Boston University Honors College Experiencing High Program Dropout Rate

Cullen Deimer sighs heavily in class, slouching over his phone while browsing the internet, talking to his roommate and scribbling down some linear algebra. He is not, however, in linear algebra. He’s in his honors college lecture, working on just about anything but the course material, and he is not the only one.

“It’s the stuff I actually need to study for the future,” said Deimer, 19, a sophomore enrolled in Boston University’s Kilachand Honors College (KHC). “I’m not proud of myself for not paying attention, but it’s so dumb and pointless. I’m gaining nothing intellectually.”

Students in Boston University’s selective, liberal arts program are, according to the administration, dropping out of KHC at an alarming rate. This year’s sophomore class in particular is dissatisfied with the program’s perceived excessive time commitment, overly challenging and uninteresting course material, and inflexible study abroad policy, all of which contribute to their feeling that KHC is impeding the pursuit of their careers.

Although the administration reported that 337 students enrolled in the program this semester, they declined to give the specific number of students leaving the program. Director of Kilachand Honors College, Charles Dellheim, said the sophomore class in particular was “dropping like flies.”

Dellheim explained in an interview, however, that he thinks these students were ill-suited for the program, singularly committed to their own majors and viewed KHC only as a means of distinguishing themselves from their peers.

“University has unfortunately become based on a ‘customer model’ where students ask what they can get from things,” Dellheim said. “A liberal arts education is not immediate or linear. Make a commitment to do it, don’t just expect things to be given to you.”

“There’s an unbelievable amount of complaining around here,” Dellheim said. “Likes and dislikes don’t cut it. It has to be deeper than that. I try to be sympathetic to [students] and where [they] are. In the end, not everyone is going to like the decisions I make, but somebody has to blow the whistle, and it happens to be me.”

Students, however, think that, in their pursuit to promote higher-level learning, the KHC administration has made the program’s curriculum too difficult.

“[The courses] shouldn’t be taught as 100 [level courses], but [they] also shouldn’t be like [graduate] level classes,” said Felicia Gans, 19, a KHC sophomore. “It’s like they throw you in the deep end and watch you drown.”

In an anonymous, random survey of 30 KHC students, about 90 percent reported that they also found the curriculum to be challenging.

“It’s a lot of work, and for most of us it’s pretty pointless,” said Deimer. “Plus, the material is so dry and hard to get through.”

The same survey yielded identical results on whether students found KHC to be time-consuming, with about 90 percent reporting yes.

“For this semester especially, it’s been at least two hours, two times a week,” said Ian Quillen, 18, a KHC sophomore. “The reading has been hard. We don’t talk about it, and it’s very dense.”

The high-achieving students, who must maintain a 3.5 or better cumulative GPA to remain in the program, must often overload coursework in order to maintain pace with their major requirements.

“There are only so many hours in a day,” Gans said. “We can’t use it all on [KHC]. We’re interested in other things.”

In addition, 75 percent of surveyed students reported disliking KHC’s study abroad policy, which only allows students to study abroad once their junior year.

“For someone like me looking to go abroad both semesters junior year, it messes things up,” Gans said. “I shouldn’t have to choose between the KHC program and something that has to further my career when the whole point is to help me become better-rounded for my career. Ultimately, I may have to drop next year if they aren’t flexible.”

KHC students did, however, give overwhelming support to the community the program has fostered. 100 percent of surveyed students said that most of their college friendships have been made through the KHC community.

“That’s the reason I don’t regret applying or staying,” said Deimer. “Having a group of people to work or even commiserate with is pretty wonderful.”

Despite the high dropout rate, the survey also revealed that 80 percent of students had an overall positive or neutral opinion of the Kilachand Honors College, and about 70 percent of students would recommend the program to incoming freshmen.

“Just because it isn’t the main priority doesn’t mean that it isn’t a priority or that we don’t care,” Gans said. “Everything other than [the work difficulty and study abroad policies] I actually enjoy, which is why I am so passionate about trying to change [those things].”

Dellheim, too, expressed a desire to make program improvements.

