Honors Seminar Profile

The Honors program regularly profiles different seminars in this spot to give visitors a feel for its unique curriculum. Honors is unlike most programs on campus in that its curriculum is designed around interdisciplinary approaches to subjects, which gives students from different backgrounds an opportunity to make connections across disciplines and see topics in a new light.

Every other May term, Prof. Richard Badenhausen, Director of the Honors Program, and about a dozen students embark on a journey in an Honors seminar called "Reading and Writing Salt Lake City." Through extensive reading of cultural studies theory, visits to local places as varied as Bambara restaurant, Red Butte Gardens, and the Gateway shopping complex, and intensive discussion and writing about the concept of "place," participants seek to get beyond "official" presentations of the city, discover a more authentic sense of the environment in which we live, and ultimately recover a direct experience of place that emphasizes what Walker Percy calls the "knower over [the] known."

Summing up her experience in the course at the end of one of these terms, an Honors student wrote: "before taking this class I saw it [Salt Lake City] as one entity. It was one object, one singular place. From our course, I've discovered that it is not one entity. It is a living, breathing creature comprised of parts, of ideas, beliefs, images and understanding. These parts give SLC a life with character and personality with challenges and triumphs. You really have to look to see these parts, though! This class gave me the glasses through which to look, but I got to see for myself. It was my discovery."