Mississippi State recently hired a new dean, Christopher Snyder, to oversee the expansion of the Shackouls Honors College, and many of us are wondering what changes we can expect to see in the near future. There is certainly progress to be made within the Honors College; however, we need to be asking ourselves what sort of progress is right for MSU.
The requirements of SEC honors colleges are all over the place. There is no real “standard,” and MSU is not “behind.”  LSU and Ole Miss require a thesis to complete their honors programs. But Florida only requires four honors courses, and Alabama simply requires 18 hours of honors courses.  Georgia takes a similar approach, requiring 18 hours and having an option for a thesis to graduate with a certification similar to our Phase II. 
The requirements of SEC honors colleges are so varied that it is unfair to say SHC needs to catch up in any way. Universities’ honors colleges are as varied as the universities themselves, and the only responsibility MSU has to remain in line with the rest of the SEC is to make sure it is giving its honors students the best resources it can and is staying true to who it is as a university.
Snyder comes to us from Marymount University, where the honors college requires 24 hours of specifically Honors classes with a defense of the student’s own thesis at the end of senior year, a set of requirements that seems most reminiscent of TSUN’s. He is certainly thinking about these things as he looks at ways to revamp Mississippi State’s honors college. Indeed, I recently conversed with Snyder, and he said he would like to institute into SHC a senior thesis and study abroad trips to Oxford University, both things that Marymount boasts. These are all well and good, but I do not think they will best serve the needs of MSU.
We are not Ole Miss, and we don’t need an elite honors college with a fancy name and fancy requirements. We are a land grant institution founded on the principles of learning, service and research, and our honors college should reflect that. I think the first thing we should do is implement honors advising to connect students with resources that can help them.
We have fantastic research opportunities available here, but they can often be hard to find if you don’t know where to look. Honors advising would be a place for advisors to connect students with the opportunities they need to be successful, as well as help students choose an honors class for the year. Giving engineering students research opportunities that are relevant to their needs, connecting pre-med majors with internships and giving grad school opportunities to those who need them could all be done through honors advising.
Changes in the Shackouls Honors College should be about helping our community and  our students, not about creating arbitrary and stressful requirements over the entire university like some of the stricter honors programs in the SEC.
We are the People’s University. Students should be able to be in the honors college without feeling that a capstone project is only tangentially related to their field of study, or that they’re being made to take courses that will not help them in their major or count toward graduation. There is no need for a thesis requirement across all disciplines, like Ole Miss, LSU and Marymount have, at a land grant institution like MSU. I don’t know what will happen over the next few years as Snyder tries to implement his vision using MSU’s resources, but I hope our new dean will be sure to take the unique nature of our university into account as he shapes the new requirements for Shackouls.
Whitney Knight is a sophomore majoring in secondary education in English. She can be contacted at
[email protected].