“Extraordinary opportunities for exceptional students.” This is the headline on the web page of Stony Brook’s Honors College, which is adorned with photos of happy, presumably exceptional students from years past. It claims its students – around 60 freshmen are enrolled each year – “experience the individual attention and benefits typically found only in small liberal arts colleges while having access to the vast range of academic opportunities available only at a major research university.”
But recently, many of those students have found themselves at odds with Honors College and university administrators, claiming that that the “individual attention and benefits” have given way to an authoritarian management style that has left them anything but happy. Some are even fearful for the college’s future, as closed-door meetings and committees fuel an atmosphere rife with rumor and conspiracy. Administrators insist it’s all just a misunderstanding: they say they’re only working to strengthen the college, that its future is secure, and that they’d happily assuage students’ concerns if only more would talk to them.
The confrontation began in the summer of 2010 when administrators introduced a new rule about faculty members serving as advisers for the theses Honors College students must complete as seniors. Formerly, any full-time faculty member could serve as a thesis adviser, but the new rule would only allow for tenured or tenure-track faculty to serve as such, excluding faculty members holding the position of lecturer. Some students who would graduate in the spring of 2011 claimed they were left scrambling at the last minute to find new advisers. Students mounted a vigorous effort to have the old policy reinstated, to no avail.
That was only the beginning. In the fall of 2010 the college began enforcing a policy about the order in which students take the three-credit seminars that form the core of their curriculum in lieu of DEC requirements. Students generally take the first two seminars in their freshman year; they then take one seminar in each of the following three years. Whereas in the recent past many students took the last three seminars in whatever order was convenient for them, the college now requires that they be taken in a specific order. Students claim that these requirements are unnecessary – as each seminar is on a completely different topic, they say the order in which they’re taken is irrelevant – and that they unduly restrict students’ flexibility in scheduling their courses.
Moreover, at the beginning of the spring 2011 semester the college also began enforcing a requirement that the four one-credit “mini-courses” students are required to take be completed by the end of their sophomore year. Students say this only adds to their scheduling woes.
Honors College Director Oliver “Trey” Street and Faculty Director Jeff Edwards, who joined the college in December 2009 and August 2010 respectively, and who many students blame for the changes, claim that they’re perfectly justified.
According to Edwards, “Every honors college in the country has a curriculum structure, and the sequencing very much determines our curriculum structure.”
Additionally, Edwards says that without sequencing, administrators are “simply not in a position to determine how many students are available to take a particular course.” This, he says, had caused the college to cancel an unacceptable number of classes in the past, complicating faculty recruitment (the college has no faculty of its own) and making it vulnerable to cuts in a difficult budget environment: “Like anybody running any program or academic unit at this university, we’re in a squeeze, and one very basic way in which we maintain budgetary efficiency is to maintain that our course scheduling is on the mark.”
Street claims that the college’s course scheduling had become so haphazard that “It reached a point at which the university at large, higher administrators in the university, (put us) under a bit of scrutiny, especially given the budget crisis.” They also claim that they have made exceptions to the new requirements wherever they would otherwise keep students from meeting the requirements for their majors and where there is, as Edwards put it, “no reasonable alternative.”
Street and Edwards characterize the course-sequencing requirement as one that has existed since the program was founded in 1989, and is merely being enforced more vigorously after years of lax enforcement. But students point to recent changes in the wording of the requirements in the Undergraduate Bulletin as evidence that there has been a substantive change.
On October 13, 2010, Street and Edwards appeared before the university’s Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, which had to approve the changes in wording. According to the meeting minutes, “Jeff (Edwards) asserted that the courses do and should build upon one another. Such a sequence has been implicit in the function of the college since its inception, however, changes to the bulletin in Fall 2001 reduced the clarity of this implicit sequence. Changing of faculty and staff directors in the past ten years has allowed this sequencing to drift.”
The committee approved the changes on October 20, 2010, but the minutes of that meeting reflect some reservations about the changes, stating, “The committee is concerned that the sequencing is in part driven by resource constraint rather than best academic interest of students. … The committee does not see the academic substance that necessitates the enforced sequence, but understands that approving the sequence will allow flexibility to design a curriculum that does build on previous curricular parts.” The minutes also state that “the committee urges the Directors to give special consideration for students who need an out of sequence course to complete the Honors College program or a commensurate major(s) or minor(s) requirements,” which Street and Edwards say they have been doing and will continue to do.
But according to Deborah Machalow, an Honors College junior and Executive Vice President of the Undergraduate Student Government, “They’re not (making all the exceptions students need). They said to us that if it’s in the student’s ‘academic best interest’ they will make an exception. Who are they to decide that?”
Machalow also claims that there are more reasons for excessive course cancellations than a lack of structure: “For this semester, there were three sections of (a seminar) that were all scheduled in the same time block. Anyone who had a conflict with one of them had a conflict with all of them.” And as for scrutiny from higher administrators, she argues, “If the changes are coming from above, (Street and Edwards) should fight for us, against (the changes).”
