Honoring excellence: Meet the new director of Auburn’s Honors College

Stepping onto Auburn’s campus this summer, Laura Stevens was certain she had chosen the right path. As the incoming director of the Honors College, the English professor and previous director at the University of Tulsa’s Undergraduate Research Challenge immediately felt a sense of belonging and spent most of July engaging with students, faculty and staff about the college.

With more than 25 years of higher education experience, Stevens looks forward to drawing on her own honors experiences as a student, as well as her roles as a faculty member and administrator at the University of Tulsa. A noted scholar in early American, 18th-century British and Native American literature, Stevens brings a wealth of experience involving undergraduate research and honors education to Auburn, in addition to her efforts to promote inclusivity among Indigenous students and communities.

As Stevens prepares for her first fall semester on the Plains and gets to know the college’s more than 2,000 students, she offers some insights into her new role, her passion for honors education and what she hopes to accomplish as director.

You have had considerable leadership experience throughout your career. What drew you to Auburn?

I was drawn to Auburn initially because it is a vast, multi-faceted and academically impressive research university with a public-facing mission and deep commitment to the public good. While I thoroughly enjoyed teaching for two decades at a small private university, I felt ready for a shift to a more capacious and intellectually diverse setting, and I am excited to connect with some of the colleges focused on areas far from my own areas of expertise, like forestry and veterinary science.

Once I visited Auburn, I was so impressed by how small this large university feels. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a campus that feels so welcoming, so bound together by courtesy and kindness, while also being so large and complex in its operations. Auburn truly has cracked a difficult code in achieving this balance.

I also feel a personal connection to Auburn as an institution set on ancestral Muscogee land because, for more than 20 years, I lived within the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. My teaching and scholarship have connected me in recent years more closely with Muscogee scholars and artists, as well as with the Nation’s Department of Historic and Cultural Preservation. Auburn feels like a place where I can maintain and strengthen those relationships, continue some of my research and perhaps also play a role in teaching Auburn’s students more about the history and culture of this region’s original residents.

What most excites you about leading the Honors College?

I am most excited about the people I have met and the people I will meet soon. I cannot wait to get acquainted with our students, to learn what energizes them and how Auburn Honors can support them in achieving their dreams. The college is surrounded by an impressive array of administrators and faculty who are connected with the college in countless ways. I have loved every conversation I have had so far with people across the campus about what the college has done and what it could do, and I am keen to pursue more conversations and collaborations.

What is most important to you when considering the Honors College as part of the broader Auburn Experience?

I want the Honors College to provide opportunities to students and faculty that are not available elsewhere in the university. These include professional development opportunities for our most ambitious students, for example supporting them in applying for major external scholarships and grants, but also opportunities to challenge and inspire them in their thinking. It’s pretty typical for people to describe honors colleges in general as the homes for universities’ smartest students. I disagree. Smart is everywhere at Auburn. Honors, instead, is the place for intellectual ambition, for experiments in thought, for a more dynamic, kinetic mode of learning both inside and outside the classroom and lab.

What legacy do you hope to create as director?

As a starting point, I have two main goals: first, I want to connect our students with more opportunities for their own education, intellectual development and achievement; second, I want to develop Honors as an experience that includes but ranges beyond the challenging, seminar-style courses for which the college is so well known. Of course, Auburn students already are highly engaged with all sorts of co-curricular and social activities ¾ that is part of what makes this campus so dynamic.

Right now, I am working with the college staff and the Honors Congress student leadership to determine what kinds of programming will be most appealing to and helpful to our students. I am thinking about establishing an Honors salon in Cater Hall, inspired by the Parisian salons of the Enlightenment, in which individuals from many sectors of society would come together in homes to discuss texts, artworks and ideas in an informal setting. I also hope to see more of our students participating in study and travel opportunities, as well as other forms of experiential learning, and I would love to raise funds to support more students in these adventures.

What does excellence mean to you, and how do you hope to advance the college’s tradition of excellence?

Excellence has become an over-used word in higher education, and so unfortunately it has lost much of its definitional traction. Its core meaning is straightforward yet elusive, being derived from the Latin verb excellere, “to surpass.” But surpass what? In proposing an answer, I will be somewhat old-fashioned, quoting from one of the oldest texts on education, Plato’s Republic: “The purpose of education is to give to the body and the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.” I love this vision of education as what leads human beings towards ¾ but never quite reaching ¾ a sort of perfection. Education, in general, is what drives us to surpass ourselves, finding ideas, objects, skills and cultures that were not otherwise available to us ¾ of which we might not even have been aware. Honors at Auburn already provides a more distilled and, thus, more intensified version of what education in general should do. I hope to foster this kind of experience for our students, gently pushing them to more perfect versions of their selves, especially in their capacities of mind.

Who were your early influencers in life and career? Who inspired you?

My mother, who died last year at the age of 79, left her first career as a nurse to stay home with my brother and me. But, when I was nine years old, she opened a used bookstore. It was a second home to me, where I was allowed to roam free, reading whatever I wanted as long as I put the books back when I was done, and I was very proud to be put in charge of arranging the children’s literature section. She made me a reader, which led me down the path to being an English professor. My father, who just turned 81, is a retired computer programmer and systems engineer. He is also a Vietnam veteran, having commanded a float bridge platoon in the Army Corps of Engineers. I feel deeply influenced by both of them in all sorts of ways that occur to me almost daily.

I also was inspired to become a professor by my late uncle, Richard Cobb-Stevens, a philosophy professor who took on many administrative roles during his career at Boston College. He was a brilliant but humble man who wore his learning lightly, told fascinating, funny stories about his life and flourished in conversation with others. He also was a Jesuit priest for over 20 years, leaving the order eventually to get married. One thing I saw in him was that although he had left the priesthood, he retained a pastoral attitude in his work. That is, he seemed to approach teaching and administration with a focus on the care of others and the cultivation of a community. I try to have a similar approach to my own work.

What’s your favorite thing to do in your spare time?

I relax by walking and playing with my dog, reading science fiction and mystery novels and watching (mostly British) mysteries and detective shows. I love the imaginative world-building of science fiction, and I feel a childlike contentment in watching mysteries get solved. I’m an avid but mediocre student of the German language, and so I try to keep up my mid-level proficiency by listening to German news podcasts or (very slowly) reading German literature. In Tulsa, I enjoyed biking and walking along a river path near my house, so once it cools down, I look forward to finding similar opportunities here in Auburn.

Lastly, what book, show, movie or podcast have you enjoyed recently?

I recently read N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. It’s so hard to describe, but it’s this fascinating, engrossing story about a future world in which earthquakes and other disasters are frequent enough to be called seasons, the civilizations that have reconstituted themselves in this landscape of intractable, repeated wounding, a woman with a power she hides because she would be killed for it, and her quest to find her estranged daughter. It sounds grim, and it is, but it’s also gorgeous and riveting because of the characters she creates.

Members of the campus community are invited to meet Stevens during the college’s Fall Open House on Aug. 26 from 2-4 p.m. as part of its Welcome Week activities.