Challenging Students. Transforming Lives.
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It all started on a hot
August day in 1981. Jeff Farris, Jr., President of UCA, came to rest next to Dr. Norbert Schedler on a bench under a large oak. Norb wondered aloud that, if the university could offer remedial courses to students who needed them, could it not also offer a comprehensive program for the “severely gifted?” He had been discussing it with faculty, hoping an honors college might help recruit and challenge high achievers and improve the stature of the university. President Farris said, “I want one of those next year.” But how easy would it be to attract the “severely gifted?” Dr. Schedler’s professorial magnetism brought in successive classes of bright, communityminded students, who helped grow an academic program to rival private liberal arts colleges—small, discussion-based classes; faculty-mentored research; and intense study of big ideas.
Dr. Norbert Schedler Founder, UCA Honors College
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alumni & friends of the Honors College UCA is changing forever. Never before has it endowed an academic program in the name of an individual. That ground is being broken by the Honors College in naming it for Founding Director, Dr. Norbert O. Schedler. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Princetoneducated philosopher. Respected scholar of religious studies and environmental ethics. Master teacher. Commanding presence. Bow tie wearer. Bearded, bespectacled, bookish, be-sneakered. Unique. Unforgettable. He is Norb.
challenging students Like top universities worldwide, the Honors College prepares adults for career and citizenship through the classic liberal arts curriculum. Novice scholars gather with experienced teachers to read the great works of global thought, contemplate art and literature, formulate viewpoints and values, and try out their ideas in conversation and writing.
Serving as his longtime partner and now as dean, my job is to sustain a healthy climate to keep the program growing. As we become the Schedler Honors College, I ask you to help grow our future prospects by participating in Dr. rick scott Dean, Norbert O. Schedler Honors College
the Schedler Honors College Campaign. We are raising funds to endow the TAG/URGE program, what Norb calls “the single most important addition to the Honors College since its founding.� TAG funds the study of faraway places, and URGE opens doors to laboratories, offices, and rehearsal rooms, providing hands-on education. Your contribution not only celebrates the Schedler Honors College, but it also says thanks to Norb in the most meaningful way possible by directly supporting Honors scholars to whom he has devoted his life.
All Honors classes are small seminars, where every student gets the attention of peers and faculty. The Honors College puts apprentices and mentors together in an academic workshop where skills can be practiced, critiqued, and practiced again. The aim is mastery of the self and of its capacities for knowledge and action. Honors students have received top national honors, including Rhodes, Truman, Goldwater, Fulbright, Cooke and Rotary awards.
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transforming lives What happens in a classroom can change the lives of students forever. Undergraduate research turns students from passive recipients of content into potent generators of knowledge. Service learning turns the community into a classroom, and introduces real-world problems that students must use collaborative methods to solve. Study abroad immerses students in cultural difference and first-hand discovery. These high-impact teaching methods put the student front and center, requiring them to act decisively, organize efficiently, and reflect deeply. Students enter the UCA Honors College as learners. Four years later, thanks to these transformational experiences, they leave as leaders.
When I met Dr. Norbert O. Schedler for my admissions interview in 1996, I experienced a sensation I will never forget of being on the cusp of something grand and mysterious. The bookshelves lined with weighty tomes from floor to ceiling, the stacks of paper tossed about his desk, the beard. When my first semester of college began, I knew I had found my home. Every lecture, every reading assignment, seemed to bestow a new world. In many ways my life began when I first met Norb. I started a journey that continues to this day. My 17-year-old self would not have believed it. Learning, true learning, is a process of becoming, of moving from potentiality to actuality. Our essence is ours to make, if we have the courage to be. No circumstance of birth or wealth or status can determine us, if we are honest and bold enough to shoulder the burden of choosing our own path. For a kid from rural Arkansas, realizing this was a moment of liberation. The Honors College reminds me of the challenge and the joy of transformation. Moments RHETT MARTIN, 02 Campaign Chair
The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is now. 4
of transformation arise often in conversation at the Schedler Honors College. As campaign chair, I ask you to support this extraordinary place with funds to send students abroad or place them in professional settings that make education real. Our role as alumni and friends is to keep the conversation going.