“There are always things that could be better,” Dellheim said. “There are things I have changed already because of valuable things students have said.”

“It’s not my college, it’s our college,” Dellheim said. “I’m gonna do my part, and do it the way I conclude I should do it, but it’s about what [the students] are gonna do personally to make it better.”

Profile: Boston University Professor Alicia Borinsky

BOSTON – Terrified, she arrives in Argentina, the country she used to consider home, at an airport now laden with frightened citizens and gristly, armed military men. Shaky hands pass a note to the young woman, weary and desperate to know if her husband is dead or alive. “Do not return to your parent’s home,” it warns. “They’re looking for you.”

Alicia Borinsky, head of Boston University’s Spanish section, writer and human right’s activist, is a survivor of Argentina’s 1970s military coup and its subsequent persecution of intellectuals. After recently returning from a lecture series in the Dominican Republic, the poet, novelist and literary critic will release an English version of her newest novel, Lost Cities Go to Paradise, in coming months with three more books in the works.

The lecture series, completed last week, centered on Borinsky’s favorite area of study: the centenaries of the great Latin American writers Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Nicanor Parra, Julia de Burgos and Gabriel García Márquez, associated with the “Boom” period of Latin American avant-garde. Her upcoming written projects consist of two compilations – one of short stories, one of poems – and an intensively researched book on tango which examines not only the dance, but its role in culture and in the community.

Much of her creative inspiration comes from the dark years of her country’s past, but the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship award winner often manages to err on the side of dark, macabre humor when writing about topics of torture and terror which she witnessed firsthand.

Borinsky’s novels One Way Tickets: Writers and the Cultures of Exile, Mean Woman, and All-Night Movie all include a scene of torture – one which she wrote during the rapid escalation of violence in Argentina. She has also written a satirical short story featuring a torturer as a kind man with a nice home and pregnant wife.

“My thing in writing is very much the writing of the absurd… I make connections between the slaughterhouses that make the possibility of the beef that you eat so delicious and the torturers and the thirst for blood,” Borinsky explained. “It’s pretty painful because I write about subjects that are very, very violent. I write about things that sometimes demand action, sometimes demand reflection, things that are disturbing, disconcerting.”

As a college student at Argentina’s University of Buenos Aires in the 1960s, Borinsky was threatened by the Argentinian military because of her status as an intellectual. Following a common practice of this time, acquaintances associated with the underground resistance movement may have falsely given her name to militants during torture as a scapegoat to their cause.

Military regularly assaulted students and professors, making it too dangerous for Borinsky to stay. With her older and well-connected husband, she fled to the United States.

“I was lucky to be able to leave so that I could save my life,” she explained.

Several years later, however, Borinsky was desperate to return. In 1975, after hearing rumors of her husband’s death, she flew back to Argentina, leaving her work at John Hopkins University, intent on never returning to America.

Upon arriving in her native country, she was slipped a note warning her to leave immediately because her safety was in jeopardy. The military were searching for her in her parent’s home.

Borinsky stayed with a friend who had been previously targeted so that she would not put anyone else at risk.

Renewing her passport through underground channels, she fled to the United States for the second time with only the belongings she had on her person.

“…it was an impulse that made me go, and it was God’s grace that made me able to leave,” Borinsky recalled.

Following the incident, she had initially sworn to never return to Argentina. Having never been sympathetic to violence on either side, including the armed resistance to which many of her friends belonged, Borinsky waited until 1983, when true democracy had been established, to go back.

Now, she spends much of her year in Argentina, contributing regularly to the national newspaper, La Nación. Recently, she published a popular article about Adolfo Bioy Casares, another great Latin American writer.

The goal of Borinsky’s recent lecture tour is to perpetuate the achievements of Casares and other, similar, great authors.

These writers gave “eloquence back to Spanish, to a Spanish that had been dying a victim of its own beauty and had become kind of empty,” she remarked.

But as far as her own work, Borinsky admitted, “I actually like the readers more than I like what I write,” referencing the positive reaction to One Way Tickets. The novel, however, is still far from her favorite. “I always think that the best thing is to come.”