Mission
Mission Statement
University Honors College
University of Pittsburgh
The University Honors College (UHC) was dedicated in 1987 to meet the special academic and co-curricular needs of Pitt’s most able, motivated, and inquisitive students. Designed by faculty, the College is undergraduate in focus but University-wide in scope. The UHC functions for qualified students as a flexible educational delivery system that combines distinctive brokered opportunities for attainment throughout the University with expectations for leadership support at the highest levels. The College seeks to provide intellectual challenge, inspire individual effort, foster independence of mind, and generate abiding educational relationships with professional scholars. Simultaneously, it seeks to establish for students and faculty an inspiring reverence and lasting enthusiasm for the life of the mind through fulfilling participation in a culture of academic aspiration and self discovery.
Honors College initiatives rest upon the bedrock of fundamental principle. Two in number, the first is profoundly American, central to the public interest and fosters reflective decision making in a democracy: equality of educational opportunity. The second is vital to a healthy society, identifies institutional justice with the promotion of attainment and specifies an all-important Honors College conception of quality: in all endeavors the measure of quality is human attainment, either relative (“be all you can be”) or absolute (“be as good as anyone can be”).
A bona fide university establishes intellectual attainment as its foremost value. Consequently, UHC structures are designed to nurture intellectual attainment and discovery for undergraduates. These structures emphasize (1) course work that engages students intellectually following in-depth treatments of basic and applied disciplines by committed faculty, (2) personalized advising that stresses a combination of scope and disciplinary concentration as the essential elements of distinctive undergraduate studies, (3) academic community that sustains informal intellectual and social interaction among peers and faculty across disciplines in relatively small settings of human dimension, (4) independent scholarship that takes advantage of the comprehensive resources available only in a major university through supportive research collaboration with professional scholars on the faculty, and (5) incentives and deserving recognition for high levels of completed formal scholarship through the option of a special research-based university-wide degree (Bachelor of Philosophy in “disciplines”).
If the measure of quality in individual endeavors is human attainment, then the measure of quality in institutions is a capacity to transform talent into attainment. The visible promotion of attainment establishes an ambience for human possibility that animates any worthy organization. A university that aspires to be major without qualification regards attainment by undergraduates as an indicator of educational quality much as attainment by faculty is regarded as an indicator of professional quality. In top-tier universities efforts to foster the highest possible attainment deserve exceptional attention at all levels including undergraduate. To that end the Honors College invests human, material, and financial resources in individuals over programs. The College seeks participants of ability, curiosity, drive, independence, imagination and philanthropic disposition. These individuals will be inspired by the achievement of others, will seek achievement for themselves, and will ultimately be moved to responsible civic advocacy following participation in a deliberative community of kindred spirits.
Associated with the UHC investment in individual attainment is an ancillary mission: to assist the University in attracting additional students of diverse background, curiosity, and academic promise. These students, through their striving, intellectual fortitude and achievement in academic and co-curricular arenas, benefit from exceptional faculty mentors while contributing themselves to an educational environment deserving of public confidence and private support.
Updated May 14, 2007