A committee has yet to be formed to plan the school-wide honors program set to replace the University Professors Program, almost six weeks after Boston University President Robert Brown announced the college would be cut from the school in a letter to its students.
The new program is scheduled to be completed by fall 2008, and the provost will appoint faculty to the committee, according to officials. Few details are available about how the program will work, and there are no details available whether the honors programs in the College of Arts and Sciences and School of Management will be eliminated or integrated.
For now, UNI students will attend classes as usual and their schedules will remain unchanged, said UNI Director Sir Hans Kornberg. Current and incoming students will continue classes in UNI for the next two years and will still receive UNI diplomas.
“UNI students, including the freshmen class this year, will be guaranteed exactly the same kind of instruction as previous classes,” said Kornberg, a biology professor. “The details [of the new honors program] have not yet been decided. The provost is who is going to be dealing with this.”
Provost David Campbell did not respond to phone messages left over the past week.
Specific details about the new honors program are limited, Kornberg said, because he does not yet know who will be on the honors program task force.
“Right now, all we know is that [the university is] going to change course. We just haven’t plotted it yet,” he said. “[The new program] will include present honors courses in various schools and will embrace all the trustee scholars into one program.”
The program will also continue the UNI tradition of garnering teachers from a wide range of disciplines and allowing students to study topics from different colleges. The transition will serve a larger number of students, Brown said.
“By moving resources to support an all-university honors program, we can better serve more of the exceptional students at Boston University who are interested in both disciplinary and inter-disciplinary degree programs,” Brown said in an email to The Daily Free Press over the summer.
Before ultimately making the decision to cut UNI, Brown consulted a separate committee headed by former President Aram Chobanian, who examined how UNI could be improved and better managed, Kornberg said.
The committee collected information from faculty and staff from inside and outside UNI and concluded that “as a present institution, [UNI] was no longer viable,” Kornberg said.
The committee also concluded that it is important to preserve certain aspects of UNI, including the immediate contact between smaller numbers of students, their professors and their academic advisers, Kornberg said.
“Advisers become friends and mentors,” he said. “An intimate relationship like that you can maintain only if you’re a small school.”
Besides UNI, BU has two other honors programs in CAS and SMG, and the future of both has not yet been decided.
“In terms of which elements of the existing CAS Honors Program will be preserved within the new university program, that will be part of the work of the task force to decide,” said CAS honors program associate director Jocelyn Campbell in an email.
The students in UNI, the smallest undergraduate college on campus, become a tightly knit group because the college can seem isolated from other schools, especially during freshman year, Kornberg said.
“Sometimes, [UNI] comes off as a snooty institution,” he said. “It hasn’t been cross-germinated, and the entire university will perhaps be more accepting [if it is].”