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The School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, is debating the
merits of having an undergraduate honors program. At the same time, the
campus is establishing an undergraduate honors program, which is seen as
serving all schools. I would like to hear about other's experiences with
honors programs. In particular:

* Experiences with campus honors programs and their integration with a
business curriculum. My assessment of the campus honors program is that
it is going to evolve into a liberal arts program and that the School of
Management should have its own program. The campus honors program is
designed so that only full time students can participate, but the School
of Management mostly serves part time students taking courses in the
evening, so the majority of our students will not be eligible for the
campus program. The rub is that we also have approximately 35% of total
enrollments and 40% of credit hours, so our participation matters in
terms of support for the campus program. If we decide to go our own way,
other schools (engineering and sciences) may follow suit.

* Experiences with undergraduate honors programs in business. What has
worked best, enrichment or advanced study programs? We already have a
fast-track MBA program that allows qualified undergraduates to get an MBA
with a fifth year, so we are thinking about an honors route in addition to
this fast-track option.

* I would very much like to hear from anyone that has had a bad
experience with a business honors program. What went wrong and why do you
think it did not work?

Since I am unsure whether there is broad interest in this subject, I will
leave it to the list participants to decide whether they want to post to
the list or respond to me. If I receive off-list responses, I will
provide a synopsis in a week or so.

============================================= Jack [Brittain@UTDallas.edu]

Jack Brittain mentioned thinking about an honors programs in
management--and wanted to hear some input/brainstorming.....

This is a little different from the specific questions you particularly
threw out, but here's my two cents. As a student, I participated in two
different types of honors programs, one in high school and the other during
my undergraduate days. However, both programs were humanities based and
embedded within a liberal arts context. Having said that, let me add that,
in retrospect and speaking as a graduate student in business fields, these
learning experiences greatly strengthened me as a creative thinker and
remain among my favorite memories of school or university days.

Jack, I'm not sure that an honors program in management that would not be
integrated with a college's larger liberal arts program would work all that
well. Why? Because I think many B-School students are already too
isolated from the very kind of liberal arts initiation that management
students need, especially at the undergraduate level where I'm particularly
concerned that younger students are sometimes forced to "specialize" too
early and before they've built any kind of a mature, interdisciplinary
foundation upon which to rest a well positioned "major."

At the MBA stage, I worry that older students, especially ones who have
been out of school for a while and who never experienced a liberal arts
undergraduate education--whether they be part-time or full-time--are
_still_ not receiving the kind of interdisciplinary training/education that
is required for them to be more creative as managers and leaders or just
__"survivors"__ in varied types of corporate worlds.

Hence, I'd always opt for the graduate students' honors program to always
be more, not less integrated into the larger university rather than
segrated solely into a B-School focus. (I am clearly biased towards
promoting the broadest possible liberal arts experiences for students! I
admit it. It is just that when I think of what it means to be 'well
educated', I think in terms of breadth and depth. Overspecialization often
limits more insight than it fosters.)

The literature below, my own personal experience as a student, and my
experience teaching full time working adults on both the undergraduate and
the graduate level--are responsible for why I tend to believe this.

Granted, this lit review that follows is a tad dated, now, but I still
think that the reports remain valuable to management educators--and I still
see the same needs/problems in the working managers that I teach in the
Chicagoland area, today.

Most management instructors and professors know that too many business
school students suffer from a peculiar form of tunnel vision resulting from
overspecialized curricula which favor quantitative analysis at the expense
of equally important interpretive and liberal arts skill building
components.

If an honors program can help the student by widening their foci, rather
than narrowing it even further, I'd say "great"--but I think that an overly
specialized honors program focus may do just the opposite.

Of course, it _always_ depends on the faculty and the program, as well as
the culture at work in a specific college or university. I realize that,
too.

References

Hayes, R. H.,& Abernathy, W. (1980, July-August). Managing our way to
economic decline. Harvard Business Review, pp.66-77.

Leavitt, H. J. (1989). What we haven't taught our MBSs. California
Management Review, 27(3), pp. 43-62.

Peters, T., & Austin, N. (1985). A passion for excellence: Lessons from
America's best known companies, New York: Harper & Row.

Porter, L. W., & McKribben, L. E. (1989). Management education and
development: Drift or thrust into the 21st century?

Note: If anyone has some more recent references about critiques of
management education programs, please share them with me, off-list, to
"mgrotola@interaccess.com."

Michele Grottola
ABD, Cornell University
Adjunct Instructor, NLU
Master's Program in HRM/OD