The theme for NCHC’s 59th Annual Conference is “Harmonizing Heritage: Elevating Honors Education through Culture, Capital, and Community Engagement.” Known as the “Paris of the Plains'' and the “Heart of America,” Kansas City has been, since its founding in the early 1800s, a place where people, ideas, and cultures have met and melded, producing something new, complex, and uniquely American. It is the perfect setting for NCHC to explore these themes with its characteristic combination of intellectual rigor, innovation, and inclusiveness.

Discover how honors pursues Liberty, Equality, and Humanity. Updated (humanity instead of fraternity) from the motto first heard in the French Revolution and codified by the Third Republic, this theme should allow all of us to look at topics important not only to our students, but to all academics - even to our nation as a whole.

Students are far more likely to succeed when they feel they reside in communities that value and understand them. While universities have always attempted to create such communities, honors colleges and programs are uniquely well positioned to build and maintain deep, lasting connections and to foster environments in which students can come to value difference rather than merely understand or acknowledge this difference. Community is what we do.

The global pandemic has caused us to reimagine our daily lives. In the process, we have been forced to reimagine how we do teaching, learning and community building within education, higher education, and honors education. There is no going back and while some adaptations have actually enriched honors experiences, the lack of personal connections and organic intellectual conversations has hampered the impact of honors engagement on our students’ lives.

Following the 2018 conference theme of “Learning to Transgress”, a 2019 theme of “Disrupting Education: Creativity and Innovation in Honors” seems the next logical step in our explorations. If creativity and innovation have lost their places in American life and education, but are deemed necessary, then honors can and should provide solutions.

In her 1994 landmark essay collection Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Bell Hooks explores the manner in which a critical consciousness can lead to liberatory practices in education. As honors faculty, students, and staff, we can learn much from hooks’s powerful call to resist the “unjust exercise of power...”

The conference theme, “Just Honors,” will explore justice both as an academic focus and also the role honors can serve in addressing issues of access, equity, and technology in education. It is a challenge that many honors programs and colleges, even at diverse institutions, are not very diverse.