What seems to raise students’ ire even more than the policy changes themselves is the manner in which they have been communicated and enforced. According to Machalow, after they had registered for the following spring’s classes in the fall of 2010, “Students were sent an email saying they would be dropped from classes at the end of the next business day if they didn’t meet certain prerequisites (to ensure they took them in sequence). This email was sent out at 2:06 PM on a Friday before a vacation.” And in the spring of 2011, she says students “were being enrolled in classes without permission” so that they would complete their mini-courses by the end of their sophomore year, a policy that she claims is not even enforceable, since unlike the course-sequencing requirement it doesn’t appear in the Undergraduate Bulletin, but only in the Honors College Handbook, which she believes is non-binding.
Machalow claims all this is part of a pattern of poor and even threatening communication that has appeared since Street took over as director: “We feel as though communication is a very big issue here, especially the tones of emails we’ve been getting.” Some students allege that they’ve felt strong pressure to choose between their membership in the Honors College and keeping their majors or minors – particularly if they have more than one major or minor – or participating in opportunities like research if it would mean taking too many courses out of sequence.
Street asserts that the dissatisfied students are “a vocal minority.” But Machalow says there is a reason only a few students have complained: “Students are terrified, that’s the problem. I personally am nervous.” A number of other Honors College students who privately expressed grievances against the administration declined to be included in this article, citing fears about possible ramifications for their academic careers.
Nevertheless, realizing that some students, even if a minority, were upset, Street and Edwards held a town-hall meeting early in the spring 2011 semester to address their concerns. But to their dismay, few students showed up, something Machalow attributes to less than a week’s notice having been given of the meeting. Street’s and Edwards’ request of those who did attend that they not discuss the content of the meeting with anyone other than fellow Honors College students also angered some students and alarmed others, fueling speculation that perhaps the college was threatened by external forces.
Then some students learned of the existence of the Provost’s Honors Education Task Force. While not a secret – it is mentioned in the publicly available minutes of some Curriculum Committee meetings – its existence was not made known to students, which only served to further alarm some of them. Since the fall of 2010, it has met every other week, led by Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Charles Robbins, and it is set to deliver its recommendations and dissolve at the end of the spring 2011 semester.
According to Robbins, Provost Eric Kaler asked him upon assuming his post in summer 2010 to create the task force in order “to look at how we provide programs, services, enrichment to our highest-achieving students.” This includes not only the Honors College but also University Scholars and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE); faculty and administrators involved in these programs now or in the past comprise the task force. “What we’re doing,” says Robbins, “is looking at what our goals are in providing these programs and whether we’re achieving those goals.”
Some of the speculation about the task force has to be alarming to any Honors College student. One rumor centers on the purported dissatisfaction among administrators with the number of unconnected and seemingly redundant honors programs at the university and the cost of maintaining this structure. The result would entail the de facto elimination of the Honors College as it merged with the other programs to form one larger, more cost-effective program.
But Robbins does not foresee radical changes: “I think we’re going to come up with recommendations that will involve more adjusting, tweaking our current programs rather than sort of throwing it up and starting over. I think people have a sense that the structure we have basically is sound but there are some things that we can strengthen in each of the programs.”
When asked about the possibility of combining programs, Robbins replied, “I will say that one of the things that we’ve been concerned about and want to see if maybe we can do is put a better bridge between Honors and Scholars and WISE … right now they’re very siloed, and I would like to see more integration.” But he asserts that “the chances of us eliminating any of the programs that we’re talking about are really slim to none. It’s just not going to happen.”
Robbins is aware of students’ dissatisfaction. He supports the recent changes, but acknowledges that flexibility is important: “Our policy should be that these are the courses people take in a certain order, in a sequence, as long as they can go to Trey and say, ‘I’ve got to take XYZ for my major and the only time it’s taught is now, so I’m going to have to take that and then take this Honors seminar next year or next semester or whatever,’ and we have to have that flexibility … but I think that our desired preference should be for students wherever possible to sign up for (seminars) in some sense of sequence.”
He also acknowledges that there has been a learning curve for the college’s new administrators as they implement the new policies: “I think as we’ve gone on with the year there’s been more of an appreciation of a need for some exemptions and compromises and I think they’ve been better at doing that.”
As for students’ fears of retaliation for speaking up about their concerns, Robbins asserts that they are unfounded: “No one is going to face any kind of retaliation at all in terms of grades, in terms of their thesis, in terms of anything. That just is not conceivable anywhere on the table in this matter, and I would not – it’s not going to happen, but it just would not be tolerated from this office.” He urged students to speak up about their concerns: “If student A has a problem trying to get an exemption or was made to feel lesser or was made to feel that they need to change their major or was made to feel anything, then I want to know that, and I will deal with it.”
Ultimately, says Robbins, “We want this to be as positive an experience as possible.” That reminded me of something Machalow said earlier: “(Administrators’) main job is supposed to be to serve us and help us attain our educational goals, not to force curriculum and rules on us. We’ll do what you force on us, but we won’t be happy. And you might as well make us happy.”
(Editor’s Note: Doug’s great article about the Honors College took home an award for best written work of the year, and contributed to Think Magazine’s overall award for best written work on campus.)
