are without nancial and political

agency and regularly languish in camps for decades. We developed

three interrelated tiers to address this situation:

1. Interdisciplinary honors coursework;

2. Experiential learning in complex environments; and

3. Co-curricular discussions, events, and project support. Each

tier is fully interdisciplinary and seeks to bridge classroom-

based learning and practical experiences.

We established an honors course that is team-taught by faculty

hailing from international relations, engineering, the humanities,

anthropology, and law. A central argument of the class is that the

insights and methods of every discipline are needed to under

stand forced displacement and propose ethical solutions. e class

balances the goals of studying the massive scale of the problem

with lectures on, for example, the history and legal framework of

the UNHCR with a focus on a particular displacement context.

Another topic was the Afghan refugee crisis; it had, even before the

end of the U.S. occupation in August 2021, produced more than

two million refugees, with many more eeing Taliban rule. Human

displacement is an aspect of human mobility and involves all facets

of what it means to be human, including, but not limited to, gender

and sexuality, health and well-being, race and ethnicity, religion,

creativity, technology, and urban cultures. Displacement is not a

phenomenon limited to a particular group or a specic region: it is

a human condition to which we are all potentially, albeit dierently,

vulnerable. Rejecting the narrative that refugees contribute little

of cultural value or are helpless victims in need of aid, we invite

students to reect on the resilience and ingenuity of refugee com

munities as well as their art, literature, and culture.

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Connected to the interdisciplinary course on forced displace-

ment, we have established an experiential learning program with

partners at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon); Maker

ere University in Kampala (Uganda); Universidad de los Andes in

Bogotá (Colombia); and two Texas-based NGOs, Refugee Services

of Texas and Rio Valley Relief Project. Our students and faculty in

the program study the refugee crisis for two to three weeks alongside

their counterparts at partner universities and participate in estab

lished eorts to respond to forced displacement. e courses open

with discussions of the context, demographics, and history of dis

placed populations and how any particular group (Syrian refugees

in Lebanon or South American asylum seekers at the Mexico-U.S.

border) t into the international refugee paradigm. We discuss the

emotional and physical health challenges faced by refugees and

the all-important concerns of respect, sensitivity, cultural under

standing, and ethical conduct of research in humanitarian crises.

We work directly with local NGOs, government institutions, and

policymakers, as well as domain experts, and we ultimately ask our

students to identify opportunities to improve the health and well-

being of displaced populations.

As in the semester-long honors course, students in our short-

term, immersive programs benet from watching faculty with

dierent disciplinary expertise and personal perspectives work

together and even disagree with each other: a scholar of gender

might critique the biases of international refugee policies and dis

cuss gender-based violence, including child marriage in refugee

communities. An anthropologist points to the West-centric cultural

assumptions underlying many eorts to stop child marriage and

how some feminist projects fail to consider religion and cultural

beliefs. Some engineers celebrate the impact of humanitarian engi

neering interventions while others point to the technophilia and

ethical complexity of many projects. Students in interdisciplinary

teams can help each other recognize blind spots, cultural biases, or

an inability to communicate a design idea to diverse stakeholders.

Fieldwork and direct engagement with displaced people and

humanitarian workers are crucial aspects of the program, as are

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conversations about the ethical dangers of voluntourism or disas-

ter-tourism. Students and faculty alike must face the complexity of

establishing courses, conducting research, and developing projects

in a humanitarian crisis. Our students want to help and feel like

they are good citizens of the world. At the same time, we must admit

that students and faculty are benetting more from the program

than are the refugees, aid workers, and asylum seekers. Faculty

might publish studies, design a new technology, develop teaching

and research expertise, or otherwise advance their careers. Students

add unique skills and experiences to their résumés. We all secure

a story to discuss at interviews, professional meetings, and social

engagements. We must acknowledge that our motivations include

ambition and fascination as well as a desire to help.

Knowing that neither a short-term experiential program nor an

entire semester is enough to address forced displacement, we pro

vide spaces for students to process their experiences and develop

projects further in the third and nal tier, our co-curricular

program. We oer opportunities for students to engage with practi

tioners, writers, and scholars; watch and discuss lms and plays; or

visit exhibitions. We also provide structured support for students to

develop projects or research they began in courses and short-term

intensive programs. Students who participate in the co-curricular

programs do not earn course credit, but they do fulll general

education requirements. We recognize that the three tiers of the

initiative cannot do justice to the challenge of forced displacement,

but we oer multiple opportunities for students to engage with the

problem and hope that they will pursue other disciplinary tracks

and courses to further their education in this area.

