What is the Honors Program?

Purpose

The Chapman University Honors Program is designed for highly motivated and academically talented Chapman University students who want to pursue challenging studies in a wide range of enduring intellectual concerns that cross disciplines and cultures.

Program

In a broad interdisciplinary program based on great books and events from cultures around the world, Honors students and faculty concentrate on mutually critical exchanges between the classics of human cultures and the contemporary world.

The goal of these dialogical exchanges is collaborative and intentional learning in which students and faculty together connect enduring and emerging ideas, drawing on shared texts, lectures, seminar discussions, and cultural experiences
  
The heart of the University Honors Program is, therefore, seminars in a flexible liberal arts curriculum, with four main areas of study:
- Mathematics/Science/Technology
- Philosophical and Religious Studies
- Arts and Letters
- Historical and Social Studies

The program satisfies the GE Inter-Multidisciplinary cluster, and select courses might also satisfy major, minor, other GE and/or elective requirements.
  
In Honors courses, students encounter cultural classics in interdisciplinary ways from a diversity of perspectives and engage in seminar-based conversations that are historically holistic - that consider classics texts and paradigm-shifting events in their cultural and intercultural influence, their effects on our contemporary world, and their possible future consequences.

Seminar topics are wide-ranging, taking up such issues, for example, as the cross-cultural origins of mathematics; historical ideas of race; the rise and fall of gods; the scientific and social implications of human genome mapping; the city and its future; and visual rhetoric - with new seminar topics introduced each year.

The seminars, innovative and experimental in nature, are unique to the Honors program.
  
The seminars are occasionally supplemented by an open lecture series course delivered by Chapman University's most outstanding scholar-teachers during the regular academic year and by preceptorials during interterm.
  
Honors students have an enhanced opportunity to pursue research, study abroad, and engage in community-based learning.

Transfer students with 60 units or more prior to matriculation take five courses, including the senior capstone. Three of the five courses must be at the 300 level or above.