They Filched Our Program! How to Turn That into a Good Thing

The Butler University Honors Program, like many other honors programs and colleges, is often the generator of “good ideas” on campus. We are considered an experimental classroom environment for piloting new courses, programming ideas, and/or introducing potential new areas of study. Both faculty and students recognize this characteristic of the program, and we are pleased to serve as a sort of laboratory for other campus initiatives. However, several key pieces of our Honors Program were recently folded into other aspects of our own university. While we know that imitation is the highest form of flattery, maintaining a distinct honors program becomes challenging when many of our most innovative and successful ideas are filched by other areas of the university all at once. In this article we outline the background of our Honors Program, describe the ideas that were filched, and state our intentions for dealing with this issue in the future