University Honors hosted in Hardesty Hall, is reserved for any student enrolled in the TU Honors Program who seeks to illuminate their everyday life as scholars, lifelong learners, and contributors to society through inquiry, discussion, and immersion. By establishing academic pursuits from the beginning, this community helps create lasting relationships with peers who have a similar educational quest.
The Honors Suites contribute greatly to the Honors Program experience. They create a space for students to discuss their Honors seminar readings with roommates and suite-mates who are in different Honors seminars. In those conversations, the individual students benefit from the opportunity to exercise their independence of mind: they decide what’s worth investigating in any given text; they choose which criteria matter; and through such exercises, they arrive at their own, considered judgements. Such late-night conversations often forge deep and lasting friendships. And the community benefits as well, as students bring their different ways of approaching a text – as well as the conclusions their conversations led them to – into class to enrich the seminar deliberations. Importantly, the enrichment is not just in terms of the diversity of perspectives it nurtures, but also in the deeper lesson that, each of us has the power and the responsibility to choose what to think about, and how to think about it well. That lesson, after all, is at the heart of a transformative liberal arts education.
The Honors Living and Learning community also serves to further deepen students’ meaningful relationships with faculty mentors (which research suggests is the most important contributor to learning in college). A variety of programs bring professors and students together outside of the classroom and office hours: invited faculty lectures; informal dinner conversations; local outings; or activities of shared interest. In the past, Honors LLC has hosted: faculty-student soccer matches; “Bad Greek Movies” night over delicious Mediterranean fare; group trips to see the Tulsa Opera, to visit an exhibit at the Philbrook, and to star gaze out at Gilcrease.
Advisor: Dr. Denise Dutton, Applied Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy
To learn more about the Honors Program at TU, email honors@utulsa.edu, call 918-631-2122 or schedule a meeting with Denise Dutton, Honors Program director, on your next campus visit.