UNM looks to add honors college

A task force at UNM put together to keep the state’s brightest students in New Mexico hopes to turn the University Honors Program into a degree-granting college.

“It would help the University attract and recruit the best and the brightest students in New Mexico,” said Roger Schluntz, an architecture professor and task force co-chair.

Rosalie Otero, the Honors Program director, said the honors college would have its own dean, full-time faculty and connections throughout the University.

“We certainly would want collaboration with other departments and other colleges on campus and the honors college, which is supposed to be an enhancing, interdisciplinary academic piece for high-achievement students,” she said.

In fall 2010, UNM appointed the Honors College Task Force, composed of University faculty, to explore the possibility of turning the program into a college. The task force met every two weeks to study honors colleges at other universities, as well as interview past and current honors students, University staff and other universities’ deans. The task force concluded that UNM should take steps to establish an honors college.

“UNM should establish an honors college that would form an academic community by bringing UNM’s best undergraduate students and finest faculty together, fostering advanced and interdisciplinary study,” the report said.

Otero said students will have a “dual system” option, choosing between a dominant or interdisciplinary major.

“We’d probably have different tiers of students: those who want to enhance their education and still major in engineering or something else, and … those who want to get a degree that would be interdisciplinary through the Honors College,” she said.

Otero said the Honors Program is already set for the transformation into an honors college because of its strong curriculum and full-time tenured faculty.

“We have in place a lot of things we’d have to have for a college, so it would be very easy to just say ‘yes, we’re going to go ahead and make you into a college,’” she said.

The recommendation is awaiting approval by the Faculty Senate and University president.