PARTNERSHIPS
&
AFFILIATIONS
APLU
Association of Public Land Grant Universities: a research, policy, and advocacy organization dedicated to strengthening and advancing the work of public universities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
HERU
Honors Education Research Universities: a coalition of R1 institutions with honors colleges and programs that organizes a biennial conference hosted by a cooperating institution.
HERU 2024 -- TBA
HERU 2022 -- University of Houston
HERU 2019 -- University of Utah
HERU 2017 -- Ohio State University
HERU 2015 -- Oregon State University
HERU 2013 -- Penn State University
See below for a history and explanation of the structure of HERU.
IBEC
The Integrated Bioscience and Built Environment Consortium that seeks to bridge the gap between science and real-world application so people
can feel safe gathering together again in indoor spaces.
Hosts cooperative programs, grants, and events with CoHE.
History of HERU
For a number of years, directors and deans of Honors Programs and Colleges in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), now the Big Ten Academic Alliance, met annually to discuss the best practices and challenges of Honors education.
In 2008 and prior to joining the Big 10, the University of Maryland was invited to join the members of the CIC at this annual meeting. Maryland’s addition was felt to be a great benefit to all, and so began the practicing of inviting a different peer institution to the annual meeting each subsequent year.
While other Honors focused conferences and meetings have much to offer, it quickly became evident that none were fully meeting the specific needs of Research 1 institutions. Honors Programs and Colleges needed a way to expand their CIC-based annual meetings to allow the larger national Honors community at research institutions to meet and share best practices and scholarly work on to provision of enhanced educational experiences for high achieving students. Thus, Honors Education at Research Universities (HERU) was born.
A key decision, agreed upon by general consensus, was that effort would be made to keep HERU from becoming another society with a corresponding overhead, committees, and politics.
Instead, the organization would be a bi-annual meeting with a "daisy-chain" structure of committees, passing along decision-making from one to another. For each conference, a new planning committee is created with the host serving as the chair of the committee. Each planning committee subsequently creates a subcommittee for site selection to select the location for the next conference. Finally, in a nod to its roots in the Big 10, it was also agreed that, as the founding members of HERU, each committee would always have representation from the CIC.
Pennsylvania State University hosted the inaugural HERU conference in 2013. Oregon State University was selected to host the second biennial conference in 2015, followed by the 2017 HERU Conference at The Ohio State University and the 2019 HERU Conference at the University of Utah.
After the COVID pandemic delayed the normal conference cycle, the University of Houston was selected as the host for the fifth ‘biennial’ HERU conference, held in 2022.
It was the hope of the founding committee and inaugural conference that HERU would be an opportunity for Honors peers to come together, sharing best practices and building relationships that benefit us all. Further, it was hoped that this structure would allow for the organic growth of HERU, responsive to changing needs without becoming imposing or cumbersome. In the end, HERU belongs to those who attend the conference and choose to participate.
Source: heru2022.com (University of Houston).