texas tech university impacts

e approach of blending elds and reinvigorating the liberal

arts is also working at TTU: HSH course enrollments and major

declarations have both increased. Such innovation is a common

theme in many honors-related publications: essays on interdisci

plinarity, trandisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and integrative

learning are well represented in both Honors in Practice and the

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Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council. ese peda-

gogical and education research eorts in the honors education

eld have been helpful in guiding the TTU Honors College in the

development of the HSH major and investigating the eectiveness

of the new liberal arts approach. rough this investigation, the

TTU Honors College has been successful in receiving grants from

the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). ese grants

have helped grow and promote the HSH major and HDSTEM

curriculum via research on interdisciplinarity, especially the rela

tionship between the humanities and STEM and the manner in

which STEM students can benet from exposure to creativity and

innovation (Bequette and Bequette; Henriksen). While the human

ities have traditionally played little or no role in STEM education

(Wisnioski), natural connections exist between the humanities and

STEM that deepen students’ educational experiences (Hudson et

al.). For example, new technologies designed and manufactured

by scientists and engineers have an impact on how we communi

cate within and across societies (Ertas). e HSH degree program

explicitly makes these connections and links humanities to STEM

through the interdisciplinary background of faculty.

HDSTEM expands upon current interdisciplinary approaches

by introducing STEM problem-solving skills and methods within

a humanities framework, which in turn may help students develop

empathy. When students are provided a context of where and why

problems arise and are asked to use typical STEM problem-solving

approaches, they are encouraged to empathize with those impacted

by the problem and to explore the larger needs of society, the

motivations of actors, and quality of life considerations. Further,

students have more to say about a situation when they are asked

to problem solve and empathize with a given topic (Carrell et al.,

“Using Humanities”; Carrell et al., “Humanities-Driven STEM”).

Students change their perspectives in these interdisciplin

ary settings, particularly when problem-solving. For example, in

HDSTEM courses, students move from a very technical and hard

science approach in problem-solving to a more well-rounded

approach when they attend more to the social, political, and ethical

implications of their decision-making. is type of problem-solving

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is helpful for all honors students, especially those in STEM. As Wal-

ther et al. note, in line with guidelines put forth by the Accreditation

Board for Engineering and Technology (“Criteria”), engineering

students should learn skills that promote teamwork, eective com

munication, and reection on the role that engineering plays in

society—each of these skills requires an empathetic disposition.

Many STEM programs focus only on developing scientic, mathe

matical, and engineering content knowledge, divorcing these topics

from the emotional and social contexts in which they are situated

(Hoople and Choi-Fitzpatrick; McCurdy et al.).

boston university assessment, challenges,

and further work

Kilachand Honors College’s approach to liberal arts education

and our program on forced displacement have been successful when

measured by student and faculty satisfaction. We have seen marked

improvements in student retention, one metric for student satisfac

tion that is a challenge for some honors colleges. First-year student

retention in Kilachand Honors College has increased from a low of

65% in the prior curriculum and remained above 90% for all four

cohorts matriculating under the current program, an increase of

38%. Four-year graduation rates per class year have reached and

exceeded 60% for the rst time in the history of the college (from a

low of 38% for the class of 2017), an increase of 71%.

We have certainly faced dicult moments in the classroom and

experiential learning program, but these challenges have regularly

reinforced the depth of learning taking place. Students have asked

crucial questions: Do we have the right to discuss and/or represent

refugees when we have not experienced displacement ourselves?

Can we avoid patronizing narratives and white saviorism? How do

we ask our students and ourselves to persevere in the face of the

inability of academia to solve the problems we discuss? Ultimately,

these questions demand that we face our own inadequacy, culpabil

ity, and privilege in relation to forced displacement with humility

and compassion.

418

C, W, C, P,  Z

Our program will never solve the problem of displacement, but

one of our future goals is to nd ways to support the further devel

opment and possible implementation of student projects, many

of which have been excellent. Several of our students and faculty

members have published research articles, essays, and op-eds. A

team of four Kilachand honors students (all pursuing liberal arts

majors) and an engineering student from the American University

of Beirut won the concluding pitch competition in Lebanon in 2018

with their prototype for an educational platform they designed to

prepare Syrian refugee children for Lebanese schools. e team

continued to work on their design and took rst place in BU’s Hult

Prize competition in the fall of 2018, then moved on to the regional

competition. Still, our program cannot boast that any of our stu

dents have implemented their work.