When I came into the world it was not desolate because those who preceded me planted. When future generations enter this world, I want them to enter a world not desolate because
I planted. 5
funding needs
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The Schedler Honors College Campaign
friends, and faculty to help ensure that Honors
aims to raise $3 million to grow the
students have ongoing opportunities for
endowment for TAG and URGE. In
global study and undergraduate research and
conjunction with the UCA Division of
creativity. Research and travel push beyond a
Advancement, the Honors College is
student’s personal comfort zone, to boldly go
reaching out to its community of alumni,
where no Honors Scholar has gone before, and
parents of current and former students,
to embrace the world in all its strange beauty.
horizons expanded Isaac Jones (top) joins friends studying abroad in South Africa atop Lion’s Head overlooking Cape Town.
global experience More than 900 Honors students have traveled, studied, done research, and pursued internships, thanks to two extraordinary programs: Travel Abroad Grants (TAG) and Undergraduate Research Grants in Education (URGE). Deposited into unfamiliar cultures, social contexts, economic development levels, and professional settings, grant recipients learn on their feet. When Isaac Jones used a $3,000 TAG award in 2010 to intern with Projects Abroad, a human rights organization that places students in volunteer positions worldwide, he already cared about social justice. But his experience with juveniles in the South African justice system gave him, for the first time, a practical outlet for his enthusiasm, and a first-hand look at the complex problems to be solved in a ISAAC JONES TAG recipent
rapidly changing world. He returned to campus eager to present a Soapbox (a voluntary Friday afternoon presentation) to educate his fellow students on what he had done and learned, and to motivate them to get involved. And his travel led directly to original research for his undergraduate Honors thesis on the role of non-governmental organizations in human rights monitoring. Through travel and internships, Honors College students have the world as their classroom. Through leadership and citizenship development in their Honors curriculum, they do not merely learn from the world, but also seek to change it.
TAG & URGE The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989-90 marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Ed Tanguay saw it happen on an early travel abroad grant from the Honors College. Studying language acquisition for his thesis, he became a witness to history, transforming his life. He now lives in Berlin with his wife, Gisela, and their daughters, Karla and Hannah. Endowments from the McCastlain, Schedler, and Vail families made possible Ed’s trip and a few others early on. The program was formalized in 1993 as Travel Abroad Grants by financial support from UCA, and was extended to include scholarships for research and creative projects (Undergraduate Research Grants in Education or URGE). TAG/URGE has grown since with funds from the Sturgis Foundation along with increased support from UCA and private donors. Travel and research funds are awarded competitively to grant applicants, supporting 60-65 Honors scholars each year.
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serving the world How do you want to make a difference? Honors College applicants write an essay on that topic—their first step into a program that introduces service learning to freshmen, secures volunteer commitments from sophomores, and directs the focus of seniors toward changing the world. Utilizing skills both from their majors and the Honors interdisciplinary curriculum, students build non-profit organizations, forge partnerships with government agencies, and work to benefit charitable groups of every kind. They knit, dig, hammer, immunize, grow, and heal. Honors College graduates are citizen-scholars, putting their academic training to work for the public good of their neighbors and neighborhoods, nearby and around the world.
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JACOB PERRY, ‘09 TAG recipient
In the summer of 2008 I volunteered at Hogar Angelitos Felices in Copán Ruinas, and developed a lasting bond with the kids who call the orphanage
she is born. It is within our grasp to reach those
their home. I couldn’t help but be concerned
who suffer most: the poorest of the poor. I wanted
about the future of the beautiful children there,
to turn my despair into hope, and so I created
and the countless other deserving children all over
Hermanos in Hope. By spending time with these
Honduras without clean water, food, or clothing.
wonderful people, teaching them how to read and
I’ve been fortunate enough to live comfortably and
write, clothing them in school uniforms and shoes
get an education, but they won’t without our help.
to wear, building schools and beds–we are giving
No human should be condemned to hunger and
them a chance to get an education and overcome
poverty because of the conditions into which he or
their circumstances.
The Travel Abroad Grant in my sophomore year at UCA had a much larger impact on my life than I could have ever imagined at the time. In 2003, the Honors College awarded me $6,000 to attend a semester-long Mandarin language program in Beijing. I arrived in China in the dead of winter and the middle of Chinese New Year. On the airplane’s nighttime descent I watched fireworks exploding as far as the eye could see and, although I did not yet know how to say “hello” in Chinese, before we touched down I was plotting ways to stay beyond a single semester. As it turned out, the SARS outbreak cut short my initial trip to China, but even so, the Chinese language program I attended was the most challenging academic endeavor I had yet undertaken in my young life. It was also the most gratifying. I felt the topography of my brain change as new pathways forced themselves through soft tissue. China was such an utterly different place that I
LAURIE STAHLE, ‘05 TAG recipient
walked around in a constant state of awestruck amazement and enthusiastically took in every sight and sound. After graduating UCA, I went to the University of Southern California, where I received a Masters in East Asian Studies, and am now a Ph.D. candidate in Paleoecology at Montana State University.
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SEARCH FOR SELF First year students work on an in-class writing exercise for a core class led by Dr. Donna Bowman, Associate Dean
honors faculty
Dr. Phil frana Director, Undergraduate Research
Only a handful of Honors programs in the nation have their own full-time, tenured faculty. With specialities in history, science, technology, anthropology, Asia, religion, media, philosophy, literature, environment, geography, and sociology, our faculty offer interdisciplinary class experiences found nowhere else on campus. They publish in top journals, present at national and international conferences, engage in research in their disciplinary fields, and contribute to the scholarship of collegiate teaching and learning. The benefits emerge in the classroom where these accomplished professionals become coaches and facilitators for students eager to fulfill their potential as citizenscholars. Outside of class, they engage with students in an integrated living-learning community; sharing expertise, attending co-curricular programs, and advising campus organizations.
