The Division of Academic and Student Affairs (DASA) has made a proposal to combine the Honors and Scholars programs, and on Thursday, students and faculty met at a town hall to hear about the proposal and have their opinions heard.

Sean Cassidy, the interim director of the University Honors and Scholars Programs, said that details of the proposal were not yet confirmed.

“There is a range of possibilities, and at this point we don’t know which of those will be chosen or when these changes will begin to take place or what they look like,” Cassidy said.

Sue Carson, the interim executive director of Academic Enrichment Programs, added the merger would look more like a combination of the programs rather than a complete overhaul.

“We had several different possibilities, such as an administrative change to a co-localization on the same village, to a single semester of like a shared experience,” Carson said. “Maybe we would still keep Honors and Scholars separate as they mostly are, but in the first semester all of the students would get to take one Honors seminar and one Scholar’s forum and then they would go on their separate tracks.”

Carolyn Veale, the assistant director of the University Honors Program, is in favor of a possible merger of programs.

“I think the great part of a possible merger, synergy, or whatever you want to call it between the two entities will mean that there will be shared resources and elements of both programs that students seem to gravitate toward to, so students will no longer have to make a choice,” Veale said. “They can have the best of both worlds.”

Regardless of the outcome of the proposal, Carson feels there are benefits to students participating in both programs.

“To me, irrespective of the feedback we get I would strongly advocate for–if they’re kept totally separate–for some mechanism to be able to be able to accommodate scholars students in at least one honors seminar, and I would strongly advocate for having explicit expectation in the Honors program that those student would engage in the greater community,” Carson said.

Cassidy thought Thursday’s town hall went well, and was pleasantly surprised by the large turnout.

“I thought that students were very engaged in the conversation and I thought they asked very insightful questions,” Cassidy said. “I think we learned a lot about their passion for their programs and their commitment to their programs, so I found it helpful.”

Veale also felt that the town hall was a good opportunity for students to have their thoughts heard.

“The piece that I felt was very important in the discussion was that would be transparency,” Veale said. “I think that there was transparency in terms of giving the students all the information we had up until that point, sharing with students the information that yielded from the surveys that we did from both current students and incoming students. I felt that every student that was in that room that wanted to ask something or wanted to voice their opinions about something, they had the opportunity to be heard.”