New Directions for the Yeshiva College Honors Program

I'd like for us to take the opportunity, together, to use this transition year in the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program as an occasion for public discussion of our hopes for the Program. As this year's Honors Program Director, I'm happy to take the first step - in this column - by framing out my own "vision" for the Program, and by inviting students and faculty to join in a year-long dialogue in which our national search for a director can also play a stimulating part.

Yeshiva College's Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program aims to constitute an ideal intellectual community in which the College's most talented and motivated students can expect to be intellectually challenged, supported and nurtured by one another and by close, committed relationships with individual faculty. Small classes, faculty mentors and gifted peers mean a personal commitment - to enabling every Honors student to feel confident in his own ambitions and to find his own interests and strengths and pursue them as deeply and as far as he can.

From its inception, the Honors program has raised the level of the College's promise to students. The program has created a curriculum that offers Honors students a series of increasingly sophisticated and ambitious challenges: from the paired first-year seminars to a set of more advanced Honors-designated courses throughout the curriculum; and culminating with a two-term senior thesis project in which each student does original work in one-on-one partnership with a faculty mentor. At the same time, by creating the impetus for faculty to propose new interdisciplinary courses and special Honors sections of other courses, and for all students at the College to take advantage of these "permeable" opportunities, the Honors Program has committed itself to serving as a source of intellectual inspiration and curricular innovation throughout the College.

We are now poised to take greater advantage of the Honors Program's richness of student and faculty talent and of administrative commitment and resources. In turn, in modeling intellectual community the Honors Program can continue to serve as a source of intellectual excitement and growth for the entire College.

I. MODELING INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY: HONORS STUDENTS, HONORS FACULTY

This year we have already put in motion a series of programs - many of them new, others already vital elements of the Program - aimed at creating and sustaining a sense of community among Honors students and a set of strong, dynamic relationships between Yeshiva College faculty members and Honors students.

1. Honors Forum: regularly scheduled, informal meetings over lunch aimed at strengthening lines of communication between Honors Program administrators and Honors students, including discussion of new directions for the Program.

2. Honors Student Board: this year we have initiated annual elections of a five-member student board empowered to provide Honors Program administrators with a "go-to" student organization and to provide Honors students with representation on College committees, including the Honors Committee and the Honors Director search committee.

3. Honors Roundtable: a series of intimately scaled lunches with selected YU faculty members at which Honors students will have the opportunity to hear their professors explain how they came to do what they do and what they love about it; and, most importantly, to invite open dialogue between Honors students and faculty about "vocation" itself.

4. Top of YU-Traveling on the Path: a series of wilderness activities aimed at pushing students' limits, building a sense of community among Honors students, and developing a core group of advanced Honors students committed to orienting and mentoring incoming Honors students.

5. Our first one-day student-led conference funded by the Program-focusing this year on Jews, Politics, and Power-will take place this spring, and will provide an unusual opportunity for students and a faculty advisor to take the lead in bringing to campus nationally known speakers and editing a publishable proceedings.

6. When the Honors student lounge and conference room in the new Honors Center in the basement of Furst Hall are completed, they will be utilized for the scheduling of various Honors events.

7. We have committed specially designated Honors advisors to providing intensive one-on-one attention to Honors students, beginning with registration for first-term-on-campus courses.

As these new programs come to life, I would also like to open up discussion of the linked proposals below and to pilot as many of them as we can in the coming year.

II. MODELING INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY: THE HONORS PROGRAM INITIATIVE

I propose that we frame at least one and ideally two years in advance of each academic year a broadly engaging annual theme or question around which multi-disciplinary intellectual inquiry in the Honors program can be focused, deepened - and shared.

1. Each year a Visiting Honors Professor with a national reputation as a discipline-crossing innovator in his/her field would come to the YC Honors Program-either from outside the University or from one of our own graduate schools-to teach a related seminar in the Program.

2. Each year two faculty members from Yeshiva College would be designated (on a rotating basis) College Honors Professors, and teach only in the Honors Program. Each of these faculty members would teach an Honors seminar related to the annual theme-and teach several Honors tutorials of between one and three Honors students, on specialized topics developed in conversation with interested Honors students.

3. Each year a Yeshiva College Honors Seminar - taught by a Schottenstein Honors Professor, a Visiting Honors Professor, or a College Honors Professor - would bring together six faculty members and six advanced Honors students (who would compete for places in the Seminar) for intensive exploration of some aspect of the annual theme.

4. An Honors Program Book Project would select each year a text related to the annual theme, which would be the basis for a kickoff preseminar for Honors students at Orientation in August, followed by discussion in each freshman Honors seminar and in a series of year-long public events.

5. Each year the one-day student-led conference funded by the Program would focus on some aspect of the annual theme - capitalizing on and deepening the Program-wide discussions taking place.

6. Each year the Program would provide additional funding to specially encourage faculty proposals for Honors courses relating to the annual theme.

7. Beginning in Fall 2009, Professor Peter Achinstein's Center for Philosophy and Science will provide a crucial resource for bringing to campus nationally known figures working to cross the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences. When a second Schottenstein Professor is appointed, we will be even more strongly positioned to provide Honors students and faculty with opportunities for innovative dialogue and collaboration.

As we move forward in discussions about the future of the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program - discussions about both leadership and intellectual direction - I hope that these opening comments can serve as the initial basis for conversation and planning. I invite both students and faculty to be in touch with me (jacobson@yu.edu) about these ideas: about their responses to the ideas, and about their own roles in bringing these ideas to life.

Joanne Jacobson is associate dean of YC and the 2008-2009 director of the honors program