In Defense of Honors Programs (or, Read a Fucking Book)

In planning the follow-up to a survival skills event for incoming Honors freshmen, the question came up of how best to articulate to new students the value of WWU's honors program. Especially for STEM students, the fact is that the liberal-arts-focused Honors courseload can be expected to overlap very little (if at all) with their major's courses. That's a non-negligible number of extra credits, and there's nothing scarier than a delay in graduation, and so lots of people in the program question, at one point or another, whether the program is worth seeing through to the end. It's our job to try and make the case that it is.

Of course, regardless of obligation, it'd be disingenuous of us to argue this point if we did not ourselves wholly believe it. For my part, I am lucky in this regard, because in spite of (because of?) being a Math/CS double major, I'm convinced that the honors classes I've taken have on average been far more valuable than anything I've taken in either of my majors. Ditto for the classes I'm planning on taking. That's not because I don't like my majors -- far from it, I'm crazy about them. But computer science is close being treated as a trade skill, and math's "beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture" (Russell) nourishes only certain parts of the mind. Both majors are fantastic for what they are, but what they are is not a complete education. Similar things could be said for practically any other major: They leave gaps, and honors fills those gaps.

My first, informal attempt at articulating to my co-planners this argument for why to stick with honors went something along these lines:

Why stay with honors? Because we offer things you can't get anywhere else. We have classes you can take as a freshman that're on par with the upper-division classes in specialized majors. You can just be like, "I want to learn about Russian literature this quarter" or "I want to learn about film this quarter" and nobody's going to be like, what the fuck, you're a chem major. These kinds of classes are just there, and anyone in the program can take them. If you don't want to be an English major but you want to study great books, we're your best shot. If you want to be in rooms full of clever people talking about Nabokov or Robbe-Grillet or Bely or Dante or for that matter anyone else worth reading, we've got you covered. We've got some of the best professors in the university teaching our classes. Great classes, taught by great professors -- what more do you fucking want?

I stand fully behind that sentiment, in spite of having been explicitly forbidden from ever putting it in such terms at official honors events. One struggles to imagine why.

Perhaps it's because this claim, despite being (I maintain) valid in what it says, doesn't go far enough. Because it's not just that you can study these things if you want to. Yes, you can, and that's amazing. We offer stellar classes that your average student in any employable major would have no other equivalent for. It's hard to complain about that. But that's not everything. It gets more personal.

It seems fair to say that just about everyone would say that they value self-improvement. I don't think I know anyone who would say they don't think it's important to try to improve oneself. There are uncountably many ways to try to do this, and I don't claim to have any special knowledge of them. Then again, who could, especially given how the very idea of what improvement looks like varies from person to person (for example, I think it'd be nice to be better at making sushi, but I wouldn't prioritize it nearly as highly as, say, Jiro likely would). One thing I do feel comfortable saying, though, is that to be well-read is always good, never bad. Inasmuch as one's lifestyle can support it, one owes it to oneself to make time to read, and preferably to read things one is challenged by.

Ask 20 different people what college is about and you'll get 20 different answers. For my part, I'd opt to abstain from giving a straight answer to the question, but I will say that if you're in college but you aren't here to learn, then you've made some seriously awful life choices. As in, like, what the fuck are you thinking? You do realize that this isn't free, right? College is for learning, and anyone who's in college ought to be there to learn. If you're here but you don't want to learn, then you're in the wrong place. I'm comfortable saying that. And, if you want to learn, why limit yourself? If you limit what you're willing to learn, you limit the thoughts you're willing to think. Fortune and bureaucracy are already too good at placing limits on people -- don't give them any help. Whatever self-improvement is, I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of it.

Paul Erdős once said, when prompted to explain why numbers are beautiful, that "if you can't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is." When faced with someone who "doesn't really read", or doesn't see what they'd get out of (e.g.) classes charting the course of literature through history, I find my thoughts endlessly returning to this quote. If you don't see the value in studying the best surviving products of literal millennia of cultural evolution, then there's really nothing I can tell you, except that I'm sorry. But if you do, I have one thing to say, something which I'm sure that in one way or another you already know: Whoever you can learn from, seek them out -- go to them -- and learn. If learning isn't beautiful, nothing is.