Although most of the assignments from university profes

sors, including BU’s, do not result in implementation (nor are they

designed for this purpose), we feel a responsibility to the displaced

people and aid workers who speak with our students and give them

their valuable time and energy. If we are not contributing solutions,

how is the program avoiding voluntourism, or worse, disaster tour

ism? We engage this question with students, without pretending

that we have an easy answer. We are bolstered by the student reec

tions on experiences, including their thoughts on the potential

pitfalls of the program:

My time in Uganda was one of the most challenging and

eye-opening experiences that I have ever had. . . . Aer the

rst week of our trip to Uganda, I was ready to go home. I

was extremely critical of the program, other students, and

struggling with culture shock. However, by the last week, I

found myself surrounded by so many new, life-long friends

in a beautiful country and not ready to go home. I have

learned to be more exible, optimistic, and open-minded

on this journey in ways that I never planned to become.

—Education Student

419

L A

I learned so much more about how the world works, and I

also learned so much more about myself. Travelling and liv

ing in a country completely dierent from the United States

or even anywhere else I’ve visited exposed me to so many

new, dierent perspectives on how to view the world . . .

over the course of the trip, I rediscovered myself. I regained

my condence in my abilities to lead and work in teams.

—College of Arts and Sciences Student

e course aorded me a brief glimpse into the vivid com

plexities of life as a refugee which only helped reinforce

my beliefs in the responsibilities of the privileged towards

those who are not so. What was most unexpected was that

despite the seemingly endless nature of the war back home

and the grave hardships the refugees face day to day, not

one of the people we met saw a future not based in their

homeland. Such determination and hope was a stark and

refreshing counter to prevalent narratives about refugees

being aimless and uncertain in the determination of their

future.

—Engineering Student

Many comments in the student evaluations reveal that the program

changes lives. Yet, as with any university course, the long-term

impact on students is dicult to measure. Since 2018, several have

taken professional positions relevant to forced displacement, stud

ied international law, or pursued other relevant graduate degrees.

We are challenged to make sure our program is feasible and

sustainable into the future. Interdisciplinary team teaching is cen

tral to the BU Honors College, but it is also resource-intensive. We

depend on the chairs and deans of other colleges to release faculty

to teach in the honors college, which does not have faculty lines.

Currently, the core faculty who teach and travel for our co-curric

ular and short-term intensive programs do so at their own expense

or use research funds. We are committed to making the course

accessible to all students, regardless of personal resources, so we

must raise funds to support their participation as well. We have

been honored by the support of donors and charitable foundations,

420

C, W, C, P,  Z

and deans of other schools and colleges have provided funding for

their students to participate. us, we can demonstrate the larger

contributions of honors education and programming to the entire

university and fulll another valuable mission of honors colleges,

that is, to serve as incubators for innovative pedagogies and pro

grams focused on interdisciplinary approaches to major global and

ethical challenges. e incubation for our work on forced displace

ment took place within the honors college, but we are extending it

to benet the entire university.

conclusions

e “Census of U.S. Honors Colleges” included in this volume

reveals that only 10.8% of honors colleges at all institutions sur

veyed consider their pedagogical orientation to be a “Great Books”

curriculum in 2021—a curriculum that is oen mistakenly col

lapsed into understandings of the liberal arts. e new approach,

for 87.9% of honors colleges, emphasizes “Interdisciplinary/cross-

disciplinary” pedagogies, but only 24.8% highlight “Global studies”

(Cognard-Black and Smith 62). e survey did not ask honors col

leges to comment specically on a “liberal arts framework,” but at

TTU and BU, we have brought the best features of the liberal arts

approach, including its interdisciplinarity and ability to critique the

foundations of the so-called “Great Books,” to global challenges and

STEM education. We believe this approach is crucial to the eort to

recruit and retain diverse students who pursue STEM and profes

sional degrees with the highest ethical standards, especially given

the troubling low number of underrepresented minority students

in honors colleges and the lack of diversity of the leaders of honors

colleges, topics taken up in other chapters in this volume (Dinan et

al.; Pereira et al.).

Our honors colleges have redened the liberal arts and sciences

for the twenty-rst century by bringing the best interdisciplinary

approaches to global challenges and grand problems. Our programs

have focused on the human dimension of all disciplines, ensuring

courses benet from the skill of humanists at broaching di

cult conversations and ethical challenges. Exciting developments

421

L A

include team teaching and collaborations that, for example, bring

the design thinking that is a crucial skill in STEM to humanities

and social science projects. Honors curricula at our colleges have

served as incubators for innovative courses and pedagogies in

other programs. ey have advanced arguments for more inclusive

undergraduate communities, and our honors colleges have used

their exciting curricula to recruit diverse and historically under

represented students and faculty into honors while also equipping

those students with the crucial skills of being able to analyze some

of the world’s most pressing problems.

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