The Director's Corner
The Director's Corner
January 6, 2025
Finding the Origins of Auburn Honors
Happy new year to the Auburn Honors Community. I hope that all of you are returning from the holidays feeling rested and ready for the spring semester.
Like many of you, I’ve spent some time this past week sorting through old things, with hopes of organizing belongings and discarding objects I don’t need anymore, but this annual activity also provides opportunities to reconnect with my past. For me, this experience was true of some old family photographs, but also of a folder I was handed in December of historic files from Auburn’s Honors College.
The folder I read through included old issues of CHPS: Newsletter of the Congress of Honors Program Students, which a few years later became The Honors Eagle. The earliest issue in the folder, dated May 12, 1983, provides a fascinating glimpse of the origins of Auburn’s Honors College, before it was even formally established as an academic program. First and foremost was an invitation to an afternoon tea, where Dr. David Lewis from the history department “will speak on the importance of a collegiate Honors Program.”
A set of proposed goals for the nascent Honors Program included “lobby[ing] the administration for funding,” requesting graduate student library privileges for Honors students, and improving methods of communication. This issue also listed the current cohorts of Honors students, with a remarkable growth trajectory: 14 in the class of 1983, 15 in the class of 1984 and 126 in the class of 1985.
A next issue, not dated but distributed just after the Honors Program’s new convocation in November, 1983, included a list of four (four!) Honors classes being taught in the Winter Quarter, an invitation to an Honors Cookout at Chewacla State Park, an announcement that the Honors Program was seeking a formal charter from the “Organizations board,” and a request from the Honors Congress President Gary G. Genge for student feedback on improving the Honors Congress. This issue also provided updates on the curriculum, including a proposed Lyceum class, and an upcoming meeting between Dr. Campbell and President Martin to propose an Honors College with three tracks, including a “Baccalureus Artium et Scientiae” degree alongside distinction pathways rather like what Auburn Honors provides today.
By February, 1984, CHPS announced that the Honors Program “sent 710 invitations to prospective students. Welcome class of 1988!”
It’s remarkable to look back on the origins of an institution that is now so fully established, to think about the tiny program from which has grown a college with approximately 2,300 intellectually ambitious students, a multi-faceted curriculum, and a robust array of co-curricular programs and events. But it is equally remarkable to see the continuity the early CHPS demonstrates between the beginnings of Auburn Honors and the present day.
Then and now, students have been the vital core of Honors, energizing our work and moving us forward. Then and now, Honors has been about a community of thinkers, coming together to discuss ideas, whether in formal courses or in informal social events. And then and now, Honors has been about a quest for more in one’s education — more than the test and the grade — seeking a more intensive cultivation of the mind. These ideals and goals connect us closely to the past, but they also position us for a future seen most of all in the young minds we are educating today.
I wish you all a vibrant year of purpose, community and growth.
Dr. Laura Stevens
Director, Honors College
Professor of English
