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College Park’s new Honors College is launched!

With a majority of the fall Honors Program admits present (only a few students figured out that “mandatory attendance” would not necessarily mean checking attendance) a nicely-run convocation in the Chapel heralded its arrival.

But what is the Honors College?

Apparently it is another advertising and recruiting operation. Contrary to speculation that the day would include announcements of new content (recalling the fire drill in July when units were given a couple weeks to propose new ideas) we learned the new Honors College will only house existing operations that had already been responsible for content delivery: the original Honors Program (now called University Honors), Gemstone and Honors Humanities.

Included in the mix is “Departmental Honors”, which will be exciting to figure out, since not all departments have such a thing, all are different from one another, and in some cases a student won’t know he or she wins “departmental honors” until specific requirements are satisfied (e.g. at graduation.) In those cases, what will it mean to be in a departmental honors program? Nobody knows. All this comes as a surprise to most of the listed honors directors.

The real clue that this is all about spin comes from Admissions. Well before the campus deadline for units to propose content, expensive color glossies to advertise the Honors College were already printed and mailed to prospective students who we hope will apply for Fall 2010. We started with an advertising campaign and are working back to define content that will make it true.

Privately, some observers are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Usually new programs and departments are things that require bureaucracy. Can you just declare out of the blue something that is even bigger? Is there an MHEC obligation? Wouldn’t the campus Senate want to have input? One thing is sure: the way to implement a plan without having to answer a lot of pesky questions from faculty is to ram it through in the middle of summer before everyone gets back.

Congrats to our friends and colleagues at UMBC for this morning’s news that their campus is recognized by US News and World Report as the top “up and coming” campus in the nation. (See the Sun article for example.) Freeman Hrabowski, President at UMBC, is obviously in rapture on this, and for good reason. He pays a lot of attention not just to what happens on campus but also to branding and relations off campus – a tip the folks at College Park might consider. The recent good news for UMBC reflects Hrabowski’s hard work.

College Park? Held steady at 53 overall in national universities and 18 among public universities on that list. In fairness that’s tough company in which to compete, but as the saying goes, if you’re not advancing, you’re moving back.

So we were commenting about the flow of Terps going to China to save the world (and mess with the US economy), remember? Looks like our students aren’t the only ones heading that way, as we see in the latest New York Times article.

Everyone here knows the latest Board of Public Works action didn’t address even half the projected state shortfall, so the latest round of budget actions in College park clearly are just the next of a long sequence of painful steps. Administrators are feeling the burn, all right, and if they didn’t before, then they sure did after the Provost’s emergency meeting of his Deans the other day, after which word went out that proposals for even more cost cutting measures must be on his desk in September (all with a prominent “confidential” stamped on every page – no press allowed!)

The President’s office has opened up its web site for the troops to propose cost cutting tips. We’re entertained with the full spectrum of predictable tips big and small – anything from recycling postit notes and two sided copying through elimination of unproductive colleges. Be careful what you say though: it is only accessible after you sign-in with your campus LDAP identity, and … their web site downloads tracking cookies to boot.

This must be leadership’s way of ensuring suggestions remain consistent with the One Approved way of doing business on campus. Nobody in high enough a position to expose real cost savings ideas would dare express it there!