Expanding Epistemological and Practical Considerations of Merit & Rigor in a University Honors Program: Why It Matters

By Becca Berkey

The Present, the Problem, and the Hope

When I, a career community engagement professional and administrator with an academic-activist identity in environmental sociology, was approached in Spring 2022 about the possibility of taking on leadership of our University Honors Program I looked behind me to make sure it was me being asked. As someone for whom community engagement and social justice are core values and drivers in my work, I admittedly saw not just our Honors Program, but the institution of ‘Honors’ as I have come to know it to be in stark contrast with those deeply held beliefs. Not only that, I grew up in a low-income household with a tumultuous family background and my mother really only ever took what I would consider to be an activist stance to keep me out of honors-like or ‘academically talented’ tracks in my K-12 education because of her belief in them as elitist institutions. Given all this, I was doubly shocked at the irony of even being considered for such a role. Yet, here I am, today, serving as the director of an Honors Program at a top 50, R1 university. So, what changed?

If indeed Honors is a microcosm of the elitism and meritocracy embedded and socialized through capitalism into the very ether of our institutions (and many would argue that it is not: see here and here as examples), do we walk away or do we engage by walking directly into the mouth of the beast, so to speak? What is to be gained by naming and challenging the narrowly defined forms of rigor often traditionally recognized and rewarded in these spaces, or to posit that there are a multitude of epistemic groundings through which problems can be explored and solved in community? As I pondered these questions, I reached out to a dear and revered colleague who I am grateful to also call a mentor and friend, Dr. Timothy K. Eatman, Inaugural Dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community at Rutgers University- Newark. Knowing what he had fostered there in his time with Honors made me believe that these questions are at the heart of something vitally important for institutions of higher education- when and where we are seeding the sort of future we wish to create (such as through our Honors efforts), what can it look like to do that in ways that are expansive rather than limiting, particularly as it pertains to bringing people into those systems who walk outside of the narrowly-defined constructs of success? How do we value, uplift, and uphold only what stands to contribute to the world, and not just what presents as performances of greater knowledge, no matter how novel they might be?

As I stepped into this new role, I retained my position as the director of Community-Engaged Teaching & Research, and the two teams moved into one office space together (centrally located on campus). For the first time in a very visceral and physical way I was confronted with the day-to-day interaction, potential synergy, and possible tension that may exist between what I saw as competing foundational values of the colleagues on each team. There were (and continue to be) countless ways that I am struck by how many of the people I have worked with in the field of community engagement are community organizers and activists by nature, and how uncommon that is in other spaces. While I have found people in community engagement work to be people who are drawn toward thinking creatively and expansively in deeply interconnected ways, what I found (at least initially) was a team in the Honors space for whom those practices were not as central. I observed them thinking and acting in ways that created a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts- one that often seeded and perpetuated (purposefully or not) a limited narrative of what constitutes excellence and how we measure and deeply understand if the work we’re doing is truly in pursuit of that. Additionally, there are programs such as ‘Place as Text’ (previously known as City as Text) in the broader Honors landscape that share in stated goals some commonalities with the field of community engagement, but, it could be argued, differ in practice and orientation toward that work.

Investigative Administrating

With these dynamics at play, I started with a fact-finding journey, aided by a transition period with the previous director of the program. There was a lot I had come to assume about the program based on my 9+ years at the university and my intermittent interaction with it over the years from my community-engaged teaching & research perspective and role. What I found was that there were a few things I was not too far off on, namely that the students received a number of benefits (financial and otherwise) for their selection to the program (which is, of course, amazing!). What I learned also explained some of what I’d observed in my interactions over the years- that students who enter the program upon matriculation do not apply for it- meaning they were offered admission to the Honors Program along with their admission to the university without having expressed interest in being considered for such an opportunity. What was communicated to them upon that admission was what they were gaining support-wise for that affiliation- and, as one can imagine, that led to wide variation of student engagement with the program. Some students were truly excited by the experiences, curricular and extracurricular in nature, that being part of the program offered them, and as such took advantage of every opportunity that came their way- and not just for the sake of completing the six requirements that were necessitated to graduate with this distinction. Other students said yes to access the benefits without necessarily having any interest in or intention of participating in the program beyond what was absolutely mandatory (and there were/are no consequences for not pursuing the distinction). Finally, there were students who could go either way- sure, maybe they hadn’t chosen this, but they were open to being convinced (or even if not, could be anyway). While this is the case with many efforts on college campuses, it was particularly stifling for a program team and its affiliated network of faculty and campus collaborators as they were trying to and held accountable for achieving ever-higher persistence rates through the program culminating in graduating with distinction. This did not account for the fact that some people would naturally just self-select out and because that wasn’t reflected in data captured, it looked on paper like lower numbers/percentages of the students were involved in multiple efforts of the program than they would have liked.

One final area that I observed during this phase of transition that aligned with my previous observations, and one which was reiterated by members of the team, students in the program, and others in the broader field of Honors education was what constituted the level or definition of rigor suitable for an Honors student. The message was sent to me time and again even before beginning in this role that ‘you have to remember, these are Honors students,’ and that meant that there needed to be more reading and writing in their experiences than there was in learning opportunities for non-Honors students. I also saw a fairly homogenous lineup of faculty engaged with the program, many of whom were classically trained in their disciplines and who had been teaching with the program for a long time. It’s not that what they brought to the table was bad, but rather what was troubling was what was missing from that table altogether- different and more expansive ways of knowing, being, and doing.

