About Honors at Iowa

Philosophy

 

The University of Iowa Honors Program provides opportunities for top students to learn from each other and tap faculty expertise on the frontiers of inquiry.  Why should a public research university venture a strong honors program?  Seven principles of learning help explain why we at Iowa work with enthusiasm for honors opportunities that keep enlarging student horizons:

 

Intellectual Community
►	In people as in computers, parallel processing is more powerful than serial processing.
►	The honors program is the undergraduate engine for creating intellectual community.
►	It does this through honors courses, organized activities, and informal interactions.

 

Intellectual Resources
►	College students learn far more from each other than even from faculty members.
►	The honors program helps recruit, create, and educate the best possible student peers.
►	It also helps make early connections for many of the most promising students with some of the most provocative professors.

 

Intellectual Diversity
►	Universities need ethnic, cultural, experiential, disciplinary, and other kinds of diversity because learning thrives on intellectual experimentation, pluralism, and communication.
►	The honors program develops unusual capacities of invention, criticism, and openness.
►	It equips students to sample and compare disparate modes of learning early and often.

 

Intellectual Leadership
►	Learning grows most from gifts to us all provided through the talents of individuals.
►	The honors program develops these gifts and educates their bearers for leadership.
►	Its students become seeds and models for excellent learning throughout the university.

 

 

Intellectual Focus
►	Superlative learning excels in speed and expectation but also in specialization.
►	The honors program raises horizons of specialized learning for gifted undergraduates.
►	It promotes and superintends honors programs in specialized colleges and departments.

 

Intellectual Trade
►	To be productive, specialization requires trade, which in turn needs education in trade.
►	The honors program educates talented specialists in making connections and coherence for themselves – as well as communicating the resulting insights to others.
►	Thus it reaches beyond general or liberal education to genuinely public education.

 

Intellectual Re-Generation
►	Honors graduates are among the best equipped to give back to the university in order to keep it strong in service to later generations.
►	The honors program cultivates strong university connections with exceptionally gifted people before, during, and after their university years, encouraging them to share some of the resulting resources of time, money, energy, and ideas with the students to come.
►	It also practices honors students in current service to their colleagues and communities.

 

These are seven principles for intellectual life, because the experience of intellectual life is what can set university years apart from others.  Intellectual life is about ideas, but good ideas are not divorced from everyday lives.  Instead they inform each other at every turn.  This is how college studies can help people prepare for good lives even more than successful careers.  And it is how Honors at Iowa tries mightily to enhance the full lives of its many energetic participants.