Clarks Honors College celebrates 50 years

Founded in 1960, the University of Oregon’s Clark Honors College (CHC) is the oldest four-year honors college in the nation.

Established by Robert D. Clark, the CHC is a small liberal arts institution of 700 students, nested within a world-class research university. CHC students are taught by a team of nationally recognized faculty known for their commitment to scholarship and teaching, in small classes of 25 students or fewer. The CHC curriculum emphasizes independent inquiry and research. Each student must complete a senior thesis, an independent undergraduate-level project jointly designed by the student and advisers from both the student’s major discipline and from the honors college.

The Clark Honors College is celebrated for its academic excellence by Yale Daily News in its “Insider’s Guide to the Colleges”; by Lloyd Thacker, director of the Education Conservancy; in the New York Times Magazine; and in the Princeton Review.

The Clark Honors College will celebrate its 50th anniversary during the 2010-2011 academic year. Many of its 2,000 graduates will gather to celebrate the achievements of the past 50 years.

Recipients of the CHC Alumni Achievement Award include: Ival McMains, co-founder of the nationally recognized, multimillion-dollar conglomerate Family Fitness Management; Kathleen Liberty, a pioneer in the field of special education; and Mary Goldring, a world expert on cartilage biology and molecular biology as it relates to the behavior of arthritis. Each year, many CHC seniors are elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Of these, many are also named Oregon Six, recognizing exceptional academic records in both the breadth and depth of coursework in upper division liberal arts courses and extremely high GPAs.