Abstract:
The Ball State University Honors College is a liberal arts institution in a public university.
As the first Honors Program in the state of Indiana, the Honors College is the birthplace
of creativity, innovation and profound thought. Despite the significance of the Honors
College, there is no current written history of the Ball State University Honors College
on its sixtieth anniversary. This project aims to contribute to the history of the Ball State
University Honors College by using long-form, oral history interviews to create primary
sources of the Honors College. We used oral history interviews as the medium to do
this because the oral history interview better showcases the subject’s emotions, putting
the humanity back in history. My portion of the project included the interview of three
faculty members, Dr. Joseph Trimmer, Dr. John Emert, and Dr. Donald Gilman, which
will be added to the other thirty-one administrators, staff, faculty and alumni. All the
interviews will be permanently archived from the Ball State University Libraries Digital
Media Repository, where the videos will be streamable and the transcripts accessible.
By interviewing these faculty, I discovered how the Honors College offered opportunities
that impacted the university as a whole.
