Harry Potter and the Specter of Honors Accreditation

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. —George Weasley’s activation spell for the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban In higher education today, faculty morale is in the basement. Salaries arestagnant, benefits are being cut, and so-called perks such as travel money are endangered (try earning tenure without traveling to conferences). Students raised in the era of No Child Pushed Ahead are losing respect for us, administrators treat us like adversaries, and the general public thinks we are brainwashing their children with socialist doctrines. Our leaders have been enthralled by business models of assessment and evaluation, commoditizing intellectual development and exhorting us to increase demand for our “prod-uct ” as though we were manufacturing diplomas like widgets. Contextualizing the faculty role within the institutional impact of honors edu-cation, therefore, is difficult when institutions no longer value faculty contri-butions beyond generating student tuition dollars. For those of us still committed to high-quality undergraduate education