By Kevin Amidon, Oct 2024
The Honors College at Fort Hays State University is celebrating ten years of service to the Hays community, Kansans, and the world. Today’s Honors College stands on the shoulders of many who have dedicated years of effort to bring about the success of the College’s efforts to enrich FHSU’s student life, academic energy, and community engagement. On the occasion of FHSU Homecoming 2024, this brief reflection on important moments in the history of the Honors College seeks to highlight the contributions of the key people who have made this path possible.
What Honors means at FHSU
The FHSU Honors College is an academic program that represents a calling to service and engagement. The program supports experiential enrichment of students’ academic training, professional plans, and personal goals, and students earn their degrees with Honors on the basis of commitment to these principles. Students with strong motivation join the Honors College from high school, as transfer students, as online students, or as current FHSU students. The experiential core of the Honors College curriculum focuses on a wide range of student-designed co-curricular and pre-professional aspects that bridge the worlds of education and professional practice including research, study abroad, internships, community service, campus leadership, and many more. Honors College students therefore do much to create FHSU’s lively culture of service and engagement, and serve their fellow students, the community, and the university’s broader mission in meaningful ways.
How Honors began at FHSU
In the 1950s, the US invested strongly in higher education to advance the skills of the workforce, develop deep talent during the Cold War, and thank veterans for their service. At that time, FHSU began exploring Honors education with the goal of linking college success to emerging principles of gifted education at the K-12 level. These initial experiments continued on and off into the 1970s. Dr. Nancy Vogel was a pioneering faculty member in the Department of English who still provides substantial financial support to today’s Honors College including the medallions presented to each Honors graduate as a complement their commencement regalia. She contributed closely to the 1970s Honors Program as a faculty member in Honors courses. Resource constraints did not allow this manifestation of Honors education at FHSU to continue, however. Renewed efforts to establish an Honors Program with strong curriculum and admissions standards emerged, both university-wide and in the then-College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in the later 1990s. Dr. Douglas Drabkin and Dr. Larry Gould, both major contributors to the development of today’s Honors College, were leaders in these efforts, which were not able to come to fruition.
Today’s FHSU Honors College
In 2008, Mr. Matt Means was asked by FHSU President Edward H. Hammond and Provost Dr. Gould to explore ways to advance FHSU’s success in nationally competitive scholarship and fellowship competitions (e.g. Fulbright, Goldwater, Truman, Rhodes, Marshall, NSF). Mr. Means saw the need for greater organizational support to recruit, retain, and motivate high-achieving students. The first result of these efforts was a student organization, the Fort Hays Honor Society (FHHS), which remains a vigorous aspect of student life at FHSU and an organizationally separate complement to the Honors College’s academic program mission. In 2010 the forerunner of the Honors College was added: the Distinguished Scholars Program, which President Hammond granted a budget to support merit scholarship awards and further incentives for student engagement on campus.
In 2014, newly inaugurated FHSU President Mirta Martin believed that a full-scale Honors College represented an important step to advance FHSU’s competitive position and student-centered focus on academic achievement and success. Mr. Means was charged with developing the structure of the FHSU Honors College and made the founding Director. FHSU’s executive leadership made further resources available, and through an intense collaborative process engaging faculty, staff, and students, the Honors College successfully emerged in the basic form we know today. Fall 2015 saw the arrival of the first class of approximately 25 admitted students. These students moved into the Honors College’s living community housed at that time in McMindes Hall, and their success has inspired students ever since.
In 2018, Ms. Kathay Johnson arrived to serve as the heart of the Honors College’s student services. In 2019, Dr. Kevin S. Amidon took over from Mr. Means as Director. Together with the Honors College’s annual teams of student assistants, and with the vigorous support of President Tisa Mason, Provost Jill Arensdorf, and Assistant Provost Angela Pool-Funai, they continue to advance the mission of the Honors College as an inclusive, motivating place where students make the most of their education through commitment to service and engagement.
Today, the Honors College admits upward of 80 students per year. It currently enrolls 159 students who represent every academic program on campus, almost 4.5% of the on-campus student body. Several fully-online Honors students participate in FHSU Honors Online, a program first piloted in 2020. Students are admitted and offered merit scholarships based on their high school academic record, commitment to engagement, and test scores. The Honors College living community now fills most of the beautiful Tiger Village residence hall, completed in 2016.
Where the Honors College will go from here
FHSU Honors College graduates go on to success in every field, and the Honors College seeks to support their goals for lifelong learning and service. The Honors College seeks out feedback from students and its Alumni Advisory Council to assess its success in advancing these outcomes. Students and graduates speak very highly of the College’s efforts, organization, and personnel, and their feedback informs the College’s goals for ongoing growth and enrichment. The Honors College expects to continue to grow as its alumni network spreads the word in ways that develop both new recruiting possibilities and financial support from generous donors.
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