By Natalia Tomczak
News Editor
Following multiple changes in director leadership between 2023 and 2025, Wayne Heisler, the College’s director of the Honors and Scholars Program, has worked to strengthen the program.
The honors program at the College has three pillars: depth, integration and purpose, with courses that are intentional about meeting at least one, if not multiple, of those pillars. The goal for all honors courses is that they take an interdisciplinary approach and foster community.
“The emphasis at TCNJ is on excellence. The way I think about it is that students in the honors program and the experiences they have should exemplify and model the excellence of the institution,” said Heisler.
Heisler has been teaching honors classes at the College since 2009 and previously served as the director of the program from 2016 to 2017, but when he got called to chair the Department of Music, he had to leave the director position. He remained on the Honors and Scholars council, and when there was an opening for a director position in August 2025, he was interested in taking it up again, and began the position in September 2025.
One of the reasons why Heisler has been trying to strengthen the program as it exists is because they are currently in the midst of a self-study to evaluate the program. The previous self-study was conducted ten years ago in 2016. The self-study is submitted to the National Collegiate Honors Council, then two external reviewers from other institutions evaluate the program and weigh it against the self-study, creating a report to make recommendations on how the program can be improved.
The self-study seeks to evaluate the program so that strategic decisions can be made about what will be changed going forward. For that reason it is not ideal to make big changes during the midst of the evaluation, as this is a time of reflection before action. Within the next couple of years, it can be expected that there may be some changes to the program based on this process.
In the meantime, improvements have been made as Heisler focuses on enhancing communication and operations.
There have been more frequent updates on Canvas and Instagram, as well as the creation and use of a GroupMe chat for all honors students.
Communication amongst staff has also been fortified. Prior to each semester, Heisler has begun to meet with all faculty who teach cross-listed honors courses to brainstorm and standardize the practices for the honors enhancement.
For students, a program-wide meeting is held where the course list for the following semester is presented. This takes place in the middle of October and the middle of March. These meetings used to happen at the beginning of the semester, but now they’re taking place a few weeks before students start meeting with their advisors for the next term. Additionally, when students are accepted into the program, they are offered a one-on-one advising session with the director.
Heisler has also worked to bring back the student advisory board as well as rekindle the promotion of and investment in conference opportunities.
SAB, which had been inactive for about a year at the time when Heisler began as director, has been revived. The first meetings of the new SAB took place during 2026 in the spring semester after a representative from each school at the College was assembled for the board.
Brooke Zevon, senior psychology major and School of Humanities and Social Sciences representative on the advisory board, spoke about the efficacy of the board. The board has one representative from each school and meets monthly with Heisler to coordinate events and talk about ways to improve the program experience. Representatives also serve as the point of communication between current and prospective honors students and the director of the program. Currently, the focus of the board has been the self-study.
“It’s definitely hard at a smaller school like TCNJ to build that sense of community, but part of Dr. Heisler re-establishing the SAB is to find ways to increase our unity as a program,” Zevon commented. “We held a pizza event last semester, and this semester we offered honors students a special program from the leadership office! Our hopes are to improve upon the program experience for students and create more of a feeling of community.”
In regards to conference opportunities, participation in the Northeast Regional Honors Conference had waned in recent years, in large part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, Heisler made sure to disseminate the information about the conference, and four students attended and presented there. The College was able to fund all of the students who attended the conference, which was held in New Haven, Conn.
This year the conference will be taking place in Baltimore, and information has already been posted and shared. Additionally, money has already been committed from the budget to support students’ travel.
Heisler also aims to address concern and misunderstanding about how the program works. A frequent concern amongst students, which can be felt on a national scale, has been the relationship between honors courses and students’ majors.
“That tension is definitely evident at TCNJ too, but honors programs in general are centered on the liberal arts and college core, again, because interdisciplinarity is a huge part of it,” Heisler said.
“Sometimes those skills are referred to as soft skills, but I think that wording is unfortunate because the ability to communicate, to do the research, figure out what’s true and what’s fiction, to put things really into context is not a soft skill—it’s a very important skill,” he adds.
To combat this concern, the College offers something many other institutions do not, which is an emphasis on honors-by-contract course enhancements that can be done in any course. Students can take two honors-by-contract courses and complete one honors and scholars project, meaning three of their five required honors courses can focus specifically on their major.
Another frequent misunderstanding about how honors courses are curated is that there’s a curriculum, but since faculty are committed first and foremost to their department rather than college-wide programs, the course offerings change every year.
Heisler further explained, “Similarly, first-year seminar topics and faculty change every year because it just depends on what faculty are interested in and what faculty have time [to do]."
Nonetheless, the program continues to improve and elevate student experiences. Heisler believes the benefits are undeniable, saying, “to have recent graduates who are applying into jobs, who have interdisciplinary experience and can write and research well, is something that translates to every field.”
Editor’s note: Brooke Zevon is a staff photographer for The Signal. She was interviewed as a source for this story and had no involvement in the writing, editing or publishing process.