While all of this perhaps reinforced some of what I feared walking into this team and role, there was also a lot I have been (and continue to be) surprised and inspired by, including but not limited to the deep commitment of the full team to use the agency we do have in how we design and execute the program to foster the world and the university we want to see, to challenge and deconstruct the systems of privilege and elitism associated with our work (and revered by many), and to think (and take action to reflect that thinking) more expansively when it comes to rigor and belonging and by doing so, reconceptualize who is included in and uplifted by our Honors experience. This has become the fertile ground for planting the seeds of change. The team wanted to work with and program for the students who were most invested, but before now have mostly been deployed in administrative capacities to support fulfillment of student requirements (checkboxes) in the current system. This has in many ways muted and dulled their dreams, desires, and goals to build a program that could incubate and test what it means to educate the next generation in ways that allow them to develop the capacities needed to humbly lead the way and build the world they want to see.

As the team underwent transitions during late summer and early fall 2022, we better articulated the centrality of our values around diversity, equity, and inclusion- and aligned our assessment and programming efforts with an eye toward impacts first and foremost on URM students that are involved in the program. We worked to connect these two threads to acknowledge that oftentimes, Honors programs are utilized by institutions to incubate the vision they have for the whole university- which means, when there is a bold vision that aligns (at least in its articulation) with social change and social impact, these programs can (and should) realign themselves to foster a version of rigor and merit that transcends traditional notions and epistemological foundations. With a new academic plan released in the Fall 2021 we found and still find ourselves at one of these pivot points of possibility.

Why Does This Matter? What Are We Hoping to See?
Now, we are up against the task that many find themselves in, which is to connect what we’re hoping to accomplish with the actual mechanisms for doing so, with enough flexibility and adaptability built in that it can evolve, change, and grow over time. We hope to do this by implementing and iterating on four main areas/changes: 

1) Through a recognition of our constraints (i.e. not having the agency at this time to change that Honors students are admitted by central Admissions with a yield-oriented goal), we were able to separate out where we could be called and challenged to design the program as we want with permission to (over time) either decrease in size and/or to create more robust ways for students to apply to enter once at the university (giving students selected through Admissions an ‘out’ if they want it without tying it to their desire to come to the University or to reap the financial benefits associated with the program).

2) The development of clear, concise, assessable program outcomes in alignment with our values and that can be realized at different scales through both the one-year and continued experiences.

3) Designing a one-year experience focused on three things: a) Honors Discovery (with a focus on the development of a big question around a wicked problem), b) our living-learning communities (or learning communities for those who apply after matriculating to university), and c) another experience (first-year inquiry course, Dialogue of Civilizations, a Studio, research, etc.) at the end of which they will earn recognition of completion and also get to decide whether/not (and how) to continue to be involved with the central Honors Program and to pursue distinction. This has presented an opportunity to ‘dream’ with the Colleges about what is possible after that year, what ways they’re looking to engage students, and what capacities need to be built in those students to get them there.

4) Curated opportunities (seminars, studios, community-building, research, leadership, global, and yet-to-be imagined) to ready students for a culminating last-year or semester experience that will allow them to showcase how they’ve pursued their question and ultimately made (or know how they hope to make) an impact on the world.

A Final Word 

Admittedly, I still struggle with the tension and dissonance created by working within a system that represents (and in some ways excels at) the very things called out and called in by scholars like la paperson: settler colonialism, a reverence for technology, capital accumulation, and ownership over a recognition of interconnectedness. If, as la paperson states, the first university accumulates, the second university critiques, and the third university strategizes, I hope that as also asserted that “its possibilities are made in the first world university” and that “it is timely, [and] yet its usefulness constantly expires,” (pp. 52-53) that we are in a period of becoming and unbecoming that will persist and iterate. Related to this, adrienne maree brown states, “science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.” I believe that is the journey we’re on- one that brown breathes to life through her telling and retelling of the sorts of worlds and understandings that people like Octavia Butler and Margaret Wheatley encouraged- to know that the only way to create a better future is to imagine it. Best case scenario, we do this with an eye toward how we are both in an assemblage and in assemblage, a microcosm taking seriously the pursuit of inclusivity rather than exclusivity, collaborative and co-creative, and committed to embodying structural change we’d like to see seeded across the university and that is, ultimately, more reflective of the world and communities around it.

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As a practitioner-scholar-activist, Becca Berkey currently serves in dual roles at Northeastern University- as the director of Community-Engaged Teaching & Research (a role which she has occupied in various forms for 10+ years) and the director of the University Honors Program, a role she stepped into in summer 2022. Additionally, she is a lecturer with the departments of Human Services and Environmental Sciences/Studies. As a cisgender, white woman from the Midwest, she came to her passion for food justice and labor in the food system by way of Florida, where she lived and worked for 5 years in her mid-twenties, and where her eyes were opened to the plight of farmworkers. She is involved in spheres related to both her professional roles, as well as those within her field of study and teaching- and sees the two as deeply synergistic and rooted in community-led social change.

Institutional Context: Northeastern University is known for being a leader in experiential education, particularly with our extensive co-op program. Over the last 10-15 years, it has transformed from an urban campus with one predominant location and a locally-rooted mission to a large, selective, private R-1 institution with 12+ campus locations (and growing).

Snapshot Institutional Profile (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below):

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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.