Is the Interdisciplinary Honors Program Worth It?

YES:

The Interdisciplinary Honors Program is nothing if not efficient. 

Since 1936, the program has been waiving core classes, offering something resembling priority registration and proffering survey classes that approximate whiplash in their speed and brevity.

No topic is too complex for HONR 101 to glaze over in a week of lectures, no epoch too long to be jammed a single semester. 

Honors students are polished up and booted into the real world following the completion of their capstone on moral thought, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about becoming oil-slick lawyers and feckless politicians — at least the ones I know.

But in this breakneck pace, honors students have the express pleasure of being exposed to a certain diversity of thought. One has to see what there is to see, so to speak, before deciding what’s worth investigating further.

By breezing through operas, plays, books, dense philosophical texts, honors students become tourists on the slipstream of thought. By ducking in and out of various texts and slapping students back and forth between different eras, the Honors Program clumsily — but efficiently — ensures students are exposed to as much as physically possible.

This exposure is essential to crafting both the kind of moral leaders the Honors Program is meant for and coal lobbyists who feel at least a little bit bad about what they’re doing. It makes students who’re capable of seeing beyond their perspectives and into the vastness of the world around them.

This kind of education, of course, means subjecting students to thousands of pages of reading. It’s impossible to know much of anything if you don’t read, and unfortunately for the more STEM-inclined students in the program, it’s a philosophy the Honors Program has taken to heart.

Thrillingly for students, this quickly and intensely developed knowledge is evaluated with four four-ish page essays in the first-year seminars. Efficiency, of course, is the ultimate goal. 

Non-honors students thrust into the twisting, thrashing mess of introductory-level classes may find themselves heaped with lengthy papers assigned by professors unnecessarily trying to give students a taste of distinctly medieval discipline. The prince must joust with the criminal in the public square in order to strike the fear of royal power into the populace, after all.

While this may be technically more rigorous — more stringent in a way probably endemic to any kind of honors program — it’s a relief Loyola’s Honors Program doesn’t stoop to such lows.

While brief, while wide-ranging, while potentially too efficient, the Honors Program offers its adherents a chance to further intertwine themselves with a broad range of works for a relievingly low page count.

NO:

For high school students touring Loyola, Francis Hall must seem like a small kingdom. 

Tucked away from the rest of the university, Francis is its own self-sustaining ecosystem. Brimming with teachers’ pets and renowned for its en-suite bathrooms, the hall is the paramount jewel in the Interdisciplinary Honors Program’s crown — and what draws many students to the program in the first place. 

Although Francis Hall appears as a glorious haven from the rampant chaos of Damen Student Center or — even worse — Mertz Hall, this so-called blessing is a curse in disguise. 

The enclosed environment combined with the program’s domination of first-years’ schedules — requiring a lecture and an accompanying discussion for the entire first year — basically bars all first-year honors students from meeting anyone outside of Francis Hall. 

Sure, the honors dorms are nice — but are they nice enough to counteract a first-year experience completely isolated from the rest of campus?

The curriculum doesn’t justify this seclusion, either. In order to replace the core classes other students are required to take, the Honors Program is broken up into six courses — Western Intellectual Traditions Antiquity to Middle Ages, Western Intellectual Traditions Renaissance to Modernism, U.S. Experience, Science and Society, two Area Studies and Honors Capstone: Moral Responsibility. 

These classes have been critiqued by many students for placing their main focus on Western intellectual traditions and treating the global South as an afterthought, which can only be explored through a cursory semester-long area study. 

To their credit, the program seems to be working to remedy some of its shortcomings, implementing whiplash-inducing changes to the HONR 101 and 102 curricula over the past three years.

Ask any senior in the Honors Program, and they’ll lament about how, back in their day, grades were bludgeoned by arduous papers and timed exams — a nightmare for students hoping to maintain a pristine GPA. 

And yet, students in the program aren’t academic to a fault — at least, no more so than other students. The hallowed halls of Francis, like any other dorm, are brimming with students who skirt academic challenges in favor of ChatGPT. 

These qualms with the Honors Programs have nothing to do with its hard-working staff or passionate professors. I credit much of my unfolding collegiate story to the encouragement and dedication of my first-year honors professors as I struggled through Plato and Descartes. 

Reflecting on the program, I can’t help but wonder — is the education I’m getting really more advanced than the one curated for non-honors students? What am I getting out of it?

Perhaps a superficial understanding of the so-called intellectual canon. Perhaps some well-written recommendation letters and a nice addition to my resume. Or perhaps just a first-year dorm with an en-suite bathroom.