What We Talk About When We Talk About Housing Honors

When I went to college in the early 1980s at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, I entered as a freshman in the honors program. I have very specific memories of those first classes I took as an honors student—a section of honors sociology in which I wrote a case study of my German immigrant grandfather; an honors seminar in 1930s avant garde theatre in which the students wrote and performed plays based on the dreams they recorded nightly in their dream journals; an honors marine biology lab that ended at the professor’s house with a dinner where the group sampled the sea life the class had been studying; a section of honors composition taught by the legendary “Dr. Bob” Bashore, a former director of that program and the man most responsible for my eventual choice of nineteenth-century American literature as my academic specialty. Many of these classes took place in an open lounge area in the basement of some otherwise nondescript building, the name of which I can no longer recall. What I do remember is how different that setting was from the traditional layout of my other classes. Rather than occupying the rows of metal-footed tablet desks that populated my other university classrooms, the honors students usually sat on crescent-shaped couches or other furniture reminiscent of a 1970s-era church youth-group room