For minds hungry for knowledge and eager for academic challenges, Mars Hill College has a new plan. An honors program was approved last spring, pushing it to the final stage of development.
According to a proposal provided by Marshall Angle, the director of the Title III project, the program will establish an Honors Center, offer group activities such as scholar retreats and grant students $1,000 a year scholarships. Honor students will also enjoy certain privileges, including priority registration and housing, as well as extended book borrowing from Renfro Library.
The academic components of the program contain LAA111H courses for freshmen scholars, seminars and mini-courses for sophomores and juniors and an “H-contract” for seniors.
As a special three-credit Liberal Arts in Action course, LAA111H will introduce students to the program and inform them of their obligations. Five-week mini-courses will be one credit and will encourage faculty-student communications in non-traditional disciplines. The honors-designated courses, known as the “H-contract,” are also one credit and will emphasize responsibilities in students’ major disciplines.
“It’s a hybrid of different models that will work for Mars Hill,” said Jason Pierce, the chair of the humanities division who is actively engaged in the development of the program.
Other than to improve the academic environment, the program also aims to motivate students out of the classroom and into unfamiliar fields of study.
“I am really excited about the co-curricular activities,” Angle said. “They will get students to do things beyond the classroom …you know, ‘Hey, go up on the parkway and go for a hike!’”
“The mini-courses and H-contracts are designed to push you to do something that you won’t otherwise do, both for students and faculty,” Pierce said. “They are seeds for a new course or even a new discipline. If only one flowers into something new, we’ve done our work.”
Another important purpose of the program is to create team spirit, or “esprit de corps,” as Angle described it. And according to Pierce, the program, different from “just scholarships,” will establish better connections among students.
“We are not trying to find, say, the 50 best people, but 50 people for a best team,” Pierce said.
Students must meet certain minimum requirements to be selected, such as standard test grades, class-rank and GPA, but most importantly, they have to be inquisitive and unique, Pierce indicated.
“The application essays and interviews are very important. We are looking for something out of the blue…like math, math, math, math, math, pottery … that makes you different, because you can’t know something unless you’ve tried it,” he said.
The selectivity of the application process is still unknown. Ideally, the program will have 15 students per class and 60 in total. “We want to help as much as we can, but for an honors program, you can’t say yes to everyone,” Pierce said.
The development of the program has been “long but smooth” according to Angle, who said seeking money and coming to consensus were big challenges. “Everyone had different ideas. We had to accept the possibility that we might not end up doing it.”
After meetings and open forums, and despite of some concerns, the proposal eventually gained unanimous faculty support, according to Angle. The development took four years altogether, said Pierce.
Now a specific agenda must be created, which entails designing courses, appointing professors and recruiting students, according to Pierce.
“The program will increase students’ participation, transform the curriculum, push the students harder and help them become academic leaders,” he said.
“It will make Mars Hill College a better place for high achieving students,” Angle said.
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