Paul Streufert, Ph.D. – founding dean of the Honors College at UT Tyler discusses honors education and how the sixth honors college in the UT System can benefit students getting their education at UT Tyler.
(Transcript available below audio player.)
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Mike Landess: For UT Tyler Radio, 99.7 K V U T. I’m Mike Landess. Like a lot of universities, UT Tyler has had an honors program for high achieving and intellectually curious students. Recently that program took the next step to becoming the sixth Honors College in the UT system. Paul Streufert, Ph.D., began the honors program at UT Tyler in 2009 with 20 students, and he’s been named the founding dean for the Honors College.
He’s our guest today. Welcome.
Paul Streufert: Thanks, Mike. It’s great to be here.
Mike Landess: Now you started with less than two dozen students 14 years ago, and now it’s 200 students. That has to be very gratifying.
Paul Streufert: It really, really is. I always think of honors as having a very humble beginning. It was an idea, and we had a provost at the time who wanted to fast track it. And he said, “We need 20 students by August.” I remember driving into campus thinking, oh, we should have an application. We should have a website.
Mike Landess: So you really had to build it from the ground up.
Paul Streufert: Yeah, it was very bare bones in the first few days, but it was so exciting to have an idea and then to have students show up and do well and get a lot out of it. It was a way of making our students’ experience just so much more rich and interesting. And, we’ve always been breaking those sort of records of number of students in the program for a number of years. Then we held at 160 for a while, and then now with this green light, we’re moving ahead to over 200 this coming fall.
Mike Landess: Now folks not well versed in academia may not completely grasp what the honors program has done and what it’s hoped that the honors college will do.
Paul Streufert: One of the common misconceptions I think about honors education is that it’s all about being smart, right? This is just for smart kids. This is, you know, just really for high achievers. You know, smart is good, and we like smart, but I think the thing that we always push, and that we are always looking for are people who are curious and people who are hardworking. If you have both of those things, you can go so far and smart will come in time with those things, I think.
One of mentors in my graduate program would say to me, “Paul, the three most important words in the academy are, ‘I don’t know.'” That’s where it all starts. Right? And so, we try to embrace that and look for students who want to know.
Mike Landess: Now current honors program students automatically become a part of the Honors College, correct?
Paul Streufert: That’s right. We’re just with the wave of the hand saying, “OK, now you’re members of the Honors College.” We’re excited about our first group of freshmen coming in this fall.
Mike Landess: What is the criteria to apply to the UT Tyler Honors College?
Paul Streufert: When a student applies as an incoming first-year student, we look for a couple of things.
The first thing is a GPA of 3.75 on a four-point scale. So they have to be academically hardworking. One thing we don’t look for is perfection. Like a 4.0 in some ways is kind of boring, I think, because students have maybe not been challenged as much or have found high school easy.
So we look for a 3.75 GPA. But then we ask the students to write an essay, and we ask them to write an essay about Aristotle. We provide them a quote from Aristotle and we say, “Tell us–what do you think Aristotle means with this?” What we’re trying to do with that quote is invite them to play.
And if a student looks at that and says, oh man, I have no idea. I imagine most of the students who apply have never read Aristotle, and that’s fine. But we want them to be able to take an idea and run with it and play with it and just sort of see what they can come up with.
Mike Landess: Give me the example of that.
Paul Streufert: If we say the quote that we use from Aristotle is, it is the mark of the educated to entertain an idea without necessarily believing it. Right? So the idea is that you have to think through what someone is saying and actually listen to them and weigh those ideas and then sort of see how that synthesizes with your own beliefs. How does that work with where you come from? How does that work with your observation of the world? We always get, you know, there’s a lot of sort of traditional things. We get students who talk about social media or who talk about politics, and those are pretty standard.
We had one student this year who wrote– he was an, I think he was an engineering student, but he wrote about being a DJ who loves techno. And I thought that was great because I thought that he showed us something that was interesting to him, something he was curious about.
He talked a little bit about the way that we approach our work and the way that we engage the world. And I thought that was so interesting because that’s a little bit of a risk, right? You don’t normally think of an Aristotle quote and techno DJ-ing. But to me, that is exactly what we’re looking for. Curious, hardworking and interested in the world.
Mike Landess: That’s fascinating that the kids would do that. I’m sure there are a lot of stories that you have concerning that. I was thinking that it is a way of making one think outside of their ordinary world, their day-to-day, even though they may apply it. I mean all knowledge, ultimately, is worthless without application.
Paul Streufert: Precisely right. And I think Aristotle was so interesting ’cause Aristotle was the philosopher who wanted to know everything about everything, right? He was interdisciplinary. He wrote books about plants, and he wrote books about metaphysics, right?
And so, you know, here’s a guy who loved cataloging and categorizing knowledge, right? And that is, talk about curiosity. Right? That’s why we’ve kind of used him as kind of our founding, you know, a sort of central figure or a central idea or a person that we sort of admire or look to.
Aristotle also had a school which he called the Lym, which was his ancient school. And one of the characteristics of the Lym was that students would get together and talk about their work. And so that’s why we call every spring we host an event called the Lycium, which is a student research showcase on campus, and we call it the Lym because it’s what Aristotle did. And I think in many ways we are the descendants of Aristotle. We’re still working in his tradition, and I like to think of him as our great, great, great, great, however many great grand teacher.
Mike Landess: I’m thinking about, Phil Burks, whom we spoke to just recently, the head of the CEO of the Genesis group has worked in entrepreneurial projects over and over again and talked about “I want to go in the dictionary and cut out the word ‘quit.'”
Paul Streufert: In fact,we’re hosting Phil Burks for a talk in honors, this, I wanna say either here in March or later in April. Absolutely we know him and know his work. I think the thing that the takeaway for most people is that honors comes with a kind of expectation or a kind of almost anxiety-inducing load for some students. And I want to help them understand it’s not about that.
I get that you’re smart, you’re fine, but let’s dig deep and let’s brainstorm and let’s get some ideas going and then let’s talk about those ideas with other people, as terrifying as that may be. Right? There’s nothing that I love more than watching a senior present at the Lycium when they came in as a freshman and were very unsure and were not, you know, they were really kind of being very careful and there’s so much growth that happens in those three or four years that students are at university.
I mean, that’s why I went into this business in the first place. I love that stretch of time and that tremendous development that happens in those in those years.
Mike Landess: Our guest has been UT Tyler’s founding dean of the Honors College. You’ll find a link to more information about the Honors College on our website, KVUT.org.
