Welcome, ‘Collegiate Scholars’

Home Opinion Welcome, ‘Collegiate Scholars’

Last Thursday, faculty voted to finalize academic details concerning the transition from the honors program to the Collegiate Scholars program. That day, program director Eric Hutchinson sent an invitation to freshmen to apply.

As the Collegiate Scholars program accepts applications for its inaugural class, it makes its most essential break from the defunct honors program. In doing so it enhances its ability to foster interdisciplinary culture on campus and reflect the liberal arts ethos of the college.

While current members were selected prior to their matriculation, qualifying to apply based on high school and standardized test performance, selection to the Collegiate Scholars reflects students’ collegiate work and contribution to the school community. Students must demonstrate the drive and ability to thrive in Hillsdale’s rigorous core curriculum by earning a 3.4 GPA for their initial semesters here. Professor recommendations ensure that applying students understand, or have begun to understand, the partnership that is collegial life.

The college website says the program will “serve the college as a whole by offering a range of academic seminars open to all students, by highlighting the intrinsic worth of the core curriculum, and by sustaining a common conversation among all students and faculty.”

The old honors program did all these things, and its members have contributed much to campus academic and social life and continue to under their new title, but the Collegiate Scholars is equipped to better fulfill this charge by drawing together a community of students who already possess a life in the college prior and apart from the program.

As the expanded core curriculum continues to strengthen the liberal arts education offered at Hillsdale, a program dedicated to facilitating interdisciplinary life, as seen in seminars offered and the weekly “Conversation,” can only add to that strength.

As bland a name as the Collegiate Scholars is, it represents something that all of campus can be grateful for, a group of students devoted to scholarly excellence and the strengthening of the collegiate bands that tie campus together. Each program member can act as a touchpoint for peers in their discipline connecting them to students across every area of study.

However Collegiate Scholars earn their place, they earn a position of service for the common good of Hillsdale.