The Undergraduate Business Honors Program in American Higher Education
Open Access
- Author:
- Mitole, Chimwemwe
- Area of Honors:
- Finance
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Brian Spangler Davis, Thesis Supervisor
Karen Paulson, Thesis Honors Advisor
Donald C Hambrick, Faculty Reader
Linda K Trevino, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- honors programs
honors
business education
business honors programs
leadership
education
business
honors education
business school - Abstract:
- The American Honors Movement in the 1950s and 1960s transformed the landscape of higher education in the United States. Seemingly, it arrived just in time — higher education was tremendously strained by the deluge of students returning from World War II and universities found themselves sacrificing on their principles and quality to meet growing demand. The Honors Movement expanded upon old ideals and set forth a new set of aims for undergraduate education. Moreover, it conceived the honors program — a “nucleus of quality,” or an environment of learning for exceedingly talented and purpose-driven students to utilize the fullest of their abilities. In the early 1960s, there are numerous mentions of the business honors program, or, a program that could import the precepts of honors education into business education. By the end of the decade, though, the experiment appeared to have been abandoned altogether — either due to incompatibility or a lack of prioritization by business educators. Over the course of the last 140 years, business education has faced all manner of challenges: institutional opposition, societal suspicion and corporate scandals, economic demand and candidate selection pressures, lapses of excellence and curricular inferiority, and more. Through the lens of history, business education has expressed three primary themes: specialism, generalism, and disctinctivism. Specialism involves teaching business students the practical theory, technical skills, and industry knowledge that make them competent in their field. Generalism involves teaching business as it is situated among the epistemological systems of the socio-political, cultural, philosophical, theoretical, global, and historical kind. Distinctivism concerns teaching business students about the moral responsibility that their education places on them to use business as a means through which to solve the world’s problems. In other words, business is taught in a way that focuses on the individual person and the intellectual, humanistic, and leadership perspectives often associated with liberal education (or, to connect it historically, honors education). Critics of business education in the twenty-first century argue that business education, particularly at the undergraduate level, focuses obsessively on specialism, occasionally on generalism, and hardly on distinctivism. They say that students are taught to benefit themselves in whole and society in part, instead of benefitting society in whole and themselves in part. Today, there are 40+ business honors programs around the United States. Some are as old as the American Honors Movement and others are recent innovations in undergraduate business schools. This study examines 15 business honors programs in order to define what they are and how they operate in order to unify them with the histories of American honors education and business education. If the business honors program is truly the embodiment of the best ideals in those traditions, it can be used to influence undergraduate business schools around the country to prioritize service to society, leadership, and personal responsibility for all students.