User:Masterwinks/Honors Bachelor of Arts

The Honors Bachelor of Arts (Honors A.B) program is the first and oldest honors program at Xavier University. The program is dedicated to Xavier's Jesuit heritage and consist of a an intensive curriculum in classical Latin and Greek as well as foundations in philosophy. Students who complete the program are awarded an Honors Bachelor of Arts degree from Xavier University. Some students pursue another field of study in addition to the honors curriculum, completing a minor or a second major including premedical or pre-law requirements. Graduates go into a wide variety of careers including academia, medicine, law and business. The program was originally created "for selected students of superior ability."

History
The Honors A.B program was established in the Fall semester of 1948 by Fr. William P. Hetherington S.J. the chair of the Classics department at Xavier at the time. The inaugural class of 20 young men from St. Xavier High School took 20 credit hours their first semester at Xavier. The students were placed in their own sections of courses and took an expanded core. As a result of this expanded core and the double major in Philosophy and Latin, the students had no electives.

Original Honors A.B. Curriculum
The original curriculum of the Honors A.B. program included 30 hours of mathematics and science, 12 hours of history, 18 hours of English, 25 hours of philosophy, 6 hours of a modern language in addition to a full major in Latin and a minor in Greek.

First Year
In the first year, the students were required to take 9 semester hours of Horace and Livy in addition to a class in Latin composition. They took classes in logic and mathematics and 2 semesters of religion, military training, and English rhetoric and composition. If the student had taken a modern language in high school rather than Greek, they took 8 hours of Greek while maintaining facility in that modern language. All other students took an intensive course in French.

Second Year
In the second year, Honors A.B. students continued studying Latin, Greek, and English literature. They read and discussed works from Plato, Demosthenes, Virgil, Cicero, Catullus, and Augustine. They concluded their courses in mathematics in their second year with integral and differential calculus. Their second and last year of military training was completed in addition to taking 8 hours of physics and 4 hours of religion.

Third Year
The third year in the Honors A.B. program marked the beginning of the students' philosophical studies. They took 9 semesters of philosophy including metaphysics, cosmology, and psychology. The students took 10 hours of chemistry while reading Lucretius in Latin as a philosophical basis. Western history was taught for both semesters and the students read Thucydides in Greek and Tacitus in Latin. In the second semester of their third year, Honors A.B. students would take English drama and begin reading 3 Greek tragedies.

Fourth Year
In their fourth year, students in the Honors A.B. program ended their undergraduate career by taking 10 hours of St. Thomas Aquinas in Latin while finishing their studies in philosophy and history. In order to complete their studies in literature, the students read Longinus' "On the Sublime", Horace's "Ars Poetica", and Aristotle's "Poetics" in their original languages. A 3 hour course in ancient art and archeology was required in their senior year. During the fourth year, Honors A.B. students were expected to read Homer, Juvenal, Tibullus, and Propertius.

Later Honors A.B. Curriculum
As the program continued changes were made to the curriculum to meet the needs of students in the program. The expansion of high school mathematics and science programs allowed the Honors A.B. program to be less demanding and gave way for students to add a major or minor focus in addition to the Honors A.B. core.

Current Honors A.B. Curriculum
Currently students in the Honors A.B. Program are required to complete 21 hours of Latin, 21 hours of Greek, and 18 hours of philosophy in addition to the Xavier University Core requirements. The Honors A.B. program requires a year long capstone class that involves primary source research and an hour long public oral defense of the research done throughout the year.