Preparing a Master Plan for an Honors College

My experience as an honors dean, like my previous experience as adepartmental chair, is that it is easier to spend time putting out fires than engaging in long-term planning. The myriad daily tasks tempt administrators to succumb to the “the tyranny of the now. ” We almost always have classes to schedule and teach, books and articles to write and edit, students to advise, scholarship applications to proof, theses to read, special events to publicize, committee meetings to attend, building tours and speeches to give, students to recruit, conferences to attend, and numerous other worthy tasks that call for immediate attention. I became dean of an honors college in 2008. However we prize it, the col-lege is undoubtedly similar to many others. We developed from a program that the university established in 1973, became a separate college in 1998, and moved into our own building in 2004. We serve about 750 total students in a large state university that now enrolls more than 25,000 students. We have identified our goal as “providing an ivy league type education ” within this larg-er state university context. To complete our program, students take 31 of 12