Philosophy of the College
The Honors College seeks to prepare highly talented and motivated students to face the 21st century by providing them with the intellectual perspectives and critical skills needed to exercise responsible leadership at every level of their lives. To achieve this goal, we have instituted an intense curricular and extracurricular program that asks students to view themselves and their work with integrity, passion, and seriousness. Students should graduate from the Honors College prepared to stand at the forefront of the arts, sciences, government, and the learned professions, determined to act with moral and intellectual rigor, and able to grasp the significance of their actions within, and for, a larger whole.

An intentionally provocative curricular and cocurricular design leads students to understand the central problems of the human condition as they confront us now and as they have been experienced in the past. The path to this understanding is through intensive analysis of influential texts and monuments of human greatness, ancient and modern. Initiated by reading, reflection, and discriminating discussion into the long honored search for truth and beauty, in active engagement with the fundamental issues of justice and liberty that have animated the course of civilization, the students in the College discover not just the limitations but also the possibilities of thinking clearly and turning thought into action in our increasingly complicated world. Schooled in the value of the highest ideals but chastened by an awareness of recalcitrant actualities, they are led to discover in themselves the intellectual power and flexibility, the deepened moral confidence and responsibility and the capacity—indeed, in some cases, the passion—for leadership that they will need to meet the formidable challenges and mysteries of the 21st century. The mission of the Honors College is to impart to the student body a breadth of vision and an intensity of aspiration that the students could barely glimpse before entering college.

Such lofty goals are not achieved easily. They require a detailed and concrete plan articulated over four years. This plan is outlined on the pages linked above.