Honors Program

Learning Objectives

Students who successfully complete their program in the Honors College will:

1. Be able to clearly and thoughtfully articulate their own understanding of what makes for a meaningful and well-lived life, expressing their ideas and questions by drawing on some of the foundational texts that inform, illuminate, provoke, or challenge their understanding of themselves and the world.
2. Become exceptional in the arts of communication, both oral and written. Students will not only develop excellent habits of mind; they will also develop excellent habits of interpersonal communication so that they can clearly express their ideas and values to others, especially those who may strongly disagree with them. Students will learn to navigate spaces of civil and thoughtful disagreement about the good life and society.
3. Examine, discuss, and write about foundational texts in a manner that reflects deep, sustained, and serious reflection upon them. Students will become more thoughtful, self-aware, and intellectually and ethically responsible about matters of existential import to humanity. Students will be able to give persuasive reasons in support of their interpretation of texts and be able to construct and defend valid arguments in support of an ethical or political position.

Honors Core (12 hours)

Honors students take one Honors seminar each semester for four semesters. In each seminar, students trace the development of our collective understanding of what makes for a good human being and citizen. The Honors courses are sequenced so that students read and assess past thinkers in their own right, as well as consider how subsequent thinkers use, abuse, enlist, and/or reject thinkers who came before them. Honors professors encourage students to think hard about difficult ideas, to ask unsettling questions, to defend what they say with good reasons, and to write well. By engaging great thinkers who have come before us in this way, Honors students come to better understand themselves and the world in which we live.

• HON 2123 Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem (3 credit hours, Block I)
• HON 2143 The Long Middle Ages (3 credit hours, Block II)
• HON 2223 The Birth of Modernity (3 credit hours, Block I)
• HON 2243 The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (3 credit hours, Block II)

Honors Senior Project (3 credit hours)

After completing the Honors Core, students must design and implement an Honors Senior Project. The Honors Senior Project is an opportunity to design independent work that will complement a student’s growing mastery in their major and/or enable them to explore questions and ideas that pique their interest.

Figuring out just what sort of endeavors will best serve the student’s intellectual and educational aspirations is part of the challenge of the Senior Project. Each Honors student must find a faculty member willing to serve as the primary advisor of their Honors Senior Project (they may enlist the help of other faculty, but one faculty member serves as their advisor). Together with the advisor, the student should identify strengths and weaknesses and articulate interest areas and questions around which the Honors Senior Project might be designed.

The Honors Senior Project requirement is satisfied by one or more courses amounting to three credit hours (e.g., HON 4001 Senior Project , HON 4002 Senior Project , and/or HON 4003 Senior Project ). Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the Dean’s Office.

Contact

If you have questions about the Honors Program, please contact Dr. Jennifer Frey, Dean of the Honors College, at honors@utulsa.edu.