Stamatakis: Work harder to bring back the sense of community and shared mindset of the Honors College

“Well, you’ll just have to work harder.”

This was the advice I received from the late Alexander “Doc” Stewart, former dean of the University Honors College, when I asked him if I should attempt a dual degree.

There wasn’t going to be any plan for me to follow. If I wanted to major in two widely different fields ­— engineering and music ­— I would need to chart my own way and figure things out as I went along.

It has been a lot of work, but it is a decision I am grateful to have made.

The Honors College works in a similar manner. The members of the Honors College don’t need to meet certain criteria to be considered members; there isn’t a set path. This is because, unlike institutions such as the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, the UHC doesn’t really have members. You can take honors classes, participate in reading groups or live in honors housing, but no set criteria makes you an accredited honors student. The degree that the UHC does offer, the Bachelor of Philosophy, neither confirms your honors status nor excludes others from being considered members.

Instead, the UHC is just a mindset. Not a groupthink creed that members murmur to themselves ritualistically, but simply a broader way of thinking about yourself as a student.

At Pitt, this mindset is, “I’ll work harder on something I want to learn about,” and students then go the extra mile to gain some deeper understanding on a subject that interests them. As Stewart used to say, it was about doing more in service of “life above the neck.”

If this sounds comically high-minded, in some ways it is. Essentially, the UHC is funded and justified because it creates an environment through specific classes and groups in which students can pursue subject matter as they see fit, without the guarantee of long-term benefit.

This means that the UHC can fund reading groups such as Pizza and Proust and Donuts and Dystopias. Students might spend months working on a thesis on topics ranging from Internet meme culture to Duke Ellington’s relationship to Ernest Hemingway. Biology and the philosophy of biology are studied hand in hand.

But for such a high-minded, almost fanciful group to work, there needs to be a strong element of social cohesion. Getting people to work together and also for themselves on behalf of these fuzzy ideals requires firm guidance. But rules specifying X number of classes or Y advising appointments don’t accomplish this end; instead, a simple unifying ethos is all that is required.

For years, Stewart embodied this ethos. When the search began for his replacement, most candidates, including current Dean Edward Stricker, talked about the importance of maintaining this ideal. Everybody recognized the importance of the spirit of the Honors College.

However, something has gone wrong, as you can see in the paper today. Be it through short sightedness, attention focused elsewhere or honest misunderstandings, this ethos now shows signs of decay. A new focus on medical school advising has added increased pressure to do things that will simply increase the quality of applications, possibly pushing aside more solely intellectual pursuits.

Moreover, with a shift toward the biological sciences, there has been a stratification in regard to the perceived quality of academic pursuits. While most philosophy majors will quickly acknowledge that they face tougher job prospects, it would at one time have been considered in poor taste to denigrate an entire discipline solely because of employment potential. Although there is no open mocking, according to complaints from the group “Honors College in Exile” and anecdotes I have heard from this summer’s Brackenridge presentations, the former culture of academic equality seems to be slowly fading away.

But most importantly, any organization built solely on social cohesion faces an evident crisis when some core advisers have left. With the recent departure of Mike Giazzoni, a former UHC adviser and program coordinator, the community has lost four pillars in the past two years.

Any organization, be it private or public, cannot not subsist through social stability if this many people are leaving.

Dean Stricker should not be fired. Nor should he be solely blamed for the new problems. Few expected this social dynamic to be as critical as it has turned out to be.

But administrators at the Honors College need to acknowledge that the core of a group without any formal rules is ideological substance and social cohesion. Maintaining this spirit is the key to saving the UHC.

Repairing the fault lines will not be easy, but I think Stewart’s advice most aptly applies here: Just keep trying harder.

Write Nick at nps130@gmail.com.