Students in the Honors College are provided opportunities that are rare in the lives of most undergraduates. One spring morning, my challenge was a lively bunch of expectant Honors freshmen, and my
jeremy lusk, ‘10 URGE recipient, Honors PA
responsibility was to guide them in the day’s discussion. Nothing made me appreciate the hard work and dedication of an Honors professor quite like the experience of serving as a pedagogical associate, or PA. I relished my time as Donna’s PA in Honors Core I...yes, even the long nights spent reading paper drafts and grading journal entries. Looking back, I can think of no better system for encouraging juniors and seniors to “keep the conversation going” with their freshman peers. Not only did it afford me the chance to interact with new Honors students in the classroom, but it provided me a second look at Hobbes, Rousseau, and all the rest. The insight I gained from this second encounter was matched by the profound and delightfully challenging ideas I found in students’ essays, journal entries, and in-class discussions. Serving as a PA gave me valuable experience which I still use to this day as a graduate teaching assistant.
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In summer 2009, I received an internship at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences through its Center for Diversity Affairs. I’d never been in a lab before but was fortunate to work with Dr. Alexei Basnakian, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. Dr. Basnakian had me collect data for research on human vascular endothelial cells. My work produced direct evidence about the role played by a DNA-degrading enzyme, Endonuclease G, in cellular damage. I co-authored an abstract submitted to the Arkansas Biosciences blake vernon, ‘06 TAG recipient
full article in the American Journal of Physiology.
Wilson alobuia, ‘12 URGE recipient
A great line in Ray Bradbury’s
The next summer I was selected by the University of Alabama at Birmingham for
Fahrenheit 451 always comes
International Health Research training in Jamaica. I worked with the Jamaican
to mind when I think about
Ministry of Health, visiting various hospitals and interviewing patients and
the impact Norb continues to
their families on their knowledge, attitudes, and practices concerning
have on my life. It’s true of
vector-borne diseases, notably malaria and dengue fever. In 2011, after a
me, I know, and I think
highly competitive application process, I was selected to participate in the
it’s true of everyone else. It goes like this: ‘If you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you’d find the big ridges of his thumbprint.’
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Institute fall symposium, which led to publication of a
Summer Internship Program at Johns Hopkins University in the Pulmonary & Critical Care Division where I worked with Dr. Emmanuelle Clerisme-Beaty. We found evidence that patients’ race and gender, underlying lung disease, and testing location impact our ability to interpret results of pulmonary function test quality. Being a member of the Honors College has enhanced my understanding of the importance of civic responsibility through research.
SENIOR SEMINAR Dr. Norb Schedler, Distinguished Professor Emeritus & Founding Director of the Honors College, speaks to Honors students in a Senior Seminar course on Education, Work, and Our Future Economy.
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plant now for the future Norb Schedler taught us “to remember” means “to put together again.” When we remember the Honors College and how it transformed us, we remember not merely who we were but also who we have become. This Schedler Honors College Campaign remembers our past and highlights our present, but most important, it points to our future.The Norbert O. Schedler Honors College at UCA names us, and when that happens we re-member what we have in common. We share a legacy of lives transformed by challenges we faced and embraced. We also share a responsibility to keep the conversation going.We need your help to nourish TAG/URGE, programs that profoundly produce growth for Honors citizen-scholars of the next generation. Anything good and lasting takes time to grow, and to grow anything good and lasting, the time to start is now.
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join the conversation Commitments in support of the Schedler Honors College Campaign to build endowments for TAG/URGE can be made in a variety of ways. All gifts are made payable to the UCA Foundation, Inc. and directed to the Schedler Honors College Endowment Fund.You donation is tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. The UCA Foundation Inc. accepts pledges and gifts of cash, stocks and securities, planned gifts, and corporate matching gifts. Gifts may be mailed to:
UCA Foundation, Inc. Buffalo Alumni Hall UCA Box 4986 Conway, AR 72035
Credit card and debit card payments are accepted. Secure online giving is also available at uca.edu/giving.
To learn more about how you can support the Schedler Honors College Campaign, please contact: Annie Wright, M.S. Director of Major Gifts Office: (501) 852-0778 Cell: (501) 764-8481 anniew@uca.edu
Challenging Students. Transforming Lives.
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3rd Floor, McAlister Hall | P. O. Box 5024 | 201 Donaghey Avenue Conway, AR 72035 | (501) 450-3198 | uca.edu/giving
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