By Samantha Berkhead
Managing Editor
For a high school senior, an additional letter of acceptance into a university’s honors program accompanying their initial acceptance letter can make or break a college choice.
Many incoming freshmen at St. Bonaventure choose to come here because of its honors program. The program’s website touts itself as a “singular intellectual experience” for the “best and brightest.”
In reality, Bonaventure’s best and brightest get a singular experience of disappointment after disappointment.
Prospective students are promised an exclusive honors study lounge. A lounge hidden in a reclusive wing of Robinson Hall: a lounge that’s almost never unlocked.
Honors students once had exclusive privileges over other students. Before this year, they could register for classes first — nowadays, athletes get precedence in registration over the rest of the student body, while those in the honors program can only hope to get into the classes they need.
By the time they register, honors students must make sure they fulfill their honors requirements — requirements which don’t appear on their degree audits. They never meet with an honors adviser until the time their honors project proposals are due — a due date students must wade through the pages of sbu.edu to find.
In fact, these students receive little to no communication from the program’s faculty. If they’re lucky, they’ll get an email each semester outlining the honors courses being offered at registration.
The program’s site promises “social events, lectures, conferences, museum visits, and theater performances” exclusive to honors students. This translates to maybe one visiting speaker a semester.
The “small class sizes” honors courses boast really aren’t that much smaller than a non-honors course. And at graduation, honors students receive a pitiful recognition among their peers — they simply stand as their names are read from a list.
Compare this to honors programs at universities similar to St. Bonaventure.
At Canisius College in Buffalo, honors students have their own residence hall to foster an academically-focused atmosphere, according to the university’s website. To its credit, Bonaventure does offer an honors living and learning community for freshmen. However, these communities are usually just a hallway or a section of a hallway, dulling the sense of an academic focus.
Juniors and seniors in Niagara University’s honors program have the opportunity to present their research at its annual research conference. Honors graduates also receive a certificate and notation of honors placed on their official transcripts, according to Niagara’s website.
Le Moyne College in Syracuse has an “honors penthouse” open 24/7 that is open for honors students to study as well as hold movie nights and parties, according to its website.
St. Bonaventure’s honors program has suffered from inconsistent leadership, unclear goals and a lack of self-awareness and promotion. When only 80 percent of freshmen stay enrolled into their sophomore year and only 63 percent of each class actually graduates, according to collegeboard.com, the university needs to do all it can to up its retention rate.
If the university’s administrators take the time and effort to cultivate its “best and brightest” minds, both its reputation and its intellectual aptitude will grow significantly.
