Honors College Equity and Inclusion

A central tenet of the Honors College, which is itself a component community within one of the most diverse research universities in the world, the Honors College embraces student expressions of and practices institutional support for their racial, socioeconomic, religious, cultural, identity, ideas, and all other forms of diversity as central to its mission. 

We believe that a community of students from diverse backgrounds with wide-ranging academic and personal interests is a strength, and bringing them together not only is the responsibility of a public university but also provides the potential for the best educational opportunities for all students to become effective and empathetic citizens of the world. 

Working and living together with students and faculty who identify, believe, and behave differently, our students are positioned to learn more deeply about themselves and to imagine and help shape the kind of world they want to create. 

Creating an inclusive and equitable community of diverse individuals entails upon all of us respecting differences of opinion, belief, and custom, recognizing our own limited experiences, and appreciating the insights yielded by the experience of others.

A Broad, Interdisciplinary Honors College Curriculum

• We require our students to transcend the boundaries of their discipline(s) and to engage, think, and act in concert with students of varying intellectual differences, ideologies, and knowledge-bases. The advances needed to address the future will come not from a singular approach, but from a multi-faceted approach to addressing needs, problems, and goals, and in order to find a solution that is both based in the present and forward-looking.
• Our students created the Cross-Cultural Competency (CCC) course, focused on the "me, you, we" approach to building an intellectual and social community of high-acheiving thinkers and doers. Now reorganized as a three-credit course and a standard part of our Interdisciplinary Honors Seminar line-up of courses, the course starts with a foundation of cross-cultural communities and explores issues and challenges across them.

Cultivating Community and a Culture of Belonging

• Working together, through our academic, residential, co-curricular, professional, and leadership programs, we are focused on equity and inclusion, wellness, establishing educational and social capital, social and emotional engagement, and more in support of ensuring our students support each other, themselves, and their growth. 
• Our mission statement and our description of our motto reflect and emphasize the centrality of equity and inclusion to our core values and vision, and how we operate as a College, including our student leader program, our Community Mentors, affinity groups, programming, and events.
• We work to ensure that everyone knows that they belong in Honors. Honors is here to promote the academic excellence as well as the social and personal growth of every student, and that every student will be given the support and engagement that this pursuit requires.

Inspired. Empowered. Connected.

• The integrity of the entire collegiate experience, especially one that is as enriched and broadened as ours, is the essential facet of all that we do. We pledge to deliver academic, co-curricular, and personal programming that will elevate a student's educational career, as we help them launch into their post-graduate life.
• Students who intrinsically value an enriched and emboldened educational experience are at the core of our community programming, offerings, and approach. Students must adopt and adapt the mission into their own approach and take active responsibility for moving forward to new levels of engagement and success.

UPDATED Nov. 1, 2023; Jul. 9, 2025.

Learn more about diversity and inclusion at Rutgers.